If I thought my help was no longer needed by Nephew who now is in college, I was wrong.

His grandmother and her other two daughters are appalled that the young man returns to this city nearly every weekend, but doesn't come to visit me or Eliot.  Knowing Neph better than those idealistic relatives of ours, I am not shocked that he slips in and out of town and I only hear about it after the fact.  Independence feels so good to young adults!  I remember how it felt and that I didn't want to surrender it to the adults I'd had to rely upon when I was a teenager.  Believing that Neph feels the same now as I did then, I consoled myself by cleaning up the horrendous mess he left behind and by enjoying privacy and peace-of-mind.  We had a very tumultuous year together, Nephew and I.  He's not the only one who needs a break from relatives.

Today the boy reached out to make contact.  He has asked me to be a reference for him.  Having decided he can't work on weekends because it will cramp his social style, he hasn't gotten the job he needs and instead is applying for a loan.

So what do I do?   He has shown himself to be an employee who is let go within weeks of being hired and someone who is extremely irresponsible about money.  On the other hand, if he has to drop out of school, he will lose the fantastic opportunity the college is giving him.  And, furthermore, he will be out of school, unemployed, uneducated, and will surely move back into my house since he has nowhere else to go.  His mother still prefers to forget she has three children, not two and that one of them is a son.

So I guess I will let him write my name on the application and my address and phone number, too.  He asked me to send him that information--he only lived here for almost a year, it's not as if he had time to learn his address and phone number.  And if the banker calls me to ask about him, well, then I'll worry about what I'll say.   I don't like to lie and in this case, I won't like telling the truth, either.

Watching my step.

The winds of creativity--well, it had been more of a lovely breeze than a full-blown wind--make for a very healthy climate to live in and the world has been an interesting place with the push of creativity carrying me along.  Everything is vibrantly interesting and any ho-hum uninteresting chores are ignored or rushed through so that I can get my brain and hands back to working on the things I'm playing at. 

And this place looks like something's up.  Brushes, paper, palettes which started out with a rational arrangement of yellow, blue, and red and became gardens of every possible color, yarn, and photographs are organized enough to not present a hazard or eyesore, but only just and only by my making a real effort.   Chaos would trip me up.  If things are too messy, I don't sleep well and if I don't sleep well, I can't paint in my dreams, which I often do now.

The winds of creativity have blown a rough patch of turbulence my way this last week, though.  The landscape painting I started a couple of weeks ago for that landscape class was set aside when I decided the colors were too timid and the painting had no more impact than a shy wallflower at a high school dance.   Another painting was begun, much bolder and taking on the conflicting tasks of representing distance and doing it as the sun set behind the shoulder of the painter.  Cool colors that communicate distance have to be warmed up to catch sunset's glow.  For a first painting it's a ridiculous effort.

And hence the third version of the first painting.  This one is being done without a careful sketch, with no painstaking color mixing or precise little brushes.  This one is growing.  It's brash and energetic.  A big brush places the paint.   It's surprising me as it does.

As if the abandoned paintings weren't enough to show that something's up, I've knit steadily for a couple of weeks, too.  One project with fine soft yarn in rich shades of blues and greens on a shifting square made of four size 2 needles  each with double points  that the stitches are constantly trying to slip off of., Other knitting is in thick wooly yarn on bigger neeles, peasants, sturdy number ten straightss.  Both of the projects are knit, are looked at, and then are frogged back into a pile of yarn, over and over again.  Two weeks of knitting and not a quarter inch of knitting to show for it!

That's what happens when you're being pushed around by a brisk bullying breeze of creativity, I guess.

You might wonder how the rowdy third graders are doing, especially clever and naughty Ella who made the grand lady of my last post.  You might expect that she has returned to her daredevil ways after that brief flash of the sensitive artist that lives within the brash exterior.

There's a reason we form expectations.  We are intelligent beings that learn from past experience and in this case you are at least partly correct.  Ella was wowzing around the playground again today, the wild Ella of old.

Except that the wowzing  was only begun after an addition to my autumn nature doll collection was crafted and presented to me and before she went back into the school at the end of recess she told me that she couldn't wait to make more of them at home over the weekend.  Others have followed her lead, too and the roomy bag I carry the modest tools of my trade in is now bulging and crackling with the leaves that other girls gave to me.  I oooh'd and aahh'd over the incomparable color of each of the leaves and thanked the gatherer for helping me out with the project I am gathering things to do. 

My fifth graders are not so innocently employed as are the younger students.  Today even level-headed Laura was drawn into matters that foreshadow the middle school and high school style dramas that these oldest students in the school begin mimicking  before they get to the schools in the next tier.   Laura confided that she has been asked out for the very first time in her life.  Laura is all of ten or eleven years old so I hadn't worried that she was a slow starter;  indeed I was surprised that the children, most of whom still look like children and some of whom even act like children include "asking out" as a reasonable activity. 

I was taken aback by what she said and as she related her decision to refuse the invitation if it were asked again I could see how ably Laura will navigate the course of her teenage years.  First, she shows excellent judgment in not accepting a date for the school sock hop offered by a boy who, teamed up with his buddy, had so far asked nine girls who all had said yes.  As she saw it, those boys were toying with those girls and she didn't want to be one of their dolls.  She further told me which boys she would accept an invitation from and told me the reasons she considers them nice boys--and her reasoning is excellent.    She reported that they talk to her, that they are nice to people, and that they do not just follow other boys when the crowd is doing stupid things.  Stupid things like asking nine girls out at the same time, for example.

Lest you think that Laura is only concerned with character and has no tendency to the reasons why boys and girls go to dances together in the first place, she also included a third boy on her list of "nice boys" and then said even if he asked her, she wouldn't go with him.  "He's a good friend to me", she said, "But I don't like him like that".  "That" she did not explain and I didn't ask.  She said it as if she knew exactly what she meant, and also knowing what she meant, I didn't want her words out there where both of us would have to acknowledge them.  She may be ready, but I'm not.

Things have shifted around a lot in my life, but one change I really didn't expect is a refreshed enjoyment of my job.  I considered not going back to the kidlets for this school year, but nothing else but nothing at all was the alterntive use of time I had in mind and nothing never seems like much of anything to me, so I went back.  I guess you could say my lack of vision was the controlling factor in my choosing to watch out for the kids.  Ironic, huh?

Since I was going to be there anyway, I elected to take the rowdiest grade in the school as one of my groups.  I've had plenty of on-the-job training wrangling toughies, thanks to Eliot, and this group had the rep of being the toughest toughies in the school.  I worked with them last year and I must say their rep is justified.  Hardened hooligans all and hopeless cases already in the second grade.  The other supervisor who worked with them as first and second graders was pronounced to really need the break from them she begged for and I was carryng around a pretty comprehensive death wish at the time, so I volunteered.  And all summer long I rued that reckless offer. 

I think the death wish is an asset in this case.  Besides that, there are two other sources of real power when you work with a large group of children.  One is a sincere lack of hesitance to be despised by them.  The other is to genuinely like them, all of them, even the ones who test your ability to find anything to like about them.  There is one other tool to use as well and that is to remember what being a child felt like.  Feel the powerlessness, feel the boredom, feel the excitement and the frustration, too.  It really is tough to be a child and harder still to be a naturally naughty child who has to conform to school behavior five long days each week.  I couldn't do it.  I did it once, but I really couldn't do it again.  And neither can some of the third graders.

My strategy this year is to relax and to stop correcting every little transgression.  I concentrate on the biggies like causing injuries and tears, niether of which is allowed on the playground.  All of the trivial things that are tattled about get a sympathetic hearing and encouragement to the victim who is assured that she is not the tattletale her friend accused her of being or reminders that if someone told him his glasses looked like his grandmother's he would feel bad, too and we all want to be friends, right?  Good citizens of the school, right?

So I smile more this year and chitchat with the third, fourth and fifth graders and yesterday I invested in Art, too.  Naughty Ella, legendary barbarian, offered to sell me something she'd made during recess.  Sceptical, but game, I looked at what she offered.  As you can see below, it's charming.  Using things she picked up on the playing field, she made this stylish lady.  You do see her fabulous hat, right?

And how much did I pay for the fashion plate?  I gladly paid the asking price, a leaf that Ella could use to make her next doll, and told Ella that I'd find a way to exhibit the one I bought next to my computer.  She glowed and made the second doll and gave it to me for free. 

She'll probably be naughty again tomorrow, but the Art Break did us both good.

I don't care what you do.

I'm not going to be a weaksauce lame wimp-victim.

You can't make me.

The Strong Woman, Okane, of Omi Province, Subduing a Wild Horse

by     Kuniyoshi