"The Mysterious Connection"

I am meditating in the morning, just after I wake up.   (Meditating before you wake up is called sleeping.)  And what should pop into my consciousness but a story about me and Miss Sternberg, my Toronto Hebrew Day School art teacher when I was seven.

All I recall about Miss Sternberg is that she wore oversized horn-rimmed glasses, and she was big, though when you’re seven, who isn’t? 

I would – I believe fairly – adjudge myself to be creative in one and a half areas – writing and half music.  But I am terrible at art, and I always have been – I’ve been doodling the same stick figure for sixty years.

I don’t know.  My mind sees stuff, but when the image gets sent down to my drawing hand, my perplexed fingers go, “What do you want?”   It is utterly hopeless – Morse Code tapping out to a person who can’t hear.

So we’re sitting in art class.  Our assignment:  To recreate “an outdoor activity”, with crayons.  Our drawing paper was of extremely low quality – it had chips of wood in it.  Though a few arboreal remnants did not seem to deter other people, by whom I mean people who could draw.  My friend Ira Friedman was a natural.  Years later at camp, he painted a picture of “Dennis The Menace” on my canoe paddle.  (And canoe paddles are all wood.) 

For my “outdoor activity”, I decide to draw a “badminton scene”, badminton being a game which, though heartbreakingly inept at other sports, I was not entirely terrible at.  It’s like the “Sports Fairy” had mistakenly delivered “Badminton” to the wrong house.  And I kept it.

The problem is, the thing I draw worse than everything else I can't draw is people.  (Even my stick figures are unidentifiable.)  So I made an immediate decision.

As a result, my finished picture offered a rudimentary house, and a side yard boasting a “badminton height” net supported by two poles, four misshapen rackets lying on the ground, alongside a mutant facsimile of a “birdie.”

That was my picture – a “people-free” Badminton Tableau.  I finished quickly, because…what was it?

Miss Sternberg passes from desk to desk dispensing encouragements and adulations, deserved or otherwise.  I recall hearing the words, “I like what you’re going for there, Arye”, delivered to a would-be Picasso who landed in the ritual slaughtering racket. 

Then it was my turn.  Miss Sternberg eyed my effort, struggling to say something that, if not high praise, would at least not make me cry.  Finally, she found the appropriate observation.

“It looks like badminton.  But where are the people?”

Critics!  They never give you a break.

Though hardly a quick thinker, I desperately needed a “saver.”  And startlingly, one came to me. 

Why were there no people in my Badminton Tableau?

“It’s raining.  And they all went inside.”

I heard a sound which I would later recognize as a person choking down a guffaw.  I feared for her internal organs, a suppressed laugh bubble causing an helpless spleen or gall bladder to explode.  Miss Sternberg moved away in silence.  Though her shoulders kept jerking up and down.

That’s the story that came to me as I meditated.  And I was grateful, because I had nothing ready to write about that day.  (“That day” being today.)  This happens quite frequently.  I do not get an idea till it comes to me.  And when it comes to me, there it is – a ready-to-go blog post idea. 

What if nothing comes to me?  So far, that has not happened.  Though I cannot for the life of me imagine why. 

The fact is, I do not overly concern myself with why ideas come to me – I have too many other concerns I can’t do anything about occupying my mind.  But I do sometimes ponder why this one floated to my consciousness at this particular moment.

“Why did I think of that just now?” (In contrast to the uncountable other things I could have thought).  Kind of an interesting inquiry, don’t you think?

“What brought this decades-ago triviality suddenly to my attention?”

Well, just like you – or at least I – cannot make a thought appear, I cannot make the explanation for why that thought appeared appear either.  It has to come to me.  And an hour or so later, it did.

The “badminton-picture-with-no people-in-it” story seems to be about me, surrendering, perhaps too readily, to my perceived limitations.  And it came to mind, I believe, because of a recent houseguest, a friend of half a century who, though he may not have received the career-related blessings that I’ve enjoyed, has never ever stopped working. 

And he continues to today.  Toiling simultaneously on an e-book, several plays, a miniseries proposal, a children’s book adaptation, and a feature film, shot entirely on an iPad.                          

Me, I saw the handwriting on the wall, and the handwriting said, “Go home.”  And, after a couple of rejected pilot scripts and an unsold screenplay, I did. 

It was definitely raining.  But I wondered, for the first time, if I may have retired to the indoors just a little too easily. 

An unconscious thought offered up a story.  And the story illuminated the unconscious thought. 

I discovered the connection this time.

I wonder what my other stories are telling me?