Il Perfectionista Del Patio

We had a car-purge this morning, to make room for some baby-furniture transport in the mini-van for a future nephew or niece with a fast-approaching ETA. This meant a grand influx of all kinds of fun stuff from the car, which accumulated since the last car-purge (I don't remember when). Car-purges, or any other clean-up of neglected space, is a bit like a shopping-spree for amnesiacs; you never knew how much great stuff you had until you rounded it up. Daniel was the prime beneficiary of this bounty, appropriating a package of sidewalk chalk.

In short order, he was out on the walkway in front of our porch, hard at work. Daniel is a very talented artist; I'm not exaggerating when I say that he, at six, is about as good - perhaps better - than me at olde-olde-olde (so old there's an e at the ende of the worde, as in Shakespeare, Chaucer or Wordsworth). Yes - he's a good artist. But very quickly, he was back in the house, asking for water to wash away his opus. I filled a metal bowl with water and carried it out for him, but I was sorry to see that he was about to obliterate a very nice picture of an anthropomorphic sunshine, complete with eyes and a mouth. I asked him why he wanted to get rid of it:

"Yeah, because his lips look a little like a girl, and I don't really want him to look like a girl."

Sure enough, he had lips worthy of Carly Simon. I don't know that it was unmanly of Mr. Sunshine to have big lips, but I do know that if he were a girl, he would have many boy-sunshines interested in him (or her, in this case) for the lips alone. Kind of a solar Angelina Jolie - except that this sunshine was "born" with them... Great lips - but maybe better on a girl.

In any case, I was sorry to see the entire masterpiece obliterated all because of a plush pair of lips. I figure, if Angie could have surgery (as I suspect she did), so could Mr. Sunshine, without destroying the beautiful frame hosting the lips. But that's just my opinion, and I dropped out of drawing class half-way through the year in ninth grade, and never made any real attempt subsequently to portray physical reality in two dimensions, without Kodak or pixels. Daniel is the true artist, and artists are opinionated and temperamental.

I won't question the master.

(February 3, 2012)