Caspar

Caspar was unlucky. Or, it could have been something else harder to put a finger on. He was slow when things called for speed. He was quick when it was not important to be fast. He was gifted, sometimes seeing more than he could put into words, feeling that he knew some things that others did not. Sometimes he had longings that he did not fully understand. Evenings he looked up, stuck in traffic, well after dusk, loosening his clenched jaw slightly as his eyes turned to the vastness and texture of the sky far above the street. He wanted to speak. No words came. The son of middle-class, educated parents, he was in the 2nd quarter of his graduating class at Mid-State College, and was now assistant manager at a local company, going nowhere. His talent had failed him. Why was it that he so frequently found himself following far behind others - a slightly above average person thwarted by apparently foreordained obstacles, all perhaps traceable to his own quirkiness and personality? He remembers the day in kindergarten he tried harder than other kids, but his art came out a mess. He wanted to start over but he could not. It was time to go. He had started out high and confident. His eyes were wide. He visualized his painting and his stomach fluttered. He saw other kids making stick figures of men and square houses. Caspar would make a picture of a pony with a man riding on its back. It would stand out from the other kid’s paintings for its beauty and noble theme. He would do his best and maybe they would hang it up on the wire in the hallway after it dried. Then teachers and parents would walk by, all smiling at the simple stick figures of the other children, and when they came to Caspar’s their eyebrows would arch a little, and they might even say something – “Oh, honey, look at that pony one. Isn’t that good?” “Yes, that one’s really nice.” And on Friday he would take it home and show it to his mother, and he would tell her how it was hung on the wall in the hallway for people to see, and how the teacher told him how special it was and how she had “never seen such a great pony before”, and then he would ask if they could find a special place at home to hang it up on the wall, and she would suggest they put it in the kitchen by the breakfast table so they could see it every morning. His mother would hug him extra tight and say how proud she was of him. And that memory would do its formative work in his fresh, young psyche. He would come to perceive himself as a person who can do things, as confident, clear-eyed and strong. As an adult he would be able to take on difficult tasks and impress his supervisors. He would become project leader, and then coordinator and on into positions reserved for people who can do things.
But that’s not what happened with Caspar’s painting. As he sat with the paintbrush dipping in the red paint, it seemed so easy, so obvious. He started with the head. It had to have eyes and ears and a long nose. He chose blue for the eyes and dipped his brush in the blue paint. But he mistakenly dipped his paintbrush in black paint, and now there was an ugly black spot where the eye should be. He looked. He started and gave a tiny gasp, and his shoulders sagged. He looked around for the teacher. She was with another child. He wouldn’t interrupt. He would just go on, maybe start over. He cleaned his paintbrush and started a new horse under and to the left of the first one on his construction paper. This time he would do it in green. A nice head, then the front legs, back legs, body. He carefully cleaned his brush. Now he got some orange and put a man riding the pony. The brush stroked down. Wet green paint mingled with orange and turned into a color that Caspar thought was ugly. It looked like mud and he made a face that showed combined distaste and the panic of another mess-up on his paper. There were only three minutes left. He would try to salvage it. He got more green to fix the spot on the pony’s back that had turned brown. Then he got more orange for the man. Then more green, each time making the lines fatter and more pronounced as he tried to repair his picture. It was no use. He wanted a new sheet of paper. If he could just start over, he could do it right and avoid that mistake. He saw the other children cleaning up. His soaring, prodigious ambition was deflating rapidly. He went to the teacher in his father’s oversized tee-shirt and asked, but, with deeply sympathetic eyes the teacher said there was no time to start over. She said his pony looked “wonderful” and she would put it up with the other pictures on the wire in the hallway, but he didn’t want that because now he knew that rather than being marked with distinction, it was without question the worst. Nobody else had messed up theirs. His had the added blemish of the first attempt and unfinished pony head in the upper right. The young Icarus had sought to touch the sun and ended up crashed in the water. He was ashamed. He felt rage and helplessness, new and confusing to him. He would have no sweet moment of rapture in his mother’s praise. He wanted to tear it up, then his ugly picture wouldn’t even have to be put up at all, but he feared the displeasure of the teacher if he should show such a tantrum. So he wept softly.
He never had any signs of mental slowness or disability, he was just…unlucky. In time, he became familiar with that sinking feeling that time is running out, others were way out in front, and he had made a poor start and wanted to start over. But you can never start over.
Now, sitting at the wheel after working a little late at the office, he breathed steadily as he forced his eyes from the waiting car in front of him to the ancient heavens as they drew across their veil of night. He thought about that old kindergarten painting. He thought about the school play, the track meet, the layoffs two years ago – all his moments when ambition turned to a sigh. “Dark outside,” he thought. And dark inside. When would summer come? Then perhaps he would try something new, perhaps he would add on a deck or paint the Opel in the garage. He thought about it. That car would be nice to drive around with the top down when the weather warms up. He would paint it red…