Seth's blog entry about bunnies reminded me of something I had been meaning to post for a while but kept forgetting. This past weekend would have been the perfect time to post it.

What follows is the second-oldest drawing I ever made. I drew this on April 14, 1974. Easter Sunday. It's on the back side of a letter I wrote to my grandma at the age of 4-1/2 that she saved and returned to me a few years ago.

The most prominent feature is the two chimneys at the bottom center. For whatever reason I was obsessed with chimneys at that time and drew them frequently. If you follow the snoke that spews out of them you see that it all goes to the upper left corner. I am not entirely sure what is going on in that corner. The sun is present, but if you trace the lines of smoke, they all connect into some sort of rectangle. I do not know what that rectangle was supposed to represent. What I do know, though, is that additional lines pour out of that rectangle and flow right where they enter the TV antenna on the roof of the house I drew.

That was the house I lived in at the time, on the west side of Cambrian Way in Bremerton, WA. Note the flowers in the yard and the doghouse out back. My dog was a beagle named Popcorn who bit me one day so I put him in the trash bin so that the trash men could have him. Fortunately for the dog the neighbor lady saw me and ratted me out to my mom. I feel guilty about that to this day even though I was frikkin' four years old. :)

In the bottom right I drew the Solar System. The Sun is at center Mercury and Venus are in the upper left. Mars and its two moons, Phobos and Deimos, are in the upper center. Earth and The Moon are in the upper right. In the lower left we have Jupiter, then Saturn. In the lower right is Uranus. I evidently forgot to draw Neptune and Pluto. The little dots are the asteroids.

The other wide of this page is a private letter whose contents are between me and my Grandma. So there. :)

So what's the oldest surviving picture I drew? It is inside the back cover of my favorite book when I was a kid, My Brimful Book. The final section of that book contained animal stories. Two pages before the back cover was a page that contained only a picture of a bull. I wrote my own animal story on that page titled "Bulls". The text of the story read as follows:

"Bulls kill you."

The next page was totally blank so I drew a crude bird and wrote an animal story titled "Birds" that read as follows:

"Birds are lovely."

That sketch of the bird is my oldest surviving drawing, predating the Easter letter by about 2-3 months. I do not have it anymore, though, having given that book to my goddaughter a couple of Christmases ago.