Ceiling is Believing

I learned at a young age that the drive to create can transcend words.

Oct 27, 2025

There I was: baffled, bamboozled, befuddled and bewildered.

For about the fifth time in only a few minutes, the same word kept popping up in my mind, and I had absolutely no clue what the hell it meant:

Canvas.

Although it was just after 11:00 in the morning on a balmy Burbank day in June 1980, I was still in bed, pondering my immediate future. I rolled onto my left side and, clutching onto a large corduroy body pillow, gazed at a brand-new, glossy poster of Magic Johnson, the NBA rookie who, just one month earlier, had led the Los Angeles Lakers to their first championship since 1972. In the image, Magic was following through on one of his trademark no-look passes, the ball headed toward an unseen teammate. The aptly-named Magic Man transcended the game itself, by performing jaw-dropping, never-before-seen moves on a nightly basis.

Millions called the 6’9” point guard a true artist on the court.

I rolled onto my back and took in my 12-by-12 bedroom: at the three walls painted sky blue, the fourth wallpapered in a brilliant tropical sunset; at the silver cassette tape deck wired to two massive Kenwood speakers; at Brutus, my tough, perpetually under-watered spider plant. I stretched and, while gazing up at the ceiling, pondered climbing out of bed.

And there it was, that random word again, like an annoying pebble in one of my size-14 Converse All-Stars:

Canvas.

I’d just returned from a year at San Diego State, where I’d majored in psychology and minored in frat parties (with the requisite liver abuse), aimless channel surfing, and solo evenings twiddling my thumbs at the local McDonald’s: anything to avoid, God forbid, cracking open a textbook. Given how things had transpired – a 0.0 GPA the previous fall, thanks to my brilliant idea to stop attending classes without actually dropping them, followed by a bland, half-hearted 4.0 spring semester, when I actually bothered to show up – I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be returning to the university following September.

Feeling rudderless at the ripe old age of 21, I had no idea what to do with my life. My future, five minutes or five decades hence, seemed to be as blank as the ceiling that was staring me in the face.

Canvas.

That’s when it hit me. The ceiling.

A canvas. A blank canvas …

As a kid in the early ’70s, I’d spent hours at a time creating string-art designs, dizzying geometric patterns formed by weaving colored thread back and forth between nails fastened onto wooden or foam boards. Although I wasn’t aware of any artistic talent – my one year of piano lessons had been about as blissful as a colonoscopy, and I couldn’t draw a stick figure for the life of me – I loved witnessing the whimsically symmetrical magic that unfolded, and the easy, rhythmic meditative state that always followed, whenever I played with string.

Then I had an insane idea: Why not do a giant string design … on my ceiling?

Right away, my overactive mind, the source of that one-word inspiration, canvas, soon followed with something less encouraging.

What are you, a whack job? String art? On a ceiling?

I decided to engage my inner critic with an eloquent, dare I say long-winded, argument.

“Bite me,” I said aloud.

And with that, the defense rested.

Still on my back, I began to envision a series of colorful concentric circles, essentially a massive Spirograph design (remember those?) poised eight feet above the carpeting.

My brain went into overdrive. What would I use for the string? How much was needed? And what colors? And how the hell would I fasten it to the ceiling?

Then there was the layout itself: How to pinpoint the exact center of the room, the planned center of the concentric circles? How to calculate the exact placement of the pins, those critical pivot points, to create a perfectly symmetrical series of circles?

To my pleasant surprise, the answers manifested without effort. Still gazing up at the ceiling, now completely enraptured by the blank canvas, the design swiftly came together in my mind’s eye, vibrant lines flashing back and forth at light speed between the pivot points, like the computer-generated animations that came into the world a few years later.

And my malaise lifted completely.

Next stop: Beautifully Yours, Burbank’s arts and crafts store. It was surely the first time the store’s friendly staffer helped a testosterone-jacked 21-year-old male find … crochet yarn, of all things, my chosen medium. As for the pivot points, which held everything together, upside down no less: “Why not just try thumb tacks?” she suggested. Problem solved.

An hour later, I stood in my bedroom, neck craned upward. Sixteen bundles of the yarn, each one coiled together like kite string; 300 thumb tacks; and a tape measure sat at my feet. A smile was plastered on my face when my father stopped at the doorway after a day at work.

“What’s going on?” he asked, removing his tie.

“I got an idea,” I replied.

“What’s with all that?” he inquired in his Bronx accent, nodding toward the recently purchased items.

“I want to do a string design.”

“A what?”

“A string design, Dad. You know, I did those as a kid.”

“Where?” he said, glancing around the room.

“There,” I said, jabbing a thumb at the ceiling as my smile morphed into a giddy, full-blown grin.

My father, a logical, linear sales engineer who took to anything even remotely associated with art the same way a feral tomcat takes to a hot tub, looked at me, pursed his lips slightly and shook his head in dismay ...

… or maybe it was pity.

“I don’t understand, Larry.”

“Dad, neither do I.”

I didn’t need to explain myself, for by then my obsession to create this kaleidoscopic pattern, though not fully formed in my mind, had fully embraced my soul.

Shaking his head and sighing, my dad ended the conversation with words I’d heard many times before: “Kid, I think you’re nuts.”

But he also threw me a bone, adding, “But what do I know? Knock yourself out,” before shrugging and heading into the family room.

I could go into all the ~~scintillating, mind-blowing, history-making~~ boring details outlining how the string design, a full 10 feet in diameter, took shape. Let’s just say that any high-schooler who’d made it through Geometry 101 without slipping into a coma could’ve done the same thing.

But, to the best of my knowledge, nobody ever had.

This 10-foot-diameter design, completed last summer, mirrors the work done back in 1980. (It kills me that I never took photos of the original.)

The following afternoon, a Saturday, I was cleaning up the remaining string fragments and putting away all the scattered thumb tacks when my dad tapped on the door, and, cracking it open a bit, asked me if I’d like to join him down at the local park for an hour or so of pickup basketball.

“Come on in,” I said.

“Larry, you wanna – ”

Then he looked up at the ceiling.

“Jesus, Lar.”

“What do you think?”

Never one to sing high praise, the ol’ fella surprised me with, “Wow. That’s amazing.”

Then Dad hit me with a question, the exact same question every person has asked me in the 45 years since, whenever they see one of my ceiling designs in person:

“How long did that take you?!”

“The math, not long at all,” I said. “To set the tacks just right, maybe three hours. And to weave the design, about another five.”

In 1980, those eight hours seemed like just ten minutes … of pure bliss. And, in the decades since, that’s never changed.

That old string design stayed ceiling-bound until August of 2019, six years after my father left this mortal coil and one week before my mother left her home for the final time, to move to an independent-living senior community. As I removed the thumb tacks and all that string began to sag toward the floor, like a tired weeping willow, I recalled the many times my father enjoyed showing friends, family and coworkers my work.

“Come here,” he’d say in rarely displayed enthusiasm, gesturing toward my old room. “You won’t believe this. Look up. That’s something, right?”

When my father first questioned the wisdom of trying something this unusual, I knew at a core, elemental level that trying to explain myself would’ve been an exercise in frustration. Even at such a young age, I must’ve understood that the finished product would transcend mere words.

And it did.

As I pulled the final thumb tack from the ceiling and the rest of the colorful crochet yarn collapsed to the floor, I sighed and glanced across the room at that old, now-frayed poster of Magic Johnson, plying his craft.

Yes sir, I thought to myself, the Magic Man was a true artist.

But maybe, just maybe, so am I …

High-fives to friends in our Write Hearted community – Linda Kaun, Kathy Ayers, Alden Cox and Rick Lewis – for their valuable input and encouragement while this essay was being strung together.