When the battles finally come to a 'draw'

By Felix Carroll


We found in our son’s school folder a drawing he did on the sly, not meant for public consumption. It depicts a certain teacher at a certain school. It’s not flattering. She has talons.

“Don’t apologize,” I said to him, holding his drawing to the light for a closer inspection. “It’s okay, it’s okay, just don’t let her ever see drawings like this.” He was horrified that we found it. He tried to snatch it back. He begged me to toss it into the woodstove, but this one is a keeper, so too bad.

“Wow,” said his mother when he had gone to bed, “it kind of does look like her” — and it does, in a Ralph Steadman-ish kind of way. 

I'm not posting it here, based on the advice of my team of attorneys. Suffice it to say, it’s a line drawing done all in black. By the boldness of the marker strokes, it’s apparent he applied a lot of himself into this — probably all 62 pounds of himself. She has wild eyes. A hornets’ nest hairdo. Reptilian limbs. A bullet strap draped across the chest. A heart-shaped tattoo on each leg for whatever reason, one with lovers’ names that have been crossed out. Hedge clippers. A mouth with sharpened teeth and spewing what could only be invective.

In person, she’s a lovely lady, by the way, but she does hand out a lot of homework, and really that’s what this is all about. In our boy’s guileless division of good and evil, evil has a new lady in town, and she’s a teacher. And you know what I think? If she wanted to be drawn in periwinkle, exuberantly waving her arms from a tiny, green sports car under a smiling sun and with birds perched upon a rainbow, she should have applied for the first grade teaching position.

This is fourth grade after all, and, man, this is an age of Armageddon-on-paper, mostly when it comes to the boys. Even I’m not safe — me, his father, probably a mere unreasonable ultimatum away from my likeness finding itself proportionally 20 times its size, stomping on our house during a violent lightning storm while devouring helpless puppies with my lizard beak.

What he doesn’t realize is that, as a former grammar school student who would draw devil’s horns on hand turkeys, I can only empathize. Perhaps not in the form of hand turkeys, per se, we know from an early age that evil lurks in our midst.

Indeed, no matter how much we’ve sheltered our children from violent imagery, when they put marker to paper it seems peaceful resolutions rarely appeal to their artistic sensibilities. We would be fools to expect them to sit down and draw a rendering of Generals Grant and Lee engaged in a firm and noble handshake at Appomattox Courthouse, or Henry Kissinger engaging in shuttle diplomacy, or Hamas and Israel chasing butterflies at Camp David.

            

Jeez, can’t you see?  We’re under attack! Grab the flamethrower, the potato bazooka, the slingshot — whatever you’ve got! Buildings will be demolished. In a boy’s artistic arsenal, the reds and blacks are always depleted before fresh supplies arrive, so he may have to resort to depicting mere armed robbery.

Clearly, he’s working some things out in his mind. He’s lost some battles, but never the entire war. The good guys win — always — be they bank tellers held up by bandits, or earthlings fending off an alien invasion, or fourth graders whose free time is being filched by a chalk-wielding overlord.

There’s good and there’s bad. And that’s that. Still, his bad guys are starting to soften up a little, their evil intent undercut by a propensity for slapstick. These days, the alien invaders have been known to drop bombs etched with the word “Sorry.” These days, the last utterance of the bloodied and beaten bank robber is not always “Ow!” Sometimes it’s “Yeesh.”

We stash away a lot of these drawings. Over time the narrative arch surely will get more complicated. Someday, he will inhabit a world where evil isn’t always so obvious and good doesn’t always win, where there are two sides to every story, where right and wrong find themselves partnered in a whirling, swirling contra dance of contradictions.

Maybe the bank robber was only trying to feed his family. Maybe that evil teacher was only trying to reduce the odds of her students becoming bank robbers.

I was probably his age when it became clear to me that things weren’t always what they seemed to be. I recall how, with righteous indignation, I turned in my toy sheriff’s badge, six shooter and cowboy hat for a pair of moccasins, an Indian headband and a tomahawk. I would not be on the wrong side of history.

As difficult as it gets, we still have to draw our own conclusions, otherwise, why draw at all.