Sidewalk drawing

I used to draw on the sidewalks in front of my house, using the same expensive oil pastels I now put to paper. Perhaps money was less of an object then, but even then I knew how I needed to spend my time: while other husbands might use their warm-weather weekends to paint the porch or hang shades in the dining room or put in a patio or pound posts for a fence, I knelt on a cart in old jeans and a t-shirt, copying drawings out of art folios or children’s books, which lay open on the lawn beside me with a brick holding the page against the wind. Over the years I drew Aladdin and Batman, a unicorn, and an American Indian boy, and Uncle Sam. On Halloween trick or treaters walked around a pastel black cat with yellow eyes or Lon Chaney as the Phantom, or Picasso’s Madonna and Child, a Modigliani woman, or a Van Gogh self-portrait. 

One summer a family from India rented the upstairs apartment of the brown two-family house across the street with an open porch where the grandmother would sit, dressed in layers of cloth on the hottest days, I could see her eyes and part of her nose but little else of her face. She watched her grandchildren playing down below, in the street with a ball, or standing over me making smart, nervy comments. I made a lot of neighbors nervous or distrustful for a while, until they knew I wasn’t going to take their children’s souls like a pied piper, and these two children, I made them nervous too, they were under 10 years old but their voices were too loud and their words too challenging as if conjuring up courage to overcome me and my oddness. My boys didn’t like them, the girl, the older, was a sneak, and the boy, only six or seven, was arrogant and hard with a brittle high voice of false cleverness. I suspected either of them capable of spilling juice or scuffing their feet over a new Superman or a Maurice Sendak monster when I wasn’t around, but they were afraid to challenge my sons who watched them with distrust or their grandmother’s placid observation from her perch. 

One early Sunday morning, out alone lost in the peculiarities of the pock-marked cement and the wonders of Picasso’s drawing skill as I tried to replicate his Portrait of Jacinto Salvado as Harlequin-1923, our city street perfectly quiet like from another century or a primitive country, no cars or sirens or children, just trees and lawns and old houses and rough gardens and the sidewalk, I looked up at the early sun over the two-story house across the street. The grandmother was standing, swathed in colored cloth, staring down at me and our eyes met and she lifted the layers of cloth to remove her arm and wave at me, and she nodded, her eyes so big and black that even from a distance I could see she was smiling.