I have not bothered to wear eye makeup this week. It’s not due to the global state of quarantine that renders my face from flesh to pixels whenever I need to socialize. I don’t care if my closest friends and family see me sans mascara via video chat. It’s because I will only cry it off.
This past Monday, my family said goodbye to our beloved dog, Quincy.
Quincy, or Freckle Boy as I christened him upon our first meeting at his breeder’s home in Springfield, MO was my constant companion (if not in physical presence, then via weekly video chats with my parents) for more than half my life. Now, he lives on not just in the myriad photographs tucked in and about my childhood home in St. Louis, and stuck to my refrigerator here in Des Moines, but in my many sketchbooks and countless middle and high school art projects.
“His long, freckled nose and pointed tail remained unmistakable.”
His elegant long legs and narrow face held not only a physical resemblance to my family, but provided me with endless inspiration for my illustrations. I have loved drawing animals ever since I was old enough to hold a crayon. But Quincy, he became a character worthy of his own comic strip (really!), the first thing I’d doodle on the edge of a notebook, the star of countless birthday and Christmas cards. Certainly, as I drew, his style developed, but his long, freckled nose and pointed tail remained unmistakable.
A whippet has yet to make a debut in one of my children’s books, but I imagine Quincy would enjoy (read: would like to sink his teeth into) the star of my current story project, Theodore, a striped stuffed animal bunny, not unlike the many toys he ‘borrowed’ from my bedroom since I moved out for college.
Drawing, of all things since the beginning of the Corona virus crisis (now amplified by unrelated, though by no means less acutely felt loss) has been my constant. It’s the reason I get out of bed in the morning and what I put myself to sleep thinking about at night.
Perhaps I should add a few teeth marks to Theodore’s penciled plush.
