As a teenager, I attended art classes on Saturdays at a famous museum and then a famous university. At the museum each week an honor roll was called. I was on it frequently. I also remember many of the names called as if it were yesterday. I think they called them alphabetically. Hypnotize me and take me back to that time and I could announce the whole list.
Some of these people were my friends or friends of friends. We all had a small sense that we were special because we had been invited selectively from all around the county.
In the end almost all the people who got full scholarships to the famous university classes were male. I sometimes wonder about that. Was it sexism? Was it sexuality? Was it that the people who were behind these classes just thought that men artists had more potential and would be more serious about pursuing art? There were many women on those honor roll lists.
So one afternoon back in the day, when I was visiting my friend Sandy, my favorite classmate, who lived near her friend Robert, a name called, a person who got the full scholarship, she introduced me to Robert. He was a very tall teen from a German background in a mostly Jewish neighborhood.
We went over to his house. We sat in his living room. He and Sandy were chatty.
I remember that day because of the finery about the way he spoke. The thinness of his fingers. A seriousness about him. And also because he had a slobbering Saint Bernard with a small barrel under his chin. (Why do people make Saint Bernard's carry barrels? Maybe this dog carried Robert's cash or stash?) The dog got on my lap and slobbered. They all told me this was because he "liked" me. I hated his slobber. I wanted him off my lap. You would never guess at that point in my life how much I would come to love dogs. They all thought it was sort of funny that the more I resisted the Saint Bernard, the more he "liked" me.
Every once in a while I would think of Robert, such a promising artist. Had he gone on to afford the extreme tuition of the university? Did he still paint? Was his work represented in galleries? Maybe a museum?
So, one day I had the urge to check. I put his name into the Internet and up came an obituary. He had been dead for years. He had died young in another city and state. The obit suggested that he had long had family in this other state. I wondered when he moved. What he did for a living when he was alive. And what killed him. Was it a car accident? A strange disease? Cancer of some sort? AIDS?
Then it bothered me, the way I had carried him around as a live person when he had been dead most of my life.
Even as I write this I see his face.
C Christine Trzyna All Rights Reserved
