Thumbnail Sketch
Josie Levy Martin -- December 1, 2008
"There is no intelligence but in things...." --William Carlos Williams
I had no idea what Williams meant when I first read that phrase on the blackboard in my 9th grade journalism class, South Gate Junior High, 1953. But I remember the teacher, Mr. ------. His name was either Jones, Johnson, Green or White. Everyone had common American names in those days. He was a tall ganglionic kind of man, sort of twitchy and uncomfortable in his JC Penney's suit and white shirt, its limp collar ringed in weeks-old perspiration. And his desk, it was ringed with circles from the plaid thermos of coffee he always kept nearby.
Maybe he had worked at a real newspaper once upon a time, maybe as a war correspondent like Walter Winchell, I now wonder. He always looked as if a story was about to get away from him, but probably it was the unruly boys at the back of the room not paying attention, who were getting away. I wish I'd appreciated him for appreciating Williams.
The first assignment was to do a "Thumbnail Sketch".
I probably wasn't listening carefully, or the teacher didn't explain it very well in the din of those boisterous yoyos lifting and dropping the wooden tops of their desks to get Mitzi Lee Albertson's coy attention. Mitzi could wink, smile, tilt her little head and flick her long blonde pony-tail all in one smooth move. Sometimes she wore it in an upsweep and then would let it cascade over one eye a la Veronica Lake. She wore Milkmaid lipstick and thick peach make-up, already preparing to be a Pasadena Rose Princess which she actually became a few years later. We regular girls watched every move and hated her with all our might.
The thumbnail sketch had to be done by the end of the week said Mr. Jones/Johnson/Green or White.
What could I possibly write about thumbnails? I'd just stopped biting mine, but there didn't seem to be much to say about that except that my mother had to find something new to nag me about.
There was the old woman who lived behind the Jorgensen Steel annex up by Century Boulevard two blocks away with thumbnails long enough to trap spiders. Kids said that when she cut them, she saved them in Prince Albert tobacco tins. Bobby Knudsen had sneaked up to the shed that she lived in and had seen the cans. He reported there was so much dirt caked under her nails that she had to use garden clippers to cut them.
She'd walk through our track-house neighborhood stepping on any ants that crossed her path. Montarra, Tascadero, Seminola, Tenaya, each street, her killing ground. Sometimes she seemed almost to dance on those grey squares of sidewalk, left foot forward, toe pointing: stomp, crush, grind... stomp, crush, grind.
And if one got away, she'd reach down, pick it up, roll it to death between her gnarly thick thumbs and toss it in a wide arc over her head.
Now none of the kids in the neighborhood cared much about ants. Big red ants were despised, but we felt sorry for the scurrying creatures when that smelly woman was out on her warpaths. We always crossed the street as she approached with her smell of rancid automotive oil and farts. Bonnie Watson would tell stories about her when she and I walked home together from the Tweedy Boulevard bus stop. Bonnie was sure she had once been a famous ballet dancer. She could make up and write stories just about anything. It was Bonnie who told me to take the journalism class and so I decided I would write about the old crone, throwing in a few extras that Bonnie had made up.
At the end of the week, I handed in five pages carefully re-copied using my favorite Wearever fountain pen.
I didn't get an A, but Mr.------ said it was the first thumbnail sketch about thumbnails he'd ever gotten and tacked it up, all five pages side by side on the bulletin board under the American flag. Then he sent me to the library on the third floor to check out the collected poems of William Carlos Williams and to find the one called, "The Last Words of My English Grandmother." It's the one that begins:
There were some dirty plates
and a glass of milk
beside her on a small table
near the rank, disheveled bed...