Sometimes we don't recognize what we have. This drawing that Taylor brought home from school this week, for instance -- it's good. It's very good. Not just good for a third-grader. Good.

No, I'm not prepared to discuss "the good." Not today, and probably not ever. And if I do, the occasion will probably arise accidentally and the expression will be oblique.

I'm just in awe of him, of all my kids, really.

To carry this drawing home from school, he folded it in half to fit it into his backpack for the walk home, without regard for its worth. I wonder if the making of this picture came to him easily (as so many other things do) or with difficulty. I can't possibly know. Serious play, I suspect.

Whatever the case is, he has already enjoyed the process, he has seen the virtues and defects of his work, he has decided what he's done is enough and he has gone on to other things -- bombing stray ants with a basketball, or perfecting his landing on a forward flip on the trampoline, for instance. Whatever my opinion of his drawing might be, he doesn't need to revisit his work or show it off.

Consider the example of folks who host a truly fine meal, cooking and cleaning all day to create something special for the guests, but who themselves barely touch the meal at table. They've had their fill of it, and the nibbles they took while cooking either have satisfied the hunger, or have proven unequal to it. A poem, a painting, a drawing, a sculpture, a photo well conceived, any act of imagination is never finished; it's simply abandoned. And so much about those creative acts is accidental or serendipitous, particularly their endings.

Lately, I've been playing with pictures more than I've been playing with words, something I would not be likely to do if I had to do it by hand rather than with the computer. No thing I've bought in a long time has given me as much pleasure as the digital camera has. And I bought it on a whim -- an expensive whim, but a whim. It has helped to feed my right brain, providing fingerpaints to smear and clay to roll into snakes, nothing more complicated than that. But it has been a serious kind of play brought on by the notion (false, I think) that there is some standard to achieve. And if I were to roll the perfect snake, failing to recognize it, I would probably use it as a spider's leg, joining it to the perfectly rolled clay ball, creating something that is less than the sum of its parts.

Someone whose own work I enjoy and respect wrote me this week to express appreciation for some of these pages and for some photos I had taken. That doesn't happen often, and it doesn't have to. Taking a lesson from Taylor, I would be as content with the making of these pages if they weren't public (in fact, they were private for more months than they've been public), so when someone thanks me for something I've enjoyed doing for itself, that expression of appreciation is a bonus.

I'll make no great point here. I'm just having a few good (but maudlin) moments, I guess. It's spring, the kids thrive, and green onions from the garden flavor the fried rice I made for lunch today.

Life is good. I recognize that.

Reading:
Guns and Boyhood in America: A Memoir of Growing up in the 50s, Jonathan Holden