Art

The lazy days of summer are definitely here. I'm certainly feeling lazy, especially about blogging. Sorry about the lapse. And thanks to all of you who emailed to complain --- it's always heartening to know that people are still paying attention.

Blue and Green are busy at day camp this summer. The camp is located on "daddy's campus," and they attend assorted "classes" in university buildings. Their group of smelly six-year-olds makes stuffed space aliens in a room right next door to a calculus class. The exciting news this week was that one camper threw up right outside the door of a class that was taking a midterm. The kids apparently shrieked, "PUKE!" at the top of their lungs until the real professor of the real college students came out and yelled at them.

Much of what they do each day involves complicated projects that require "recyclables." They have made a "space machine." They have made star scopes. They have made pillows and booklets and tambourines. All of these things have been carefully constructed out of garbage. In fact, one afternoon the boys came running out of their last class with their backpacks bulging. Inside were cereal boxes and butter tubs and empty yogurt containers. "Ummm, boys?" I said. "Why do you have a bunch of trash in your backpacks?" Green said, "No, mama, that's not trash. That's ART." "But Green," I responded, "You haven't done anything to this to make it art." He rolled his eyes. "Mama, it's art in my imagination."

The upshot is that I have a whole bunch of someone else's breakfast containers in my house. Maybe this is the future of recycling. Instead of placing your crap in the recycling bin, you just find a small child and fill his backpack with it. Then he takes the stuff home to his mother, who sighs deeply and redirects it to her child's school for their art supply closet. The garbage will soon go home with a different child, in the form of a different project. Thus, the trash goes from family to family to family without generating any waste or pollution.

I'm not sure what came over me the other day. I was noting how excited the boys have been about their various pieces of trash artworks, so I put us all in the car and drove us 30 minutes away to a "salvage studio." At this place, you pay $6.75 per child to make "art" with the store's vast collection of trash materials. I don't know what I was thinking --- maybe that the kids would make a small keepsake of some kind? Instead, they each made a factory. A FACTORY. These pieces of trash sculptures are enormous. And it occurred to me, I just PAID MONEY to bring home someone else's refuse. That cash could have bought us a bag of organic cherries or an itty bitty amount of gas! Instead, there is a huge pile of debris fine art in my living room, and I am under strict orders not to move, jostle, disconnect, or do away with it.

Next year, Blue and Green will be going to an art-free camp. No more creativity for those two.