Suffer The Little Children

My artist wife and I spend most of our Saturday mornings engaging in shameless commerce at the art gallery where she shows her work. It’s a good time to be there because the farmers market lures people to the plaza. We in turn lure them into the gallery as, clutching their precious produce, they pass by.

Man does not live by tomatoes alone. (Though this time of year I might be willing to give it a try.) The soul must be fed as well. That’s where art comes in.

Every Saturday morning Pat Macintyre, a local art legend who has operated the Reston Art Gallery and Studios at Lake Anne since 1986, engages in her favorite activity. She supervises young children in creating small art and craft masterpieces out of a dizzying array of materials she has collected and hoarded over decades.

Surrounded by so many enthusiastic young artists, Pat can’t attend to all their needs on her own. Recently she has been able to attract “interns,” local high schoolers who are interested in art, to assist her. Being kids, though, they tend to be a little unreliable at times. Since I’m there anyway, I often find myself sitting alongside her providing materials and suggestions to the budding maestros.

Recently, this morphed into a semi-permanent position after the current intern experienced a traumatic encounter with a pair of scissors. He nicked his finger and, though the result was a barely visible scratch, a few drops of blood had appeared. The poor fellow, apparently so protected and coddled he had never cut himself before, first panicked then experienced mild symptoms of shock. We broke out the studio crash cart and applied a life saving band-aid. Once recovered and medically cleared to return to the front lines, he chose instead to call his mother. (And, one hopes, not a lawyer.) She soon arrived and whisked him away. We have not seen nor heard from him since. Pat’s class must go on, but how can she do it without help?

Enter her knight in shining armor.

At first glance, I’m an unlikely candidate for such a role. Save for my concern for Pat’s sanity, I would never have taken on this gig. An artist I am not. In kindergarten I was so ashamed of my very first drawing, I threw it in the gutter on my way home from school. Thereafter, I avoided any kind of art that was not mandatory. The only part of art classes I actually enjoyed was color theory which is more science than art. My wife’s art colleagues have always thought I was kidding when I said given the choice between making art and hanging by my thumbs in a dungeon, I’d be hard pressed to make a choice.

I joke not.

Taking on this challenge, though, has led to a rediscovery of the pleasure of teaching children, an activity I do enjoy–as long as they belong to someone else. Looking back on my experiences interacting with kids and grandkids, I am aware I always preferred centering our activities around teaching or supervising a skill.

I’ve always been a teacher of sorts. My background as a summer camp swim instructor provided me with the requisite tools for handling ankle biters. Later on I coached an adult swim team and became a ski instructor who taught mostly children. Though my psychiatric practice was limited to adults, emotionally, many of them could just as well have been six years old.

Lately though, like many cranky cantankerous misanthropes my age, I have found myself usually more annoyed than enamored by little kids. I was pleasantly surprised, then, that these couple of hours a week have become something I look forward to. It’s always pleasant spending time with Pat, but even more so engaging with these beautiful children who, unlike me at their age, dive into the projects with gusto. In the process they reveal unique personalities that range from the super-confident to the perfectionistic to the reticent-but-game. In the course of overseeing their work, I learn a little about each child as they freely share snippets of information about their activities, interests, families, relationships and concerns. I guess you could liken this to play therapy, though I think if anyone is getting therapy it’s me.

Working with these bright, lively young people gives this jaded curmudgeon a bit more hope for the future. It reminds me that the world, imperfect as it is, will always be populated by more good people than bad. People who will jump in, full of optimism that they can create something beautiful in this all too often ugly world. Whatever I can do to help nudge them in a positive direction is better than nothing. These kids, privileged to be growing up in our diverse and affluent community, remind me that human potential requires only opportunity, good parenting and a little encouragement to blossom. Working with them gives me just the lift I need in these fraught times to feel a little less pessimistic and disappointed with the human race.

Artists suffer for their work. Non-artists may find doing art a form of suffering. But suffering these little children? That’s no suffering at all.