I can draw!

My studio space.  The white rectangles are pages of the final dummy book to be filled.  Eight now contain drawings.

Every so often I seem to forget and then rediscover that I can, in fact, draw.  This time, wow, it's crashing back on me in a glorious tsunami!

Taking the time to work out dragon anatomy and character faces has paid off tenfold.  Need another dragon in the background to round out the composition?  Move the main figure over a half inch?  No problem!  Did you know that dragons have a thumb on their wing?  It's usually tucked underneath.  Or that they have belly buttons?  Shhh, they're mammals, but don't spoil it for the kids.  (But don't ask me where the dragon nipples got off to.)

With that hurdle out of the way, I faced another problem: a reoccurring location is a page-filling heap of trash.  It is practically a character.  And try as I might, I can't seem to fake it.  I'm just not good at doodling some shapes around the edge that suggest that the entire space is filled with objects.  No, when I get going, I obsessively render every water bottle and broken cell phone.  And I'll have to redraw this heap at least five times.

But you know what?  Drawing a million pieces of trash is insanely fun!  And also, I'm getting faster and faster at it.  The first pile was excruciating, and had to be plotted out carefully in pencil first.  By the third one, I was flying by the seat of my pants, going straight at the blank sheet with pen.

Chris paid me an amazing complement when he went over to ooooh at the big trash heap, frowned, and then asked, "this isn't the original, is it?"  He asked because it was copy paper, with push pins shoved through the corners and a few dabs of white out.  Well, it's only a working sketch!  Drawn in cough sharpie cough.

As a reward to myself for getting such a reaction from Chris (who is, after all, a former art director)  I went shopping online for archival watercolor paper.

Polar Express? Bah Humbug.

I began the Christmas fun for my kids this morning by bringing down the Christmas boxes from the attic.  We arranged nutcrackers, ate some chocolates from their very first advent calenders, and set up The Train.

Oh, The Train!  It's a beautiful working model of the train from the Polar Express movie, courtesy of his awesome grandparents.  My four-year-old son waited since last December with a patience well beyond his years to play with it again.  I suppose we will have to have a showing of "the train movie" at some point this month, seeing as it is Christmas and he just had to watch it again and again when he went through that obsessed-with-just-one-movie stage of three.

If you hear some reluctance in my words, you aren't imagining things.  I'm sure there are plenty of parents who would prefer not to be subjected yet again to the movie's eerie, almost-real art style.  But that isn't what turns me off of the movie.

Back when I wrote about the Giving Tree, a friend wrote to me in private to tell me how she loathed the book, but how she was afraid to tell me so in public on Facebook.  She knew that there are many people who love that particular book, and among them some who cling fiercely and emotionally to the Giving Tree.  She was afraid to risk their ire.

I feel similarly about the Polar Express.  Reviews churn with frothy love for this book.  I am hard pressed to find any negative opinion of Chris Van Allsburg's masterpiece anywhere on the internet - and isn't the internet the source of all things cynical?  Among the few negative reviews I can find, I still seem to be alone in the source of my dislike.  Worse yet, in terms of setting myself to be scorned by those who love the book, is that I dislike the Polar Express for the very reason that it is so frequently beloved:

At one time, most of my friends could hear the bell, but as years passed, it fell silent for all of them. Even Sarah found one Christmas that she could no longer hear its sweet sound. Though I've grown old, the bell still rings for me, as it does for all who truly believe.

 I must have been seven or eight when I first encountered this book.  Even then, I was struck with the tragedy of children growing up and becoming dim-witted adults who would not or could not see the beauty around them.

Now, as I watch my son explore his surroundings, I am floored at his inquisitiveness.  When he encounters something new, he wants to know what it is made of.  How it works.  What it does.  What it means.  He is filled with wonder and a drive to observe.  And every answer he gets makes him more excited, and spurs him onward to two more questions.  Excited questions!  My son sees the beauty of the actual world around him, and the more he learns about it, the more beauty he sees.

His zest for life isn't based on some fairy tale that is going to pop like a soap bubble and leave him feeling stranded and in need of a train to the North Pole.  Every layer of truth that he learns leaves him more fulfilled, not less.

You might wonder at my own childhood Christmas experience.  It went like this: whenever my father talked about Santa, he had that crooked little smile that indicated he was playing a game.  He wasn't lying; he was playing pretend, and waiting for me to catch on.  I did catch on, early, and I played along, eagerly and joyfully.  I can recall being seven, on Christmas Eve, listening for the sound of hooves on the roof, even though I already knew that my parents were hiding all the presents somewhere.

Why as a culture do we insist that our children believe in something that we do not?  Why to we place such value on childhood ignorance and vulnerability to falsehood?  Why do we set them up to be crushed by a reality that is drab compared to the shiny lie we have fed them?

Why, as a society who supposedly values scientific inquiry in adults, do we teach our children to place a premium on belief without evidence?

My used-book-sale copy of the Polar Express will remain sequestered on the Shelf of Dangerous Books this winter.  I will grit my teeth as Tom Hanks once again scorns the antagonist of the movie for being "a doubter".  And I will smile a crooked little smile at my son when we discuss Santa, and wallow in pride when he flashes the same crooked little smile back at me.