My high school art teacher emailed me back! I sent him a note last week - after 15 years of silence, he finally gets to hear that I made it...largely due to him. Some days when I am sketching and the graphite is in my nose and all over my hands, I think back to those days, the console stereo, the stacks of 50s magazines, drawings all over the walls, the model standing on a table with the yardstick, the Sex Pistols blaring away, my hands stained with a thousand mistakes. I almost feel like I can look up and see the practice field out the window, the first sun of spring coming in; my whole life is ahead of me and I have no reason to think it will be anything but happy. And it is.

(big smile)