Holding onto the wonderful restive spirit
The other day, because our house is next to one elementary school and across the street from another, and lots of people get a close-up view of our front yard, I decided to rake the leaves.
It was nice work: sunny and warm enough to unzip my fleece; the time was my own, which meant that I could stop every now and then, lean on my rake like Ken Dryden on his goalie stick, and look around.
Haligonians are friendly folk, particularly on a fine, dry spring day so I had people to talk to: university kids just being polite to an adult; dog walkers; an old colleague at this newspaper, seemingly unaged from when he toiled in the sports department.
Mostly what I did during my moments of inertia was gaze out at the schoolyards where, at recess, the kids hit the ground running, some solo or in small groups, others in a flock that seemed to swoop, divide, and reform like a murmuration of starlings.
They made quite a racket out there with all their hooting, hollering and yeehawing. It was great to behold, as was their perpetual motion, the way their attention would alight briefly on a schoolyard tree, a bouncing basketball, their Grade 2 buddies, something there on the ground, before flitting to something else.
At one point, my labours took me over to the chain-link fence to dislodge some wet leaves. When I looked up, a knot of youngsters had clustered on the other side, watching me reverently as if I was Frederic Law Olmsted, putting the finishing touches on Central Park.
One of them asked me if I could hand him some leaves, which I did over the top of the fence.
Then, as quickly as they had arrived, they were gone, except for a little girl who found something mesmerizing in the way I filled my double-layered bag, before she too sprinted off, destination unknown.
It was good, under a hopeful spring sun, to see those youthful high spirits, to feel that the future was in good hands, even with COVID buzzing all around us. It was also good to be reminded of something.
I have not gone far in life. I attended the school across the street from where I now live, where the scene the other day was equally, wonderfully raucous.
Therefore, it did not feel completely delusional to try to recall what it was like to be that age, when everything was interesting, and a person felt that they had to dash from place to place, or risk missing something important.
I’ve seen some serious mileage between then and now. Yet, somewhere in there I must believe the remnants of that same restive spirit, even if long dormant, still exists.
At the very least, it was nice last week to think so.
Because I want to believe that I still retain the capacity to be excited by small, odd, random things. To feel that in our intensely organized lives, there remains room for the haphazard.
To know, on some level, that like those kids I can look at a thing that seems run-of-themill, that I’ve seen a million times before, and discover something that glints like a jewel.
That it is there at the very start must mean we are born with this curiosity and sense of immense possibility.
The flame, though, must be always fanned.
After putting my rake back in the shed, where it will stay until I am shamed into using it again, I flopped into a chair and read an intriguing collection of pieces in the New York Times Style Magazine in which 40 different artists shared the accumulated knowledge of their careers.
I’d recommend having a look at those articles, because you don’t have to be a painter, or furniture designer for their wisdom to resonate.
Take, for instance, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, who develops curriculum in the New York school system, as well as creating art, who said that, regardless of age, “the most ideal learning space is one where you have the opportunity to play, to selfdiscover, to explore.”
Or Katie Stout, a young New York artist and furniture designer who concluded, “There’re so many ways to be an artist, but the most unifying thing is a feeling of perpetual curiosity, a frenetic, bottomless compulsion to respond to things that’re going on.”
The kids outside my window understand this. In their own way, so do others.
When I was young my cub master taught us how to cook beans on a fire lit by rubbing two sticks together.
When I moved back into this neighbourhood, as an adult, I discovered that he lived a few blocks away from my house, and the same schools where last week kids ran, jumped and searched for wonders.
Whenever I saw him he was aboard a moped, a sight I couldn’t get enough. Instead of heading home, he always seemed to be bound for somewhere, an old guy in a hurry to find his next adventure.