You had to give it to the young Michael Dunbar.
He had a healthy sense of resolve.
He got his calendar of great men, but only after enlisting his mother to help him find the requisite twenty-four women—including Adelle herself, who he said was the world’s greatest typist.
It had taken a few days, and a pile of encyclopedias, but they found the world-changing women easily:
Marie Curie, Mother Teresa.
The Brontë sisters.
(“Does that count as three?”)
Ella Fitzgerald.
Mary Magdalene!
The list was endless.
Then again, he was eight, and sexist as any young boy could be; only the men made it to his bedroom. Only the men were hung on the wall.
* * *
—
But still, I have to admit it.
It was nice, in a strange kind of way—a boy living a real life to a sweaty town’s ticking clock, but also having another time frame, where the closest thing he had to a father was a paper trail of some of the greatest figures in history. If nothing else, those men, over the years, would make him curious.
At eleven, he got to know Albert Einstein, he looked him up. He learned nothing about the theory of relativity (he just knew it was genius), but he loved the old guy with the electric hair, poking his tongue out, midpage, of the calendar. At twelve, he’d go to bed and imagine himself training at altitude with Emil Zátopek, the legendary Czech long-distance runner. At thirteen, he wondered at Beethoven in his later years, not hearing a note he played.
And then—at fourteen:
The real breakthrough came, early December, taking the booklet from the nail.
A few minutes later, he sat down with it.
A few minutes later again, he was still staring.
“My God.”
In previous years, on this last page of the calendar, he’d looked at the Giant, better known as Il David, or the statue of David, many mornings, many nights—but for the first time now, he saw it. He decided instantly with whom his true loyalties lay. By the time he stood again, he couldn’t even be sure how long he’d been there, watching the expression on David’s face—a statue in the grip of decision. Determined. Afraid.
There was also a smaller picture in the corner. The Creation of Adam, from the Sistine Chapel. The curvature of the ceiling.
Again, he said it.
“My God…”
How could someone create such things?
* * *
—
He borrowed books then, and there was a grand total of three titles on Michelangelo in the Featherton public and high school libraries combined. The first time he read them one by one, then a couple simultaneously. He read them each night, with his lamp burning long into the morning. His next goal was to trace some of the work, then memorize it, and draw it again.
Sometimes he wondered why he felt like this.