"come back right here & we'll talk more"

In 1999, I lived in Guadalajara, Mexico for 6 months and taught art at an elementary school.  At the time, ZBOOK was just shy of 4 years old.  A couple months into my stay, J flew down for an awesome visit and hand delivered ZBOOK into my care for the next round.  Barely anyone had seen ZBOOK by this time; it wasn't something that we widely shared during those years.  We coveted it like the precious personal gem that it was.  

Well, one day at school the next week, I was spending my lunch hour in the school yard where my 2nd grade students had their recess.  As always, I pulled out my journal to draw or write or whatever, and on this day I also pulled out ZBOOK, which when in my procession I always had with me as well.  "Ms. Ceci! what IS thAT?" one of my students suddenly said as she appeared at my side.  "Oh, well, this is Z BOOK," I said.  A few more girls ran up and soon I had a group of them all around me with bewildered eyes.  I felt at once a calming and beautiful trust come over me.  This was a knowing that I could share ZBOOK with them and that it would be a delight.  As the girls circled around me, I told them about my dear friend Jennifer, how we met in school doing art, how we knew from the first day we connected that there was something crazy good going on and that we must create together, how we decided to begin a journal together to play and document in, and how we had been exchanging and creating this book for almost 4 years, and counting.  All this while I leafed through ZBOOK showing them the pages of drawings, words, cut out stuff, found stuff, and of course, stickers :)  Fireworks of questions and comments and ideas flurried forth from these 7 yr olds and our dialogues began to take the shape of animated paintings rather than conversations.  

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Throughout the next week I would pull out ZBOOK during lunch/recess and explore it in depth with these wonderful girls, many times one on one as they would individually take a breather from their yard play.  I began to scribe some of the things that they would say along the inner spine seams of the page-spreads.  Many of these quotes were first written on pages that were empty at the time, and the pages grew around them.  I would just randomly open the book to write these (as both J and I so often do with words in our books).  

On this page ("swell") I think there were only the small pen line drawings of the interlinked circles and triangles, when I wrote on it what little Angela said one day. The bell had chimed to end recess, right in the middle of a colorful exchange we were having about making drawings with friends.   As she got up to get in line for class I said "how about next recess?" and she said with a smile, in her excellent English, "come back right here & we'll talk more."   "Okay, Angelita, right here."  :)

∞ ceci

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