Just Kids

I no longer felt that I was the right model for him, but he would wave my objections away. He saw in me more than I could see in myself. Whenever he peeled the image from the Polaroid negative, he would say, “With you I can’t miss.”

I longed to enter the fraternity of the artist: the hunger, their manner of dress, their process and prayers.

A universe not yet scored contained beneath the pale lids.

was a good day to arrive in New York City. No one expected me. Everything awaited me

But secretly I knew I had been transformed, moved by the revelation that human beings create art, that to be an artist was to see what others could not.

I had no proof that I had the stuff to be an artist, though I hungered to be one. I imagined that I felt the calling and prayed that it be so.

We contained opposing principles, light and dark.

But the urge to express myself was my strongest desire, and my siblings were my first eager coconspirators in the harvesting of my imagination. They listened attentively to my stories, willingly performed in my plays, and fought valiantly in my wars. With them in my corner, anything seemed possible.

My love of prayer was gradually rivaled by my love for the book.

My small torrent of words dissipated into an elaborate sense of expanding and receding. It was my entrance into the radiance of imagination.

But as time passed I came to experience a different kind of prayer, a silent one, requiring more listening than speaking.