Almost every school day, at least one of my four children comes home with art: a drawing, a painting, a piece of handicraft, a construction-paper assemblage, an enigmatic apparatus made from pipe cleaner, spangles, and clay. And almost every bit of it ends up in the trash. My wife and I have to remember to shove the things really down deep, lest one of the kids stumble across the ruin of his or her laboriously stapled paper-plate-and-dried-bean maraca, wedged in there with the junk mail and the collapsed packing material from a 12-pack of squeezable yogurt. But there is just so much of the stuff; we don’t know what else to do with it. Of course we don’t toss all of it. We keep the good stuff, or what strikes us, in the zen of that instant between scraping out the lunchbox and sorting the mail, as good. As worthier, somehow: more vivid, more elaborate, more accurate, more sweated-over. A crayon drawing that fills the entire sheet of newsprint from corner to corner, a lifelike smile on the bill of a penciled flamingo. We stack the good stuff up in a big drawer and then when the drawer finally gets full we pull the good stuff out, and stick it in a plastic bin that we keep up in the attic. We never look at or revisit it. We never get the children’s artwork down and sort through it with them, the way we do with photo albums, and say, “That’s how you used to draw curly hair,” or “See how you made your letter E’s with seven crossbars?” I’m not really sure why we’re saving it, except that getting rid of it feels so awful.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 10:49 AM  |