Polishing brass, spit-shining shoes, scrubbing pots and pans, mopping floors; being a teenager attending a military high school wasn't how I thought it would be. A Catholic Military school, at that.
Priests and brothers were going to help me to find my way to adulthood, and a place in the world. Feeding cards into a computer, taking the innards out of frogs, knowing what elements the earth was made of, this was the knowledge I needed to get to adulthood. I had other ideas - like drawing girlfriends of my classmates for a few dollars and doing the scenery for the school play, or writing suggestive reasons why Jack chased Jill up the hill. Painting and writing were talents I had. I was more inclined toward painting than the writing though.
A penny a minute is what I got for scrubbing pots and pans and mopping the cafeteria floor. Days were long, back in my teens. Summers were the same - only adding the task of unloading boxes of food from semi trucks for the coming school year. No proms or homecoming games for me. My grades weren't good enough and I would have to pay for any schooling after high school, so work, work, work.
Drawing pretty girls and painting sunflowers kept the embers of art alive in me in those days. It was also a way to earn a few dollars toward my future.
