Quickdraw: A Memoir

“Everybody into the car,” he said.

When my grandmother was a wee girl, her father, my great grandfather, once herded her and her siblings out of the house like third-rate beef (my grandmother’s family couldn’t afford specialty meats). He did stuff like this all the time.

“Come outside!” he once yelled, and Mema walked out to their decaying front porch where her father stood, hands in his pocketS, staring straight up at the sky. When he heard the front door fall shut, he pointed upwards, straight at the bright full moon.

“One day,” he said, “There will be men there. On the moon.”

He died in 1962.

But, for now, Mema and her siblings piled into the back of a sepia-toned Sedan and stared out the window, cramped and confused.

‘My dad is insane,’ thought Mema and, although they couldn’t hear her thoughts, her siblings nodded in agreement.

After a few minutes, Mema could tell they were heading toward the lake. The houses gradually grew bigger and farther apart, and the sky darkened with fog. They didn’t live too far from Lake Erie, but were lucky enough to avoid the pop-o-matic weather it usually produced (fog one day, tsunamis the next).

There weren’t many cars parked by the beach, mostly because there aren’t too many places in Cleveland that are all too displaced from the beach, and also because it was about 40 degrees outside. They parked somewhere between the three or so other cars lined across the sandy boulevard.

“Hurry!” her dad yelled, picking up the pace as Mema and her siblings pumped their short legs as hard as they could to keep up with their father. He got obsessed over a lot of things, and clearly this was another.

He stopped in the middle of the sand, watching the deep blue water deepen and the sky-gray horizon swirl like a lollipop. The family lined up next to him, execution-style with the wet sand chilling their toes. They glared at the lake, Mema standing at the edge of the row, stealing glances from her father and wishing they were warm at home.

Suddenly, in the distance, it came into focus, floating along the back of the lake like a cardboard cutout: an iceberg. Not your normal chunk of ice that appears on the lake between October and, sometimes in Cleveland, mid-June, but a towering mountain of ice, pointing straight up to the dark wet sky.

“That’s history,” Mema’s dad said, who followed the statement with the drag of a home-rolled cigarette.

Mema barely watched the haphazard geographical assortment as it crawled through the water, pounding it in half like a deep wound. She watched her father, as the iceberg bounced painfully, slowly, the sore-thumb rock beginning to cover the bottom swirl of the horizon.

Mema later learned that the block of ice had snapped off a full-size glacier from the northern portion of Lake Michigan. It then rode down the lazy river through the Straits of Mackinac and into Lake Huron into Detroit into Lake Erie. It was the most persistent traveler she’d ever meet, until my grandfather, a pilot in the air force.

* * * * *

Although my own father took me to the beach once or twice, I usually remember him taking me and my sister to places like Big Lots, with its swirled neon-lit horizon illuminating dirty old socks. Whenever we’d walk out, there would usually be a short posting of local sub-middle-class events. Participation usually involved actual work, but, every so often, there would be the holy grail of lazy children community activities - a coloring contest.

Usually seasonal, they would range from a picture of Santa with a child on his lap to three kids prancing in the sand with beach balls under each arm to even a giant pumpkin man hugging a scarecrow (possibly to hold the straw in). One Halloween, beside the contest entries, sat a bright inflatable pumpkin, slightly larger than eight-year-old me, but deflating a little in the back. It could have been the intimidating size or the fake orange glow, but I wanted it more than anything. Yeah, I was pretty sure I’d get Nintendo and new shoes for Christmas, but, at that exact moment, nothing seemed more appealing than that pumpkin. All it would take for that pumpkin to be mine was the best-colored pumpkin-hugging-scarecrow picture in town.

At school they called me Quickdraw. Not that I carried my crayons around in a holster and walked bow-legged like a cowboy, but, when it was time to color, I would produce a row of 24 Crayolas lined up in order of usage (from most to least) and have at least half the picture completed before the other students shut their desks. In first grade math, we would have to solve about ten addition problems and then color the picture around the problems before handing the worksheet in. There was another kid in my class, Reed, who was a bit of a math superstar. Unofficially, for fear that the teacher wouldn’t approve of our constant competition, we would race to finish the entire worksheet before the other. It would usually be close completing the problems, especially if we had to carry any numbers, but when it came time to color, I would plaster crayon on that picture of three kids and a train like a hurricane.

Once I turned a picture in so fast, with so many scribbles and poor color choices, my teacher actually told my mom that I could use to “slow down a little.” I told my teacher “my crayons were waxy that day.” Although, looking back at it, I imagine the problem would’ve been worse if the crayons hadn’t been.

Either way, this was a coloring contest—speed was not an issue, as Jimmy down the street could just as easily take a week to color in the scarecrow’s eyes and still get it turned in before the deadline. I needed precision and care (my two archenemies) if that pumpkin were to be mine.

My dad would’ve been the gold medal winner of distraction, if he could ever keep the Olympic judges focused on him long enough to score points. We would have visitations with him every Sunday, but he would usually find a way to keep us occupied without him for two to three hours each time. So, when we arrived at his way-too-big, rock-laden house overlooking the beach and took off our shoes so as not to dirty his porcelain white carpet, he set us up at the kitchen table, with a box of 48 crayons (most were broken, three were white) and set us straight to work on the contest.

I felt like Van Gogh, selecting colors for effect. Yes, orange is the usual pumpkin color, but wouldn’t the slight addition of blue undertones indicate the dreary sadness of the approaching winter? By taking a combination of yellow, white, red, and gray in one hand, I could swirl the horizon, fogging it to perfection. Each new color said something different, and, if even a spec fell outside the lines, it instantly became part of the color combination in the next part of the picture.

My sister finished quickly, a grand attempt. The colors were expected and light, and the work was clean and exact. While I was making a Van Gogh, she had put together one of those pictures my aunt had hanging above her couch, with plainly painted flowers on a green background.

She peeked at my piece, rightfully confused by the slow bravado of it, and asked, “What’s wrong? You always finish before me.”

But I didn’t have time to answer as I brushed a stubby yellow-orange crayon across a strand of straw.

* * * * *

Dad told us he turned in our contest entries during the week, and next Sunday I practically bounded into his house (almost forgetting to take off my muddy sneakers, which could’ve been disastrous) to see if any new toys had arrived.

“It takes them a while to decide,” he said. “Maybe next week.”

Two more weeks passed, and each passing Sunday was torture. “Maybe next week,” Dad would say, as my interest in the inflatable pumpkin slowly started to deflate. It was too much to think about, with Thanksgiving and Christmas and Super Mario Bros. approaching. Maybe they were so in love with my piece at Big Lots that they were painting it outside their store on a huge mural as we waited. Perhaps you would walk under a pumpkin hugging a scarecrow every time you went shopping for cheap TVs and you could look up and see the colors and think about how great the world is. I was sure that was it.

The next week passed slower than ever, but I couldn’t help but feel like this was my last chance. If we didn’t hear anything by this Sunday, it was over—my hopes, my art career, and definitely my desire to shop at Big Lots.

Then it came. Dad picked us up at Mom’s house and did his usual awkward hug as our faces scratched against his sharp unshaven face.

“There’s something for you at home,” he said, and I felt my heart drop. “But we have to run some errands first.”

It was like dangling a Milk Bone in front of a starving puppy. I had butterflies doing gymnastics in my stomach the next two hours, as getting to Dad’s house seemed farther and farther away.

Finally, though, we made it, but had to unload the van bag by bag. I don’t even remember Dad buying anything (returning a lot of stuff, yes) at the stores we visited that day, but we spent a good ten minutes pouring stuff into the kitchen.

As I dropped the last bag in the middle of the carpet, I stared at Dad, big-eyed and in wonder and he just looked back, as if he forgot my entire future status as Quickdraw centered around the next moment. Luckily, I had a sister who could’ve cared less for a staring contest and walked right into the living room.

“Shawn, come here!” she yelled to me.

I practically leaped straight into the living room in one bound, landing in the shaggy brown carpeting between the leather chairs and giant fake gold deer facing the lake out the large windows to the right. And, there, toward the back of the living room, shining, were four blow-up pumpkins, each bigger than the other. The biggest sat in the middle of the group, a set of inflatable green leaves launched from the short brown stem, almost swaying in the breeze from the central heat. The three others surrounded it, each as adorable as the next. Unlike the inflatable pumpkin I remembered from Big Lots, these had arms and legs—it was a whole pumpkin family. I almost expected a scarecrow family to walk in and play a round of Scrabble with them.

Dad slowly came up behind us. “Well,” he said, “What do you think?”

Without thinking, my sister and I dashed toward the pumpkins, but, instead of hugging them and throwing them and smashing them on each other’s heads, we prodded them, like they were aliens or a dead bird. My sister knew, too, that these pumpkins were different, but there was a blue ribbon attached to the front of the biggest pumpkin. It read, ‘Grand Prize, Coloring Contest’ and that was all.

“Shawn, you won,” said Dad. “You got the grand prize! See that big pumpkin? It’s yours.”

I walked toward the biggest pumpkin, which was a lot smaller than me, and patted its head, twirling its leaves in circles.

“And Amber,” he said to my sister. “You got second place, so those little pumpkins are yours.”

Amber smiled and turned to me, sticking out her tongue. “Ha!” she proudly announced, “I get three pumpkins.”

I didn’t quite understand why second place would get three pumpkins that were only slightly smaller than the one first place pumpkin, but I was proud enough that my excellent work wasn’t going unappreciated. Perhaps the kids at school would switch my Quickdraw status over to Van Gogh or Painter Extraordinaire.

Dad smiled at us and walked out of the living room to use the restroom and change. It wasn’t going to be too long before the next snow and he needed to put us to work out front, raking leaves and awarding us a joint dollar for every bag we filled.

My sister and I got bored of the pumpkins pretty quickly, just like we did with anything we got, from her dolls to my board games. We slowly moved back to the kitchen, but I stopped to look back at the pumpkins. They were inflated perfectly, not a sag on them.

As I entered the kitchen, I found my sister staring at Dad’s refrigerator. I shrugged and walked over to her, and stood forward facing it, execution-style, trying to figure out what she was drawn into.

And there they were, held on to the fridge with letter magnets. The crooked ‘C’ held Amber’s colored paper entry of the scarecrow and the pumpkin, her name clearly written across the top in black with her own hand and, next to it, my picture, the Van Gogh, with its unusual color scheme and nameless green grass held up by the letter ‘F’.

“Wow,” I said, “I didn’t know they gave the pictures back when you won one of these.”

Amber adjusted the ‘C’ magnet to go straight up and down. “I don’t think they do,” she said.

As she stepped back from the fridge, my eyes moved to the rainbow-swirled sky and the dark horizon, where the pumpkin’s head floated across, covering it like a broken piece of rock.