Coming Home to Houston and Losing My Mural

I came home this year to a place more different than any experience I’ve ever had of my city, Houston. Perhaps more accurately, things’ve definitely changed.

Many of my old friends are now graduated from college; one’s even made the down payment for his first home. I visited my high school alma mater, and discovered that the cafeteria in which I ate many of my meals was gutted – prepared for summer renovations and construction of new, better facilities for the school’s students. And when I came back to the house I grew up in, I found my backyard in chaos. Most surprisingly, the wall on which, as a child, I’d painted a mural of a garden scene for my mother was partially removed and repainted to make room for her newly installed French doors.

This discovery was most devastating.

Looking at the newly painted fraction of a wall, I recalled the Texas-hot summer days that I spent outside working on the mural at age thirteen. I first sketched the wall’s general dimensions on a drawing pad, and experimented with my vision’s coloration using my collection of colored pencils – many of different brands – that I kept in a red cardboard box, which I once used to store school supplies as a grade schooler. I then took a drawing pencil to the wall—a task that was somewhat nerve-racking, as I’d never before painted anything on that scale.

When I finally started to mix the different tones of paint, I took a second look at the small illustration I’d made on the drawing pad, and realized that I didn’t like it; it wasn’t nearly colorful enough. So I scrapped it.

I grabbed a few paintbrushes, chose one with a fairly broad end, and dipped opposing sides of the brush end in varying tones of brown. I made a long, wild vertical stroke with the brush, twisting it as I moved it, and stepped back. I had made the first stroke of the large tree that dominated much of the mural’s space. The end result was comprised of an amalgam of differently colored lines, waving and radiating in varying lengths and intensity—much like the moods, I’d say, of an hormonal thirteen-year-old boy.

This memory is one of my favorites. I remember the rush I felt when I first put my paintbrush to the house’s back wall, and markedly destroyed its immaculate paintjob. I remember thinking that the paint would never leave the wall, and that my wildly painted tribute to my mother had a certain immutable permanence, especially since it’d been painted on the outside of my house.

Smoking a cigarette and staring at the wall a couple days ago, I realized how much my spontaneity, risk-loving and love for creativity—aspects of who I am that informed my mural’s first stroke—are still alive in me.

Nine years later, things’ve changed, but all’s the same. That is, many of the physical remnants of my past are destroyed or altered beyond recognition, but the underlying spirit or essence of my defining characteristics, and my memories and values imbued in them remain a deep part of my life and personhood. There’s a certain immutability to personal history—a way that the transpiration of all events in one’s life can never change—that remains unshaken by the way things are in the present. As I look at the things in my life as they are now – in a constant state of flux – I wonder whether I’ll feel this way in a year, or five years, or ten years. I really don’t know; I guess I’ll just have to wait and see.