Legacy Writing 365:153

The circle that is creating…

This month I’m doing the sketches for my 30 Days of Creativity entries in this sketchbook.

I had to dig it out of a bin in the garage. It’s something of Steve R’s I saved after he died. He’d only ever doodled on the first two pages of it, I think planning Christmas cards he made.

I’m also using this artist kit that someone in Tom’s family gave him many years ago.

It’s funny how often Tom and I have both used it, yet it’s still in great condition. Whenever I use crayons, I remember a Christmas when Lisa, Aaron, and Alex were flying to Utah and had a layover of several hours at Houston’s airport. Tom and I drove out to spend the layover with them in their terminal. I realized how bored kids must get during a time like that, so we took them a giant-sized box of crayons and a couple of sketch pads. This aunt had forgotten how boys can be, because it didn’t take them ten minutes to have nearly every one of those crayons broken. It cracked me up.

I’m including this photo of Aaron with his mom especially for my brother because of the way Aaron’s goofing with his sunglasses. Hmmm, wonder where he got that from?

Several years later, Lisa had to work a few days in Houston and she brought the boys to stay with my mother. When they’d walk over to visit me, I plunked them down on the sofa in front of the TV (aunts don’t forget everything!) with a box of colored pencils and my angel books.

It was Steve R who originally introduced me to the angel books. Though I have only one of his drawings–unfinished–many people have done others for me through the years. Alex finished his that first day and gave it to me.

The next day, Aaron decided to take his home and finish it.

Being a kid, he never sent it back to me. But that’s okay, because I still have the memories of those days to cherish.

When he visited in March, he talked me into downloading Draw Something to my iPhone. We played it the entire time he was here, sometimes sitting right next to each other and giggling at our bad drawings and how we had to give each other clues to guess them. I asked him how we were ever going to manage when we weren’t in the same room, but he said we’d figure it out.

I have a screen capture of only one of my drawings for him:

Nothing cracked us up like a drawing he sent me one night as I was on my way to bed. I was so tired that I couldn’t figure it out–even though just from the letters, at different times I picked out “king” and “lion,” but never put them together. Thus I ended up passing and taking our game back to zero. Fortunately, he took a screen shot of that one and shared it on Twitter. When Jen saw it, she tweeted, “Surfing guy holding a yellow Peep!” Whaddya mean “incorrect,” Draw Something?! Aaron insisted that what I saw as a blue cowboy’s sacrifice of an Easter Peep on the back of a whale was unmistakably Rafiki holding up Simba on the cliff in The Lion King.

I was actually in the middle of drawing something in a game with Jen that morning when Geri called to tell me about Aaron. A few days later, when I wrote a letter to be buried with him, I included something that I knew he’d understand: