Only the nose knows

In fourth grade I sat next to this girl named “Lucinda.” I’m giving her an alias so that I may mock her gleefully.

Lucinda loved my cartoons. While the other kids in class were hard at work practicing their penmanship and perfecting the ultimate spitball, I drew cartoon characters with grotesquely exaggerated features -- drooping eyes the size of bowling balls, mouths that could chomp the legs off a meerkat. One day, as I was toiling over various creations, I concocted a character with a nose so outlandishly huge it could double as a flotation device in the event of a transatlantic plane crash. It was shaped like a bratwurst and boasted a set of nostrils that dwarfed the wintertime dwellings of hibernating black bears.

At the time I had no idea that I’d still be drawing him a quarter century later.

Looking back, I have Lucinda’s obliviousness to thank for this. She wasn’t what you would call the swiftest boat in the fleet. Every day I would doodle and sketch an assemblage of random faces, horrid monstrosities who looked as though they had mutated in a vat of radioactive sludge. Every day Lucinda would glance at my notebook and ask, “What’s this character’s name? What’s that character’s name?” Always with the vapid stare of a lobotomy patient.

None of them had names. I told her this repeatedly. They were random, I insisted, nothing more than stream-of-consciousness distilled in pictorial form. She never internalized this information. As an overweight child with Coke-bottle glasses and a high-pitched squeal of a voice, I should have been thankful for any female attention I could get; even then it was clear my most trusted companions throughout adolescence would be a Nintendo controller and a bag of fun-sized Three Musketeers bars. But my nerves were starting to fray, Lucinda’s golden locks be damned.

So when I drew my big-nosed goofball and she asked me what his name was, I studied my sketch for a second.

“Nerdy Nose,” I said. “His name is Nerdy Nose.”

It was an easy enough name to conjure, if a little uncreative. He was nerdy-looking and he had a big nose. Nerdy Nose. Simple. As a naming strategy it had all the sophistication of looking at a crimson-bottomed snow monkey and calling it “Red Butt.” I spat it out primarily to get Lucinda off my back, but something strange and a little miraculous happened: It stuck. The simple act of naming him -- combined with his unique look -- gave him a kind of life, and before long I was getting requests from classmates to draw Nerdy Nose on brown-bag book covers, on notebooks, on soapy-smelling forearms. I felt like a rockstar, only I wasn’t riding a cocaine high and biting the head off a bat.

I still draw Nerdy Nose to this day, and with some regularity. He turns 25 this year.

Image drawn in Mario Paint, 'cause I'm that good.

Curious how we often define ourselves by our creations. Not that I would ever compare Nerdy Nose to iconic cartoon characters like Bugs Bunny or Scrooge McDuck, but surely they’ve become an everlasting part of the illustrators who drew them. Matt Groening will forever be trailed by the shadow of Homer Simpson; Jim Davis and Garfield are as interconnected as a parent to his or her child. Orson Welles has become synonymous with “Citizen Kane,” Michelangelo with the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. At some point the creator and the creation become indistinguishable.

This isn’t something that’s limited just to traditional “art,” either. Maybe you build a house and come to think of it as your baby. Maybe you rebuild the engine to a classic car, or are known throughout the community as a master knitter of epically awesome scarves. Whatever it is, there’s something in most human beings that needs to be externalized, made permanent. Corny as it sounds, I think it’s spurred by an innate sense of mortality. We want to leave a trace, carve “I was here” into the tree bark while we can still hold the knife.

The same subconscious drive that inspired cavemen to draw bison on rock walls also spurred Kool and the Gang to write “Jungle Boogie.” That’s some wild, wacky stuff.

On a remote island in Indonesia is a site called Maros, home to some of the earliest known cave paintings ever produced by human hands. They date back about 35,000 years. Not surprisingly, these paintings depict animals, which makes sense when you consider that animals and geological formations were about the only subject matter available at the time -- no teapots or cityscapes, no frilly dresses, no melting clocks. There’s no residual evidence suggesting that these were dwellings, which means the paintings were just kind of left there, like an “I was here” message scratched painstakingly into the wooden bench seat of a picnic table.

Given the available technology and creature comforts of the time, it’s hard to know what would constitute evidence of a “dwelling.” The decomposing shells of La-Z-Boy recliners? They wish. But if it’s true that the site is more art installation than abode, that means the yearning to make a mark is quite literally prehistoric.

Which in turn means that all of our little creations, our mittens and folk songs and Nerdy Noses and Tweety Birds, are part of a lineage that stretches back before recorded time.

Whoa. Think about that the next time you bang out a doodle of a talking cow.

I don’t expect to ever run into Lucinda again, but if I do, I’ll have to thank her for unwittingly inspiring my inner caveman; she may never know the role she played in spawning my own humble mascot. Annoying at the time, perhaps. But 25 years later, it sure seems worth it.