Something In The Shadows

I watched my 3- and 5-year old sons duck into the studio from the backyard while I chatted with a neighbor. Normally I'd have a moment of pause to think of the unattended ruffians going into, say, a foam-padded room with floor drains, never mind an art studio. But on this day the watch battery in the back of my skull interpreted their movements as being the natural flow of kids who have a hard time opening the 70-year old door to the stairs and who can more easily use the bypass route through the studio.

They'll head up to the kitchen.

They'll head up to the kitchen, where they'll drag the little table to the cupboard, set the stool on the table, the books on the stool, and start the heist of sweets. Let's call it a team building exercise; if they can cover their tracks before I catch up to them then they'll enjoy the bond shared only between accomplices.

So yeah, there was a red blinking light informing my consciousness that a guy like me and kids like that and a great many hours of fragile effort might be approaching a situation, but you can only interrupt so many conversations for the suspicion of what the kids might do – especially when the boys actually have a pretty good track record of knowing what is off limits to them.

Twelve minutes ticked by, unless it was thirteen.

Pleasantries concluded, I opened the studio door, more or less expecting the room to be empty. Then came the moment that it took my eyes to adjust to the light; a moment of the scurrying shadows growing arms and faces.

They hadn't bypassed the studio.

They had stayed in the studio.

For twelve minutes. Unless it was thirteen.

In unattended kid time that approximates the lifespan of a coral reef. The arms and faces were frozen in suspended animation, and as my eyes went wide with shock, the boys' smiles turned into the worried masks of people who have just reentered the present from a blackout.

They were sitting beside some moose antlers that were kind of stacked, kind of strewn around the wood floor. Packed between and upon the antlers was a grizzly bear hide. That's all a normal enough picture, including the gouges they were surely seasoning the wood floor with. The shocking sight was the huge original artwork that had somehow been incorporated into the scene, the board draped at an unnatural angle from antler tips down and across to the floor. The month invested in the progress of my largest original to date was at the mercy of these boys – these feral beasts who regularly argue about who is the jaguar. Teeth and roars. No appreciation for their destructive power.

The 5-foot long artwork had been stored on an easel in the opposite corner of the room – unambiguously off limits. Yet the big one must have explained to the little one that wisdom would be found in pulling the illustration board off of the easel (enough to take my breath away), dragging it across the room (enough to cause an aneurism), and then using it as the roof for their fort (Holy. Buckets.). Their hands and arms were black from the charcoal that had been smeared from the piece. And on their faces were wings of black leading from underneath their eyes out to their cheeks and down toward their chins. Warpaint, no doubt about it.

In my utter disbelief of the scene I had a hard time shifting between speechless and generously vocal.

About the time I leveled off to a stern, whispered warning, the 3-year old knew better than to stick around. He plopped on the floor, pulled his rubber boots onto his feet and booked it for the underbrush. His little arms were a'pumping and he was NOT looking back! His older brother acknowledged the gravity of the moment by curling up in my lap. My spent rebuke rendered me exhausted – a sensation exacerbated by my awareness of how difficult it is to eke a month of focused work out of the chaos of daily life with two jaguars. I was flattened.

I actually couldn't even bring myself to inspect the artwork for a few hours. It seemed a written certainty that the boys would have creased the board or dragged the heavy black pigment across the areas of fine detail. However, when I willed myself back to the scene of the crime, a close inspection showed handprints all around the edges of the piece, where details were intentionally obscured anyway, and the important details were intact. And although a couple corners were slightly dented from the journey from easel to floor, somehow the board had not been bent.

In other words, all was not lost. Sanctuary, yes. A year of my life, okay. Gray hair suggests sophistication.

I think I've managed to impress upon the boys that the studio is off limits to them. But then again, considering that they surprise me daily with the way their neurons link together toward a certain action, and considering that every couple of months finds us in a brave new world of developmental territory, I'm not sure that I'll ever be able to open the door to the studio and feel my eyes adjusting to the light without my body coiling for action. There just may be jaguars lurking in the shadows.

An earlier phase of the large king salmon original, complete with little boys’ handprints…