On hot afternoons, long before television and air conditioned homes, we’d dig out the left-over school supplies and play “School” on the shady screened-in front porch. The list of required school supplies for kindergarten students always included those little blunt-nosed scissors. They were difficult to use (impossible for lefties) and I still marvel that any of us mastered that all-important Cut-and-Paste requirement of our early education. Long before the advent of glue sticks, paste was provided by the teacher in the form of mint-scented library paste served up on little squares of paper with a thin wooden paddle for spreading.

By second grade, we were to be trusted with slightly sharper and more pointed scissors that allowed for more efficient cutting-out of printed shapes, and our pale amber mucilage came in glass bottles with an ingenious rubber cap that, when pressed against the paper, opened a slit, allowing a small amount of the sticky liquid to be released and spread about. Still, like the library paste, the glue dried out with age and was far from permanent. Elmer’s magical adhesive, as we know it today, wouldn’t appear in its familiar plastic squeeze-bottle until around 1953, when it had evolved from an invention of the Borden Company in 1947, at that time, sold in glass bottles accompanied by a Popsicle-stick-like spreader for application.

During my elementary school years, art classes were rare and considered to be non-essential “frills” at best, or simply a pleasant activity to keep students occupied on Friday afternoons when all lessons had been completed ahead of schedule. Art-like activities, such as cutting out silhouettes of Washington and Lincoln during February, were part of history lessons, not artistic endeavors. Most so-called art lessons served purposes other than creativity as in the following rather painful example from my third grade memories:

Miss Kaiding gave us large sheets of blue construction paper and sticks of white chalk and instructed us to draw winter landscapes with trees, fences and buildings laden with snow. I drew a house and barn with snow-covered roofs, surrounded by clusters of snowy evergreen trees and fences with snow-capped fence posts. My picture seemed disappointingly grim, frigid, unlike the warm, happy life that I knew went on inside my grandparents’ farm house in wintertime. To make my drawing more pleasant, I added a few strokes of green peeking from under the snow on the tree branches, then a touch of rusty red on the sides of the barn. I added pink curtains showing in the windows of the house and a red brick chimney protruding through the snow on the roof.

I was proud of my winter landscape. The touches of color added interest and hinted that people were in the house, warm and safe from the cold winter weather. It gave the picture a cozy feeling and let me imagine animals content in the barn and birds sheltering under the tree branches.

The pictures were to be displayed on a large bulletin-board in the school’s main hallway on Parents’ Night, where all visiting parents would see them, not just my parents and those of my classmates. When the evening finally arrived, I led my parents to the display to point out my drawing. It wasn’t there. I told the teacher that my drawing must have been misplaced and she explained that the picture was safe in my file of things that would be given to me at the end of the semester. When I asked why it had not been displayed with the others, she explained that it did not “go along” with the other drawings. “Why?” I persisted. “You didn’t follow directions,” she explained. “You were supposed to use just chalk.” It was years before I accepted that the ‘art lesson’ hadn’t been about art at all. Nothing to do with creativity, it had been a lesson in conformity, in following directions.

I sometimes still make art on hot summer afternoons, but my scissors are sharp, my glue is permanent, the air conditioning hums efficiently and nobody dictates subject or how I do it.