Inside a dirty trailor

2004-04-26, 2:04 p.m.

When I was about 6 years old I went to visit family in New York with my mother. I met one of my mothers Aunts and she immediately became fascinated with me, with my pudgy face and shy demeanor, so it was only natural that she would want to shower me with new toys and other childish delights. We went to one of those expansive shopping centers where the aisles feel like hospital hallways and the lights make everything glow sterilized white (heavens waiting room must have the same glow). She decided to buy me a complete set of 1990 Bowman baseball trading cards, cased in a yellow and blue cardboard box; 350 mint cards for a kid that hadn�t even considered reading yet. I recall sitting on the brown carpeted floor of her trailer, pulling each card out painfully slow and looking with amazement at all the names, so many different letters arranged in seemingly infinite combinations, I was looking at the cards from every angle, sideways, upside down, and finally right side up. In time, and with the help of knowing how to spell my name (which worked as a key to the code of alphabet), I began sounding out the names until I could read every players name and what team they played for, then I read the statistics on the back. I felt like I had solved a puzzle that was sent to me directly from some higher being; now I had a gift of reading. This was the genesis that begat my curiosity in books. And if I could see books as characters in the bible then Moses would have brought the word of God as the Bernstein Bears brought the word of nature and importance of family. Later, when I was in 8th grade, it was George Orwell who freed my mind like Jews in Egypt had been emancipated from slavery. I felt the books beginning to evoke those ideas which were not presented on television, or in video games. There was some secret meaning etched into book like The Giver, and the Jungle Book waiting for me to discover it and blossom in my young mind. Indeed, I must have caught hold of some of those messages, because even today I go about observing situations with the same expectation for something hidden below the visible surface. While I read Orwell and Kippling I started to draw. I�m not sure why I felt like drawing rather than writing, but it seemed to click; it felt like a direct challenge to try and make my thoughts into images. Drawing was a chance to challenge others, which was to see what I hid under the lines of graphite and ink. I started to look at paintings by Picasso, and Duffe, and even my sister (I thought she could paint the body just as exquisitely as any of the masters) as icons, painters who had attained a level of intensity that I could aspire to. After the pencil or pen drawings became boring and repetitive, and I had taken 7 years of art, I picked up a paint brush for the first time. I was uplifted by the medium of paint, with the infinite possibility of different brush strokes, each with their own meaning. Any moment that I am alone and wrapped up in thought is exactly like painting to me, because each claim you make is a brush stroke, and each provocative observation is a bold color choice. For me the infinitely varied interpretations of art, and of everyday life are to like a science, where the scientific method is a way of breaking down a conundrum into a series of small problems in hope of finding a key to the larger problems (but the best that science can ever hope for is theory, no intelligent scientist ever claimed to have an answer to the matrix of nature.) So I might say that science has influenced my thinking, but that is ambiguous to the point of absurdity. Science is so expansive, as it touches the very edges of the universe, and yet it preys on the subatomic world like an Eagle scours a valley for mice. Science makes love to every physical and metaphysical inch of mother nature, paying such detail to the voluptuous curves of a mountain or an iris, so how could claim to use all of science�s prowess as a muse for my own thinking? I will limit myself to one field of study; I am most fascinated by the subatomic world, where the mystery of substance proudly reigns, for we are almost certain that quarks are not the end of the physical world. All that aside, I love the pure imagination that is involved with quarks and the fundamental forces because they are like fairy tales, where we form beautiful images of flowering bodies of energy, gnashing globes that border on weightlessness. I make stories for those globes, picturing them as perpetual excitement, billions of neighboring souls that are flabbergasted to be in each others presence. I think it�s sort of a personal evolution, to see the shifting influences of my mind, from reading, to art, and at 19, to science, but it�s unfair to limit the catalysts of thought to just three subjects. After all, how many thoughts we do we entertain everyday? How many scenarios we play out in our mind each hour of the day? You could say that each second is filled with some form of thought, whether it�s functional --I must get to class on time or I may be dropped-- or playfully abstract --What stories could Alpha Centauri tell me if it could talk?--, and it is never ending. For me, I start to chuckle every once in a while as I write this, because I have been using art, science, and reading to construct the essay. Here I am on a brown carpeted floor, writing and pouring into paper much the same way I read baseball cards when I was six, the only thing that has changed is my vocabulary and the collection of thoughts I have gathered since then. This does not make me sad, rather I am pleased that I still look into words like there is a translucent message waiting for me. So I turn the page of my notebook sideways, then upside down, and finally right side up, now the six year olds� smile suffuses my stoic face.