He Wasn’t Even White!

You were 6 years old the last time you saw me. You won‘t remember where, but you can try. Okay, I’ll tell you: it was in the hallway of your grandmother’s old house, the house with the one weird plywood wall, the one painted a vomitly pale green. You don’t remember the picture hanging on that wall because you never looked at me. I was boring. I was dark. And I was really just a blur, the whole hallway was. Your grandmother had a great big rickety wooden bed you would jump on, trying to touch the ceiling fan with your fingers, until the fan just about chopped them off, and you ran down the hall to your grandmother’s kitchen in your fuzzy socks, crying. This is the only time you ever saw me, the painting in the hall, because your grandmother took me down the next week, the same time she hauled the ceiling fan off to the dump. But if you ever looked closely, you would see I’m really just a cheap 16-inch reproduction of a some European artist’s European, blue-eyed Jesus, originally oil on wood, now printer ink on poster board. I really don‘t look much like the guy at all. But I remind you of him. And when you see me again in the back of a dusty thrift store, sandwiched between a Norman Rockwell and a crude watercolor dolphin done by someone‘s Aunt Terry, you’ll know me. When you see me in the little boy’s room room at the dentist’s office, you’ll know me. And when you see the real thing someday— not the version of me that’s hanging in the museum, no, not the original— the man himself, you’ll see him and you‘ll think, “Well, by George, the picture really look nothing like him at all, but I can see what they were going for!”