The six-year-old is taking art classes at Laguna Gloria. I love dropping him off because while he’s in class, the 3-year-old and I get to explore the grounds. (An older dad told me years ago how important it is to split your kids up once in a while and go on little one-on-one “dates” together.) Yesterday the 3-year-old was having some serious separation anxiety (my wife is out of town), so I put some paper down on the stone ledge around the tiny koi pond and told him to draw the plants. This is what he drew.
Our portion of the infinite
This morning we debated whether to walk out in the rain or stay in the house with the boys. We chose the rain and were rewarded.
It’s almost spooky how many days my daily reading of Thoreau’s journal syncs up perfectly with my mood. (As he wrote, we receive what we’re ready to receive.) September 7, 1851:
We are receiving our portion of the infinite… I do not so much wish to know how to economize time as how to spend it.
The scenery, when it is truly seen, reacts on the life of the seer. How to live. How to get the most life. How to extract its honey from the flower of the world. That is my every-day business….
I am convinced that men are not well employed, that this is not the way to spend a day. If by patience, if by watching, I can secure one new ray of light, can feel myself elevated for an instant… shall I not be a watchman henceforth?
Always drawing
I took this photo of our 3-year-old’s setup in our hotel room in Chicago. (I had to run to the local Target after two days to buy a new ream of paper.)
Here’s half a day’s worth of drawings on our kitchen floor. My wife sweeps them all up into a big pile at the end of the day.
As I’ve mentioned previously, the 3-year-old loves drawing skeletons, but refuses to watch Coco. He still refuses to watch it, but he’s now discovered the Coco coloring book, so many of his skeletons now play guitar. (I’m reminded, now, of the genius of merchandising: hook ’em through coloring books first…)
He does this new thing where when he makes a particularly good line, he’ll stand back and pull his arms to his side and just shake in excitement. It’s infectious, watching a tiny person draw this much. And humbling. Back to work, papa.
Unread and irrelevant
I posted one of my favorite Ron Padgett poems on Twitter a few days ago and a man I don’t follow went out of his way to tell me that I was “unread” and “obviously haven’t read much poetry” because “Padgett is irrelevant.” He then tweeted me a half dozen long, presumably more important poems, most of them from poets I’d heard of, but none that I bothered to read.
Several times a day I want to put a pixelated arm around a digital stranger and say, “My god, who did this to you? Who gave you these bad ideas? You know it doesn’t have to be this way, right? This way you’re thinking… it’s not really real. Come over here and take a seat. Here is the land where we read whatever we want and we like what we like and we don’t tweet nastiness to strangers. Have some punch and a cookie. Do you feel better?”
The season of lies
Back home after two weeks on the road with the kids. No new epiphanies, only fortified beliefs:
1. Traveling with young children is not a “vacation” it is a “trip.”
The sooner you understand and accept this the sooner you can lower your expectations accordingly. My kids are, I think, wonderful travelers, and even so, traveling with them is beyond exhausting.
2. Photos can say whatever we want them to say.
Instagram lies. If you follow me on Instagram, it probably looked like I was having the time of my life. Nope! There was a lot of eye candy to be had, but a large majority of the trip was pretty miserable.
I found myself thinking a lot about Errol Morris’s book, Believing Is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography, and how he summarized it in these handy 8 points:
- All photographs are posed.
- The intentions of the photographer are not recorded in a photographic image. (You can imagine what they are, but it’s pure speculation.)
- Photographs are neither true nor false. (They have no truth-value.)
- False beliefs adhere to photographs like flies to flypaper.
- There is a causal connection between a photograph and what it is a photograph of. (Even photoshopped images.)
- Uncovering the relationship between a photograph and reality is no easy matter.
- Most people don’t care about this and prefer to speculate about what they beleive about a photograph.
- The more famous a photograph is, the more likely it is that people will claim it has been posed or faked.
If you’re sitting around this summer scrolling Instagram seething with jealousy over vacation photos, remember what Mary Karr says: “Don’t make the mistake of comparing your twisted-up insides to people’s blow-dried outsides.” You have no idea what kind of time anybody’s having. Images are nothing without context.
If you love summer and summer vacation, I’m happy for you. For me, it’s the season of lies. Best to pour some iced tea, crack a book, and wait for it to pass.
(Happy to be back, BTW. Will write a more upbeat post tomorrow!)
- ← Newer posts
- 1
- …
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11
- Older posts→