The Lemoncholy Life of Annie Aster by Scott Wilbanks

She took a flash photo of me in mid-release-one that blinded me-and I missed my regrasp to the bar. I was warming up a series of release moves on high bar (you know, you let go of the bar, flip around twelve feet above the ground, regrab the high bar, and continue…) and didn’t notice the little girl with the camera standing to the side. It turns out that the head cold I caught on the flight, combined with jet lag, made for something of a lethal combination. Only five men and five women from the US Gymnastics Team were invited to participate.

I’d been touring Australia with the Chinese national gymnastics team, and had flown back to Baton Rouge, Louisiana for a competition called the Mardi Gras Invitational. Logic, unfortunately, doesn’t account for the caprice of life. My peculiar logic dictated that a gymnastics career would have a short shelf life, and I could always pick up a paintbrush when I’d retired. By then, I was so thoroughly infected with the gymnastics bug that I set art aside. Within a couple years, I’d risen to the rank of an elite gymnast, even winning a national title on my very first trip to the Junior National Championships. She signed me up for a class in the hope that it would help create a healthy outlet for my boundless energy, and I took to it like a duck to water. First it was acrylics, followed by watercolors, but it was oil painting that became my passion-a forgiving medium with vibrant colors-and one that I centered my life around until another hobby ate up all my time.Īgain, we go back to my mom. It shouldn’t come as any surprise, then, that my mom enrolled me in art classes. I’d sit in front of a piece of paper, meticulously duplicating an image from a magazine cover or some such. And while I played at full tilt, almost as if the objective was to finish whatever it was that I was doing as quickly as humanly possible, I could draw for hours. (A more cynical person might suspect it was an act of self preservation on her part.) Be that as it may, I had a knack. Maybe, just maybe, that’s why my mom encouraged it.

That is, until I’d pick up a piece of paper and a pencil.ĭrawing became a meditation garden within an inquisitive mind that lacked a power-off button, and the one thing that I could sit still for. Perpetual motion was my game, and from the look of things, I was determined to sprint through life. As a result, I’d be smacking tennis balls against the side of the house one minute, and racing down the street on my roller-skates the next. I just wanted to gobble up the world in a single sitting. Let’s be clear, it wasn’t so much that I was prone to boredom, but that I found so many things interesting.

I was relentlessly and tirelessly on the go. One week I was a piano-key-tinkling fiend, then a Pelé-in-the-making the next. I had a deplorably short attention span as a kid.

The Lemoncholy Life of Annie Aster by Scott Wilbanks