Before I begin my prompt of the day, I wanted to give you a little background. My friend Jodie, who is the mom of Norah and Conor and wife to Brett, does this writing challenge often. It’s from an instagram account called exhale.creativity. I figured i’d give it a go. I typically don’t need prompts to write about gratitude but it’s good to try new things, right? So here we go:
It arrived in the mail last month. A marker drawn image of the intersection at E. 79th St and 5th Ave in New York City. Does this intersection hold significance for me? No. But the artist means a lot to me. It’s by a boy named Thorben who I used to spend time with regularly while his mom ran errands and got some time to herself. Thorben loves drawing intersections with traffic lights - the more complexities, the better! I’m not sure if you’ve ever tried to draw an intersection with stacked traffic lights facing different directions, but it’s not for the faint of heart. Thorben loves details like that. He’s a lego master, loves reading, candy and LSU. He’s got a lot of feelings in his little body too. I miss getting to spend time with his family. They painted a chalk board wall in their kitchen. His mom, Carolyn, is an artist so there’d usually be some fantastic chalk drawn masterpiece of fun taking up a good bit of the board.
I loved living in New York for more reasons than I could ever explain. New York feels like a combination of miracles and strife. There are artists (and those who work in the arts), business people, non-profit and healthcare workers, entrepreneurs, nannies, temps, students, kids, state and government employees, homeless people, and bugs and critters, that fill the streets. It’s the city with a heartbeat. I learned a lot and felt even more. But if I had to pick one thing that had the greatest impact on my time there, i’d be the kids. And if I look at my life as a whole, the moment in my life when I actually felt myself changing was when I got to hold my niece Lucy, moments after she was born. I have kept drawings from kids for years and if I had it my way, my apartment would look more like a kid’s bedroom than an adult’s. I appreciate how kids see and move through the world. They are often curious and imaginative. So a drawing from a kid is pretty much considered a treasure.
When I opened the mailed brown envelope from Carolyn and Thorben and saw the colorful notes written from them both, I felt loved. The 8 x 11 homemade image of the Upper East Side intersection, that I normally wouldn’t notice as anything special, is now framed above my bed. It has become special. There’s another crayon-drawn NYC cityscape framed on my other wall by Lucy. I don’t know if i’ll ever be the grown-up I’m expected to be - but I’m slowly (very slowly) realizing that they may be how God intended.
