A Portrait of the Artists?

Many, many parents think their kids are geniuses. Some of them are right, some of them are dead-wrong and some of them work hard to deceive themselves that Einstein eats Cinnamon Toast Crunch at their breakfast table: "I know he fails everything, but I believe this happens because he is not challenged enough. So he needs to be in all the top classes, even though he has a test average of 6."

The bottom line is, we parents all want our kids to succeed and we tend to project possible glorious futures for them. I have my own opinions about my own kids, but I am not going to write a proud dad piece here. But I do think it is interesting that, for the first time with both of them, I saw real evidence that they might carry on in their dad's creative footsteps. (Let's face it -- I can't completely avoid the proud dad thing, here [puts thumbs behind suspenders; bounces up and down on toes].)

Fabio and the Goose

In writing an article for When Falls the Coliseum last week, my often wayward brain had occasion to reference an event that occurred in 1999: the injury of legendary romance-novel cover model, Fabio. This, to me, was, at once, perhaps the most philosophically profound, the funniest and most ironic event in the history of the world (the injury of Fabio, not the publication of my article). Within this event lies all of the profundity of the questions of fate and Creation.

But, damn it, I can't seem to get anyone else to see it. In the attempt, I have annoyed the ones I love and estranged the ones who merely tolerate me. I have even caused a few people to move seats on the train.

Here's what happened:

Graffiti Girl

Yesterday, as I was driving home from work and enjoying the cool, sun-scented wind through the opened windows of my car, I saw a girl in the distance. She was standing at the base of a billboard. She was busy, but I couldn't tell what with.

As I got closer, I saw that she was a young woman, clad in pretty, young-womanly clothes -- summer clothes. Her feet were bare and her copper-red hair was long, copious and partially pulled back with a lime-green ribbon. She looked like the nicest girl in her class -- maybe an honors student; maybe the valedictorian.

The End of an Argument (A Dialogue)

Setting: An abandoned farmhouse.

At rise: Two men enter, sit at opposite sides of a table, upon old crates, and look at each other for a long time before speaking.

Man 1: What do you have to say, today?

Man 2: The same thing as yesterday.

Man 1: Then, don't bother.

Man 2: Why are we here, then?

Man 1: To talk again.

Man 2: To argue again. What do you think will happen?

The Quenching of a Thought

Poets have been seeing and commenting on this sort of thing for centuries, so there's not a lot of originality forthcoming in this one. But, sometimes, you really see something and that moment tempers a thought like it's a red-hot sword being plunged into the smith's water barrel and that thought becomes yours, bright, sharp and at the ready for the rest of your life, no matter how small or how great it might be.

I'm not talking about a mere epiphany. Epiphanies can be forgotten about. This is something more permanent.