Open Writing

There is nothing like "the holiday season" to shift a latent urge to create into action. Cuttings from bed sheets begin to curl around coat hanger skeletons, while white pipe cleaner circles hover over skewered Styrofoam heads. Wings, starched and sprayed within an inch of their ethereal lives, jut upward as stiff as protrusions on a Boeing 747.

A woman, thin-lipped and wild-eyed with chin embedded on upturned palms, kneels before her creation. "Help," she groans. "I can't do this." She unbends and waves an arm flecked with aerosol gold. "Help," she wails. "I can't figure this out. For God's sake, will someone please tell me... how far apart are an angel's eyes?"

Seventeen glue guns cool and seventeen women freeze. One whispers, "I was wondering about that myself."

I don't know what actually happened next because the person who told me did not know. I wonder how the instructor responded. and whether those thirty-six plastic eyes doing time in a sandwich bag rolled their working parts toward the heavens. Was there a group discussion? Could the Baptists and the Unitarians agree? Did the Catholics think metric? Is there a correlation between angel height and eye spread? How tall is an angel, anyway?

If I ever need to know how far apart an angel's eyes are, I'll ask a child. Children know these things. A four year old might ask where we go when we die or where is God or where do babies come from? Kids don't know everything. But all the children I have met know that an angel's eyes can be just as far apart as the angel-maker wants them to be.

As soon as toddlers curl their little hands around jumbo crayons and their urge to gnaw on the art supplies gives way to the urge to create, they turn into artists. Children draw what they know: themselves, mommy, daddy and the dog. They draw what they don't know: a wedge of sun beaming from the top left hand corner of the paper and to top it off they add rainbows. They draw what they feel: an angry child can cut and paste the blackness of a hole onto an 8 1/2 by 11 inch sheet of plain white paper. You don't hear a child ask,"How long is a dog?" "How big is the sky?" "How many colors are in a rainbow?" Children are artists and artists know these things.

I learned long ago art of a child is not to be questioned, but to be enjoyed. A child-rearing expert, Haim Ginot, had written a best-selling book about parenting, and I was dutifully well into the chapter on children's art. Dr. Ginot advises when responding to such a creation, pick one or two features in the picture that you sincerely like, make a few positive comments and be done with it. In other words, don't insult the child with hyperbole.

As if on cue my three year old son Russell came to me waving a piece of paper. "I've made a picture of you, Mommy."

I took his offering, carefully looked it over, gave him a hug and said, "How nice, you've drawn me wearing a pink polka dot blouse. I like that."

He yanked the paper out of my hands and turned his back. "Naw, Mom," he sighed. "Can't you tell? Two's your buttons and two's your boobs."

I, one who hesitates to dog ear a page in a used paperback sailed the library's Mr. Ginot, dust cover and all, over the coffee table and under the couch. I learned something that day: not only are children artists, they have the temperament to match.

I wonder what it was those eighteen angel-making crafters lost somewhere on the long trip from child to grown-up. I wonder what it is that most of us lose as we get older and why is it gone and how can we get it back?

When Fredrich Nietzsche, an artist not with paints but with words and ideas, talks about creativity he says, "One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star."

Literally, it turn out that we can all give birth to a star. Astrophysicists tell us every nucleus of carbon in our bodies originated in the stars. Imagine that. We're stuffed full of stars. Now, if we could only get the children to help us make them dance.

Note that Russ never asked me how far apart are a mother's... never mind. You get my drift. Children are artists. They know how far apart things should be.