Seed

IndieInk, Whatnot Comments (3)

‘There is nothing in the world that you can’t do if you want to badly enough.’

Her father had told her this with such frequency as she grew up that at some point it became her default approach to life. This isn’t to say that she was an unfettered success. Far from it. Failure was a constant companion through much of her formative years. And yet she was never daunted. Always in her memory sat the image of her father, pipe resting pleasantly between thin lips, paper drooped ever so slightly, just enough to enable him to see her standing in the doorway in her pajamas. ‘Nothing is impossible,’ he muttered through one side of his en-piped mouth, ‘unless it involves staying up past your bedtime. Go to bed, my love.’ And back up would go the paper.

She finally found her creative calling as an artist and when she told her father that she wanted to be an art major in college, she thought that she saw in his reaction the slightest twinge of regret. ‘Promise me that you won’t give up on this decision’, he said, recovering himself, ‘for the life of an artist is difficult and the rewards lie mostly within. But I know that you’ll do well. Do you know why?’

‘Yes, daddy’, she replied, slightly exasperated. She wasn’t sure what he meant about the ‘rewards within’ stuff and it would be years before she appreciated the part about the difficulty of her chosen path. What always kept her going, confident in her choice and passion, was the seed planted in her grey matter from when she was merely a sprout. That she could do anything.

Eventually she made a name for herself in a field where one’s name is mostly spoken only within small groups of people with very specific tastes and talents. She could create the most realistic representations of people and animals that many people had ever seen. Her colleagues held her in high esteem with what was equal parts admiration and jealousy. She had arrived after decades of effort, failure and success always accompanying her like siblings. When she decided to retire her chisel, she settled her mind on a final work that would be her finest, searching the world for the largest hunk of black granite that she could find, and procuring its purchase and delivery. The cost was astronomical, but ultimately met with the help of friends and galleries whose faith in her ability had never been marred.

And so she worked on this last sculpture for years, through retirement and the gradual loss of motor skills that finds us all in due time. She never rushed, however, even when her sight began to fade. Always her focus remained on this one final work, a memorial to both herself and her father.

In the atrium of the gallery named posthumously in her honor, there stands a 6’3” likeness of a curious looking man in a three-piece suit. One hand rests in a trouser pocket, while the other arm, bent at the elbow, holds a pipe. The head is titled forward and a permanent thin-lipped smirk adorns the handsome face, the eyes of which are cast downward, forever resting upon whomever might be standing in front of him. And there on the base of the statue are carved the words that paved it’s creator’s glorious path.

‘There is nothing in the world that you can’t do if you want to badly enough.’

A young girl, filled with the insecurity that plagues all young people on field trips to art galleries, stops to read those words. Through the haze of her unstable life at home and at school, she looks up into the tall, dark, handsome man’s face, and suddenly, unexpectedly, begins to think that he just might be right.

For the IndieInk Writing Challenge this week, Lance challenged me with “tall, dark and handsome” and I challenged Sophia Grace with “Tell a story about the passage of time from the perspective of an old clock.”

Sir @ February 23, 2012