Love big. Love hard. With risks intact.
Summer isn’t just a season. Or a state of mind. It is an imperative. In the hope of insight about what to do with summer, we are featuring a series of essays over the next two months on the theme of summering. You can find the first essay here.
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Back in undergrad I had this summer job as a maintenance man with the North Canton City School District, North Canton, Ohio, being my hometown. The powers that be had me mowing lawns at the high school for the first part of the summer. For the second they paired me with the head custodian at Clearmount Elementary School. His name was Skip. He knew every inch of the building and how to patch, polish, scrub, repair, treat, and overhaul each of those inches. I was this gangly kid, more likely to impede the work out of blinding ignorance than to complete it, an inadvertent pain in the ass who barely knew the difference between a flathead and a Phillips.
I found out quick that Skip was a hunter. He went after turkeys in the spring from a blind with a 12-gauge and raised hunting dogs at home. But he lived and died for deer season. Specifically bow hunting season. Late fall through early winter in Ohio. The loneliest part of the year. Where you perch on a tree stand, watching and breathing—and that’s it. For hours. A vigil that begins pre-dawn in the kind of cold and outer dark where the damned gnash their teeth. It ends with, maybe, absolutely nothing. Or, worse, the sheer torture of a near miss. Or—the whole reason you’re out there in the first place—the rack and carcass of a broad shouldered buck. Which, fueled by 100% adrenaline at that point, you could hoist onto your shoulder and fairly well dance out of the woods.
Skip was a storyteller too, the good kind, who didn’t waste breath on generalities. On lunch breaks he recounted the bowhunting life to me, but he never over-seasoned. Hunting is a bloody business, and he told it as it was, not gratuitously but in factual gruesomeness. No more, no less. All of it brand new to me. I learned: An arrow, shot from a compound bow, makes a smack (punch the open palm of one hand with the fist of the other) when it impacts the animal’s hide. Faster than a thought, the arrow passes completely through the deer and buries itself up to the fletching in the dirt. And the deer takes off. Bright frothy blood on low leaves means you hit the deer in the vitals and it won’t make it far. Dark blood means you only winged it and it might be gone forever. Sometimes, as if to verify everything, Skip brought in venison bologna and we snacked as we fixed up the school.
Meanwhile, I was an abstract expressionist. At least I thought I was. I’d discovered the works of Hoffman, de Kooning, Pollock and the rest about two seconds before I started that job. So, while I bopped along behind Skip trying to remember the correct amount of solution that was supposed to go into the mop bucket, my brain was on fire. Those mad slashes, the wounded canvases, the audacity those artists had to sling and grind and drip the paint, where their predecessors could only imagine painting with it. I argued with my girlfriend—and meant it then, and maybe still do now—that Pollock was a truer artist than Michelangelo. At the art museum I stood with my nose an inch away from the huge canvases, immobilized.
A flash fire had been set in my heart and pretty soon just looking wasn’t enough. I wanted in. My parents, always supportive of my batty artistic drives, let me set up a studio of sorts in the basement. I got to work.
There were a few differences between Skip and me but, in the end, just one of consequence: His love for hunting wasn’t tempered by the stilted sheepishness that lampreys itself to my voice box when some beloved activity I take up verges on going public.
That Skip exercised his love for hunting when he wasn’t cleaning up Clearmount mattered. At least to him. But if he were the only person to whom it mattered, well, that alone was plenty, in his estimation of the world, to totally legitimize the activity in the vast pantheon of human endeavors. His willingness, then, to tell me, sans braggadocio, all about hunting, was a kind of invitation. Not to know hunting but to know him: Skip, the man himself.
But I hardly ever talked to Skip about what I loved—this frenetic painting style—because loving, or even admitting that I loved anything at all, was too tightly tethered to rejection. I must’ve expected that on some far-flung day I’d finally pick apart that Gordian knot. And once I’d gotten love and rejection separated, when I could love without putting my ego in the crosshairs, all that I wanted to openly love would magically coalesce into legitimacy—in both my own eyes and in the eyes of the world.
Little did I know then, and can barely fathom even now, that the risk of rejection is one of love’s throughlines, and true lovers, of other people and of any good thing, love away with the risk completely and necessarily intact.
But I must’ve let it slip once that I wanted to make a really big painting, bigger than anything that would fit on the stretcher bars I found at Blick. Pollock’s masterpieces, after all, are as big as a barn floor. How could I abstractly express anything if I wasn’t working on increasingly humongous scales? All I could figure was to stretch raw canvas on a frame made of, what, 2×4’s? So I bought some at the hardware store. But what next? The last thing I’d made out of wood was a pinewood derby car from a kit, back in Cub Scouts.
“Let me have them,” Skip said.
“What?”Â
“The 2×4’s.”
On a Friday I handed them over. I’m sure I spent the weekend mucking up my parents’ basement throwing paint around. Monday morning Skip pulled into the Clearmount parking lot and unloaded a giant, perfectly cut and fitted, flat and sturdy frame. My 2×4’s. Built now into one giant, wholly unique apparatus. All set now for me to stretch the canvas and make a masterpiece.
I suspect that Skip knew I wouldn’t say much more about art and how I loved it. But if, say, hunting could matter so much to him and he cared to share it with me—all those intimate risks disguised as stories—then there was more than enough room in the world for art to matter to me.
I couldn’t see it. He could. I can’t say that Skip personally cared about art any more than I personally cared about hunting. But I can say this: He must’ve cared about me.
Paul Luikart is the author of several short story collections , including his just-released The Realm of the Dog. He serves as an adjunct professor of fiction writing at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia and lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee.