Jon Mark

When I was five years old, my kindergarten teacher told my mom that I was “retarded.” Looking back, I can’t say I was surprised. I was the kind of kid who would stand on a train track and watch the train come straight toward me without the instinct to move. When people spoke to me, I would look at them without really listening—like a puppy staring at its owner. I could hear the words, even recognize them, but I couldn’t quite string them together into meaning. When the teacher told my mom her opinion, my mom simply replied, “No, he’s not.” She had seen something different in me. She knew I could sit in front of a device, take it apart, and try to reassemble it. I would disassemble my action figures and put them back together as strange, mutated creations. These things had something in common: I would shut out the world and disappear into the creative caverns of my mind. I went on to live a somewhat normal life, but I never lost the ability to retreat into that creative cavern. The only difference is that now, instead of breaking things apart, I make art. And when I’m in that process, the nostalgic fog descends, and the rest of the world simply fades away.