You're Drawing Beauty

Today I re-realized that I am in Paris. I was walking through the Louvre's courtyard with the glass pyramid and the re-realization welled up inside of me. I am in Paris. I am walking through the streets of Paris. I am sitting in the Jardin du Carrousel with some paints and paintbrushes and a clean piece of canvas.

Someday I will look back on these two months in Paris, and I will think to myself: "Ah yes. I lived in Paris for two months." And this thinking will be thought with a romantic sigh.

This afternoon when I was planted in the Jardin du Carrousel (as I just mentioned) a little girl, perhaps 7 or 8 years old scrambled over to to where I was lying on my stomach in the grass painting. My canvas was no longer clean. I had painted a woman in orange and yellow and her arms looked like elongated yams (not on purpose). It was not my best work, I was deciding, when the little girl plopped down in front of me, surveyed the painting and spoke: "You're drawing beauty."

I smiled and and said: "Oui!"

1.5 seconds later I realized that English was not her first language and what she was probably trying to say was: "You're drawing is beautiful," to which a more appropriate response would have been: "Why thank you very much, you are too kind." Instead of: "Yes. Yes indeed, I draw beauty. And I'm damn good at it too. I should charge you for looking at it."

But what she actually said--"You're drawing beauty"--those words mean so much more to me than a mere complement. For some reason I feel delightfully affirmed by this little tourist child (whose parents, incidentally, were just ten feet away buying Eiffel Tower key chains from one of the 12,954,643 street vendors that inhabit Paris--I think she and her family were from Spain or Italy). I feel affirmed as more than an artist. I feel affirmed as a person who communes with beauty. Beauty with yam-arms. Yam-armed beauty.