It’s really too hot to paint outside during that quiet time of the day when the kids are centered. If I leave Chas to paint alone on the floor in the kitchen, I begin to prickle with anxiety, because it’s never long before paint begins flying across the room towards the wool rug (which, being wool, easily stains. And which, for the record, I refuse to live without.) It’s a high stakes gamble, but one I can avoid if I sit him on my lap at the kitchen table.

So there we sat, yesterday, and I found I was able to engage him for a longer period of time than usual, simply by painting alongside him, on the same page. Normally, I’d discourage this–it goes completely against my teaching style, which is to let them simply create on their own. But he seemed to enjoy telling me what he was doing, which colors should go where, and he thought what I did was funny. He loved sharing the piece of paper, maybe it reminds him of sitting on my lap when we read a story. For this reason, it felt just right.

Ford doesn’t share my love of painting, but he is creative in other ways. Here is an arrangement he called me to see, the creation of which he narrated for five minutes to an imaginary audience. When he was finished, he held it in place and sat back, stratching his arm, so that he could get a different perspective on the piece. I told him that it was important to take a picture of it, so that he could look back and appreciate it after he did the inevitable: take a sip, then throw it across the room, pretending that it was a spaceship with attached spacecpod sailing through space.

Chas. Bull Creek Trail, Austin

He somersaults now, too! It usually follows “Daw-Dah,” which means “Down Dog.”

I made this aluminum starfish at RISD when we were told to design a toy. I’d just returned from a weekend at Narragannsett, where I’d found a scattering of beached brown sea stars. Inspired by the way they clung to my hands (I’d never before felt one) and their bumpy texture, I immediatedly brainstormed a way to recreate one (or a scattering of them). And because I couldn’t get enough of the oily sharp smell of metalshop in winter, I HAD to make one out of aluminum. My favorite memories from school there are from this project.

And what a pang I felt when I looked up this morning to find Ford playing with it! He was whirring and buzzing it all over the house, pretending it was an omidriod robot, for HOURS. It was so rad. I almost cried.

Beeswax and damar resin fumes meandered out the studio door, through the live oaks and onto the lake, while I manically experimented with pottery tools and heat guns. My first encaustic painting class began today at Laguna Gloria., and it was so MUCH FUN.

I think the fumes may have gotten to my head. I drove home smiling at the deer, creeping along the ridge home. I had to get gas as I rounded our block, and found myself drifting aboard the slinking gas fumes, too. Tonight, the olfactory smorgasborg. But I made it home safe! I’m glazed over and staring at the screen, both boys asleep beside me on the bed. They’re angelic in their quiet perfection, framed between us old tired people. Every now and then Chas will flail his arms in dreamscape, eyes pressed shut. As always, he smells like some deep-fried dessert. GOD he smells divine. Hey, where’s the powdered sugar?

Our seventh morning in the hot natatorium. I sat in a white plastic chair above Ford, my sundress sticking to my legs while beads of sweat trickling down my cheeks. Meanwhile, naked with resurfaced anxiety, Ford threw pleas of desperation at me through chattering teeth and purple lips. And I could immediately identify with this feeling of his. I disappeared into my mind, where an abysmally blue open ocean dropped beneath me. I remembered looking down beyond my suspended feet at a shipwreck, one hundred feet below. I remember the way panic feels in a racing heart, chattering teeth, trembling body , and a wild shallow breath that I couldn’t uncoil.

I coached him at breakfast, an hour before class. He bent my positive vibes backwards and refused to go. Today I decided not to talk so much, but to firmly remind him of the challenges and the fact that he was, indeed, going to face them. Still, there he was in the water, panicking.

One boy floated on his back, waiting for his turn to swim in the deep water. He spat a stream of water towards the ceiling. The girl beside him made ape calls to an elderly man running in the next lane. The third girl silently stared at Ford. And Ford, for his part, was negotiating as best he could in a frenzied squeal: “Coach Heather? Coach Heather? I’m scared! I want to go to the little-deep side! Please can we go to the little-deep side?”

I wanted to have magic hands to rest on his shoulder and ease his fright. Instead, the best I could do was clench my fists and shove out my thumbs, pinning my grin from one ear to the next, shouting “That was even better than the last time! Way to go!” It was agonizing for me to watch him worry, though I knew his pain, in the face of all my applaud. As if I owned part of the problem. Did I do something wrong? When, of course, the very real fear is his own acquisition, because he is his own person and he is four. I can’t blame myself for everything, as hard as I try and as egocentric as I probably am.

But he did it. He jumped into the pool today, smack onto the pool noodle and splashing the teacher’s wide smile. I was suddenly able to breathe, and the world started turning again. I wrapped him with praise in a warm white towel and for the rest of the day he greeted everyone, everywhere, by inquiring,
“DO YOU KNOW WHAT? I HAD MY SWIM LESSON THIS MORNING AND I JUMPED INTO THE DEEP END!”

Summer is saturated with mass-production. The sun destroys anything left outside. So after lingering twilight, chasing fireflies and each other around the flowerbeds, toys stay outside night and day. Our home has stretched out onto the lawn. Plastic toys will only last a few months in this climate.

This is an inflatable swimming pool that I bought last summer. I also bagged sand toys, beach balls and a Slip and Slide, but these have all been shuffled into the other toys, buried in sand and punctured by piercing UVrays. This pool has lasted longer than I imagined, knowing when I bought it that it would destruct by Fall, like summer plastic tends to do.

It’s beginning to get a fair amount of use, now that we’re baking our way towards the double digits. And every day we drain it, like I’m doing (with Ford) in the photo above. I don’t have time for stylized puns on Pop art. Take this as a nod to mass production. We like it. Well, maybe not, but it’s convenient and cheap and beautiful when you’re short on cash. And who isn’t, when you majored in Industrial Design in school?

And you can see more Pop art self portraits here.

Speaking of mass-produced: balloons. They are in high demand at our home. Chas loves them. We can drive by Blockbuster (our fallback now that all of our Netflix movies have gone awol) and Chas will scream for boobahs. BOOBAH!!?!? BOOBAH?! BOOBAHH?! like some heroin addict. JUST! ONE! FIX!!!
We brought home two of the Blockbuster balloons with us on Friday, and Ford picked one up to practice the properties of static electricity.

So he rubbbbbbed the balloon on his nappy hair a minute and then I watched him hold the balloon over a small mount of sugar. The sugar flitted excitedly on the table. “A sugarstorm, mom!” He passed the balloon over a pile of punched paper holes: “Dancing dots, mom!” and then he passed the balloon over an ant trail in the kitchen: “Mom! Check it OUT!” And, sure enough, the ants were flicking up onto the balloon. Can you see them? They’re tiny pharoah ants (otherwise known as ‘Piss Ants’ by my father in-law, the entomologist). Science is so funny.

The pool in our neighborhood is open. It sits on the lake and adjacent the playground so it’s layered with the summer sounds of ski boats, laughter and shouting. All of the children are an inch taller, more sinewy than last year and a lot louder. I’m crowded by the youngest, with open arms for Chas, who is jumping off the ledge and into the water. Ford bobs and squeals with the more experienced swimmers. He’s riding atop a blue pool noodle and flashing everyone with Damon’s goggles and a wide smile full of straight, sweet little preschooler teeth. Some of us parents are lining the poolside, legs submerged, beers in hand and busy catching up. Many of us haven’t seen each other in months, and we’re quickly retying our seasonal connections. After all, we’ll be seeing a lot of each other in the coming months. The pool is the great common denominator during the long summer languor, and there’s something for everybody here, where nobody frowns upon beer bellies and mismatched bikinis.

I sat on a little wooden bench this morning, Chas on my lap, beside the swim class. I decided that Ford needed a nudge. He wouldn’t get away with negotiating or opting out of the coach’s instructions. It took preparation, but I was ready for the work.

So we took a jog this morning, both kids in the twinner, and I coached him on the challenges he’d have to face. I told him it would be difficult, but that he would do it anyway. After all, that’s the definition of a challenge. We talked about all the things he could do once he was able to swim: we could kayak on Town Lake, ride in Papi’s pirough in the bay.

Lo! Did it help. Spastically joyful after each effort, Ford squirmed all over the pool steps and shouted silliness. He made me so proud, I think I wore a smile for hours afterwards.

Ford, 5.28.2006. Blanton Museum of Art; Austin.

Ford is so challenging. He was the only kid today with dry hair at the end of swim class; he refuses to bob underwater. Through the glass door I watched him dismiss the coach’s instructions with a wave and an upturned nose. I wanted to step in and dunk him, myself. This is why I’m paying someone else to teach him to swim; separating my feelings from the task is difficult. All I want him to do is try. But the child just doesn’t want to swim yet.