RATS! By Jerry Touger

HALLIE EPHRON: As most of you who've hung around this blog any amount of time know, my sweet husband, Jerry Touger, was a brilliant cartoonist.

He was never without a pencil or his weapon of choice: a BIC pen. And in a life filled with boring academic meetings, after completing the day's crossword puzzles in record (and recorded) time, he had ample opportunity to doodle. 

As far as I can tell, he never threw any of his doodles away. I love them all, and this leaves me with the onerous task of trying to figure out what to do with all of them.

I've scanned ALL the Christmas, New Years, Thanksgiving, birthday, Valentines Day, and Mother's Day cards he made for me and copied them onto flash drives for my daughters. 

Add to that a gazillion printed meeting agendas with doodles all around the edges, some are recognizable colleagues.

My favorites are the many miscellaneous drawings of highly opinionated rats. 

Why rats, you ask. Beats me. 

Today I'll share some of them with you... Largely his rats were dyspeptic, as this pair...

But they could also be graceful.

And affectionately parental, as in this Mother's Day card.

(One of his pet names for me was SMEDLEY. Why? Again I have no idea.)

He even illustrated his INTRODUCTORY PHYSICS text with cartoon rats 

Do you doodle? Have a loved one who does? I'm sure you agree those drawings are not only a precious legacy but a window to the soul. 

Jerry's was a goofy, sweet place. 

Do You Doodle?

RHYS BOWEN:  I am a compulsive doodler. When I'm listening to a lecture, taking notes at a seminar, waiting to board a plane or even plotting out the next scene in my books I doodle. Usually up the left hand margin of a page. I am told that what you doodle reveals a lot about your personality, and apparently you are more outgoing if you doodle on the right side. So I am a shrinking violet, as many of you know!

I flipped through old notebooks and found a fairly typical page of my doodles:

So what do they say about me? Well, first, I am quite a cheerful person. I'm not doodling graveyards or chainsaws, but birds and flowers. And the way my doodles all work is this. I start repeating a pattern until something emerges: I draw circles around circles until they remind me of an eye, then it turns into a bird or a person. I draw a shape, repeat it, and it becomes a flower. The other thing I like drawing is three dimensional shapes upon shapes. This is what I usually do when I am thinking hard.

I think any psychoanalyst could interpret those quite easily. I work on the germ of an idea until it makes sense to me. I try to find a pattern. I am creative. I like having fun.

So wondered if my fellow Reds might somehow be the same kind of doodlers. No way! Debs--who is still rushing around and speaking--says she only draws hearts. Well that's understandable too, isn't it? She has a big heart herself. Lucy says she doesn't doodle either.

And Hank says she always draws the same thing:

Again easy to interpret--she's on her way up! She's organized and forward thinking and has a plan!

But what about the other Reds? Any doodlers here?

HALLIE: I don’t doodle. Really I do not. Other than scratching holes in the paper if I don’t like what i hear. But my husband is a fabulous doodler.

>Here’s one of his, on the margin of a meeting agenda… a comment no doubt on the person who was speaking.

SUSAN: I don't doodle either — but like Hallie's husband, mine does, too. Here's one of his

It seems that Reds have very creative husbands! With great sense of humor.  I'd love to see what Ross doodles, Julia!

And how about you--do you doodle? Always the same thing? Fess up now!