Spring is come. The bees bump into the attic window. I found mouse shit on the back stairs. The magnolia, which I thought was dead, is not dead. Green buds have come out, and in a week it will bloom.
Yesterday in Central Park we watched a street performer juggle and spit water and crack jokes. The boys laughed very hard. Meanwhile, a hawk killed a bird on the little hill facing us. Henry spotted it. We looked back at the performer, and after a little while he pointed the hawk out to me. It was on a branch now with the bird it had killed.
I thought, about the street performer, Who is this person, who does this? What brought him here?
I stood with my hands on the boys’ shoulders and heads.
We pushed through crowds, the park was crowded. On the way out we passed portrait artists sketching the pictures of seated people. Crowds gathered to watch them work. On 59th Street someone sketched two girls. One of them had a difficult nose to draw, and he drew it wrong, but not wrong, so that she looked as ugly in the picture as in real life, but with a slightly different nose. Then I realized that the portraitists we’d passed before had all been skillful at making their subjects look good. By one portrait, her portrait, stood a woman with long hair draped around her shoulder. It took me a second to realize the picture was hers, because it was more beautiful than her, but then they looked exactly like each other.
1 comment:
At the St. Louis City Museum, there is a portraitist who does portaits for free. He's a million years old and obviously just draws whatever comes into his mind. He clearly didn't look at the boys because their portraits left my usually incredibly civil wife in tears (from laughing so hard). She removed herself to a room where an 11 year old had stationed himself in the toddler room's ball pit. He would jumped out and hurl balls at unsuspecting 2 and 3 year olds.
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