Hideous Angels

 

“Angels are bright still, though the brightest fell.”

-- William Shakespeare, Macbeth,  Act 4 Scene 3

Kids make ugly shit. It's adorable. Seriously, I don't have kids or participate in the raising of anybody else's and yet if I could I would furnish at least one room in my house exclusively with ugly shit kids made: paintings that look like chemical spills, clothespin dragonflies, wonky solar systems, Papier-mâché volcanoes, birdhouses FEMA would condemn, ashtrays that look like turds -- and I don't even smoke anymore! I would enlarge their terrifying animal drawings and make wallpaper. I'd cut windows to a kid's notion of geometry and make a clock with the numbers crowded in one corner. I would have furniture made to look like a four-year-old's ideal of a perfect bed and flat chairs with too many legs. It would be glorious and beautiful and useless and a little terrifying, just like children, just like childhood.

The aesthetics of children before they've reached the age of reason have been studied by wise and learned scholars and there would seem to be a consensus that there is more that is good, or bad in a better way than most of us will ever make again. Once all our houses are square with triangle roofs and we can spell correctly and write without inverting our R and trailing our S we have lost if not so much as we've gained, then at least something wonderful and forever. Parents are wired to find their own children and all their works fascinating. For a brief time this is objectively true.

So appreciating kids' arts & crafts without keeping a kid clothed and fed isn't as crazy as it sounds. Why this stuff can be so aesthetically satisfying to me isn't to do with prodigies or savants. For a long time, at least when I was reading, drawing, or writing, I was "exceptional for my age." That is exactly the kind of accolade out of which one ages naturally. (After a certain age one may hear that phrase again but now for still being able to touch one's toes or remembering the name of the sitting President.) Looking through the stuff of mine that my father saved I was touched that he'd kept so much. I was struck by just how nearly good -- objectively and not for my age -- it all was without actually being at all interesting. Drawings, stories, "book reports," it was none of it unstudied or spontaneous. I could see immediately the books and the shows from which I drew, how hard I'd worked at making everything as much like my models as I could. Admirable but not interesting. Ironically the very thing my father saw in all my art, namely the effort, the thing that made him think it worth preserving, was the very thing that makes nearly none of it now worth keeping. Whereas a little "bird" in colored pencil handed me one day by the six-year-old son of a coworker at my desk, I have secretly kept ever since. I still take it out occasionally to study and admire. No actual bird was ever colored so, had such disproportionately large purple feet, or both eyes on the same side of its tiny head, and nearly no real bird was ever so beautiful.

I went to elementary school so long ago that teachers were actually supplied by the taxpayer with construction paper. Imagine that. Safety scissors -- mother's comfort and artist's bane -- glue pots, pencils, paints, appeared as a matter of course for projects large and small. True, our textbooks were ancient and not of the best. (In the late sixties we were still learning to read from a Dick and Jane dressed in sturdy, Depression era leather shoes and those inelastic wool socks that pooled at the ankle. Might as well have been depicted in ruffs and farthingales.) That said, there was then a abundance in public education the like of which we are unlikely to ever see again; music instruction, art, library books, paper actually to burn, and popsicle sticks enough to reproduce the abbey at Mont-Saint-Michel at third scale - if anyone at Highland Elementary had ever heard of Mont-Saint-Michel which they had not.

We felt bad for the kids who didn't get to go to public school, which happened even then. We understood that their parents were god-struck maniacs without televisions (!) who kept their car radios tuned to the screaming preacher channel, and dressed their girls like Granny in the Tweety Bird cartoons. (Little House on the Prairie, the TV hit, came a little later, in 1974 and made gingham cool in the preteen set.) This was back before John Birchers were packed onto the Supreme Court and suddenly it was okay for my property taxes to pay the tuition at some church-basement Baptist kindergarten. You know, the kind of non-public school where the kiddies learn that Jesus was not a Jew, and America is God's Kingdom. Back then, if you wanted to keep your children down on the farm as it were, you had to pay the preacher's not-so-secret mistress yourself to teach the little ones that only communists read comic books and listened to those colored dance records. The kids in public schools? We were the lucky ones. We got more stuff, including opportunities and even ideas. It's not as if we weren't taught conformity. We were. But it was less draconian, if not subtle.

For example, hand-turkeys. I now think that one of the ways kids unlearn what makes their art interesting and individual is when they are taught to all make the same thing the same way. Some of this is good and necessary. You want your kid to make upper and lower case look like everybody else's upper and lower. You want your kid to sing in tune if possible, and to take turns, and spell. I don't know, but maybe every parent secretly wants their kid to not go the same direction in a dance recital because, come on, isn't that the best? And I should think everybody wants their kid to bring home a hand-turkey in November, but maybe the wise ones want it to look a little weird, no? 

You trace around the fingers of your non-dominant hand with a crayon or a marker. (Back in my day, there was a residual distrust of the sinister, so I'm pretty sure we all had to make our turkeys face right. Lessons on lessons.) Some people would be made to then cut your handprint out and stick the outline on another piece of paper. Maybe just draw over it on the same paper. Different methods, similar results. The outline gave you the shape of the turkey: fingers were feathers, thumb the neck and head, feet added under. The result was then colored, decorated, decked in all the turkey's native glory. If the teacher was uptight the browns had to be brown. Those of a more liberal inclination allowed for not just yellows and reds but purples, pinks, blues -- all of which I would point out are present in reality when the light falls right. 

I remember my own turkey as sadly traditionalist in both its coloration and shape, the kind of thing you would expect in a recognizable hand-turkey, the kind of bird that would please the teacher and not need explanation at home. ("Oh! What a good turkey!") I also remember a few peacocks sneaking into the flock, maybe a couple of dinosaurs. Not everybody stayed inside the lines. I very much did. I was all about being good then. It's a little disappointing to think how much that mattered to me once, but give the kid a break. I suspect he already sensed he was going to disappoint elsewhere someday and not just his spelling. 

We also cut out Pilgrim hats. Historically regrettable, but easy shapes; hat, hatband, buckle. We made flags for anything patriotic, jack-o-lanterns, stars and Santa hats for Christmas. Later we made planets, and I made a papier-mâché triceratops so massive it broke in half getting it into my mother's car for the ride to school. Grim ride. Bad day.

I said above that I would be into decorating a whole room with this sort of thing and I meant it, but I don't know that I would want anything I made in it except maybe the broken dinosaur. That thing was impressive and it was not anatomically correct even before the masking-tape surgery that put its head awkwardly back on. Ambitious, that's what it was, but also sadly mud-colored and boxy. It was made with actual boxes after all. Later it made a lovely blaze on the burn-pile. I remember that. That was exciting. (It was too big to keep in my room if we ever wanted to get to the closet again, and it was sad to see after the accident anyway, badly balanced and always tipping forward on its face. Poor beast. It was time.)

Of all the things I made as a child, the only one that survived in any public way and for many years was one hideous angel. I should mention that we were angel people. In my experience, families are either angel people or star people. Star people allowed for some variation from the straight up five pointed glass star to stars with halos to stars with actual lights. I would include abstract tree-topper families in with the star people simply because that business of diminishing globes ending in a sharp point always suggested a star as the point of departure, at least to me. Yes, the onion roofs on Russian churches and the Kremlin also come to mind, but really, I think those toppers were more to do with Bethlehem's one  famous traffic signal than with inverted icicles or snow or that sort of thing. Maybe I'm wrong. We were angel people. What do I know? 

One year our angel lost her head. Happens. She was old. I think she'd also lost a hand, at least one hand. Glue was applied but she was never right again. With all the confidence of an already "artistic" boy, I determined to make her replacement. Have I mentioned the stunning variety of uses to which we then put the cardboard tubes out of paper-towels and toilet-rolls?!

Rilke said, "every angel is terrifying." Mine was. She was beautiful. This is her story.

Angel hair. Anyone else remember angel hair? It was spun clouds of fiberglass thread. It was pretty and pretty deadly. And real tinsel? Remember that? Tinsel was very thin metal then, "icicles" too, and that stuff would actually cut you and potentially kill your cat and we all used it and we all thought it was just lovely. Asbestos snow. Actual asbestos. Styrofoam was big then too. Don't see a lot of that anymore, which I'm sure is a good thing. For years my Dad got tiny settlement-checks as part of the big asbestosis case. (Factory work not snow inhalation.) One likes to think we are learning, but in my childhood all but the manufacturers were largely unaware of everything that could kill us. People smoked everywhere. We decorated cakes with silver BBs and we ate them and no one knew or much cared what they were made from or that their only flavor was "hard." Pipe-cleaners had made a comeback too even as actual pipes were disappearing. Bristled wires in various fun colors. We used pipe-cleaners for everything. So flexible. Any art supply, any discount store back in the day, there were Styrofoam balls big as your head and small enough they had to be bagged, and every size in such abundance that there were tall wire cages and big bins to keep the stuff from drifting down the aisles. Styrofoam wreaths, Styrofoam Santa, reindeer, trees! We painted it, stuck things into it, we even thought it looked good naked; just Styrofoam "snowballs" piled up like civil war ordinance. 

My angel had angel hair, sort of an up-do with a red ribbon. Red. Christmas. Made perfect sense. Cotton balls would have been a safer choice but that would have looked more colonial than ethereal. She had a bow at her throat too, same red ribbon. It was a motif. (Need I point out that all true Christmas angels are girls, despite so many boy angels named in the text? Weren't quite ready yet for Christmas drag and one needed a full skirt up which to shove the top branch.) Almost goes without saying that her body was a toilet-paper tube, the basic building-block of juvenile American engineering before Lego. Her robes were a plain white paper cone, white paper wings, white pipe-cleaner arms with loop hands folded in prayer. Gold pipe-cleaner halo, of course. Her head was a Styrofoam ball of just slightly too big a size. I painted her face on: arced rather than arched brows, closed eyes represented by rickrack lashes, two dot nose, and a bold red lip to match her ribbons. If there was more of Dolly's Jolene than the evangel about her, that was for the adults to keep to themselves. 

Among the many flaws which escaped my attention her inaugural Christmas, I would note that the difference between treated and untreated Styrofoam -- the former had a flat, glossy surface, the latter did not. Guess which one I put paint on? This meant that the cosmetic details of her mug quickly ate into the surface a bit, giving her a weirdly skeletal look. My model for making my angel was after all not an angel, but the ghosts we'd made in school for Halloween. Thus the inspiration of the decorative ribbons to indicate the change in holiday. Red. Christmas. Not blood. Who said anything about a garotte?! Anyway, I think she had buttons too. Not a ghost. It's a dress. See? Buttons, in the front so you could see them, just like dresses.

Hers was a fragile beauty at the best of times. Her face continued to fall in over time. Bad posture plagued her all her life and she often looked drunk. Presumably the sway of The Holy Spirit rather than the influence of strong spirits. Whatever one puts on top of an actual as opposed to an artificial tree is subject to the bend of the branch. Unlike the commercially produced angels and stars, there really wasn't much thought given to grip or balance. And so her many attempts to end her own life, poor dear. Up she went. Down she came, repeatedly. So many interventions. So maybe she was drunk. Sad certainly. And remember, all the brightest angels fell. 

If you haven't tripped to the fact yet, yes, my angel went onto the top of the tree. It could be argued that perfectly good parents might have thanked their son and even praised his effort without then feeling the need to place this particular project atop the family Christmas tree. Further, having done so once, with the best of intentions in the world they might then have contrived to lose the thing before Christmas rolled around again, no questions asked. No one would fault the parent employing such stratagems to spare the general discomfort of visitors, but no. Until the day in my own adolescence when I could not look at that by then bedraggled and sadly crippled thing again and took her down, my angel stayed. I think I tried to throw her away. (Teenagers are beastly.) Rescued from the trash, she lived on some time in semi-retirement on a lower branch and then on an end-table until one night she was finally done away with in the dark of night, much to my parents' grief and fury. Grief and fury were kind of the go-to response to me in my teens. I get it. It would be years before I understood the value of what I had discarded in embarrassment. 

As precious as all this may sound, you should know that ours was never a family immune to sarcasm or quick to let go of an inside joke. You made a funny looking ashtray at summer camp, we laughed at the ashtray and kept it forever. Didn't mean such objects were unloved. Quite the contrary. Every lopsided pin-cushion, every wonky clay mug, if one of us made a thing, the thing stayed even when we laughed at it, because we laughed at nearly everything. They kept my angel because they loved her, faults and all. Hideous as she actually was, with all the jokes about angels working the corner and walking the stroll and all looking better in the dark, she was loved for who she was and not just because, so to speak, she came home on my arm. 

Our house was nearly as full of strays as the yard and the barn. Kids, old people, animals, junk, none of us, none of them, none of it need be perfect to be welcome. Useless and unlovely were never reasons to not be sat right out front where everybody could see. Animate and not, it was all of it life and that was and is never less than messy. Some dogs can only run sideways. Some old friends lose the thread or fart when they walk. Some chairs tip. Some angels are ugly. If it wasn't funny you'd cry, wouldn't you?  Cry if you have to. There's a lot of yard if you need privacy and room to walk in. Look around you though. Have you ever seen the like? That cat is not right. The feet on that baby, she's going to be a runner! Just look at Aunt Ruth, will you. New glasses make her eyes the size of pie-plates. If Uncle Buster's pants rode up any higher that belt would be a necktie. Red's a funny bastard, ain't he? 

See that angel? Brad made it! What do you think of her bowtie?! He don't like it anymore but I think she looks great. Riding a little low on her left side now, but she's hanging on.

See that angel?

It is in the nature of angels to be largely unseen. Every actual appearance is presumably intended to startle. There is some justice then in having made and unmade an angel better loved than looking. Chesterton said somewhere that angels could fly because they took themselves so lightly. Never meant to linger, but then neither is childhood, neither are we.