When you’re an only child, sometimes the arc of creativity bends toward mischief.
There is elegance in unspoken words; an assured flair, when faced with articulating the obvious or allowing it to travel through osmosis, in taking the latter road. Sometimes that can make all the difference to a child.
My mother was a seamstress. She sewed with a glamorous eye for minutiae and a handsome singing voice intuitively cued to the movements and tempo of her needle. Her sewing room occupied the veranda at the back of the house.
As an only child, I found creative ways of spending my days. I especially enjoyed hide-and-seek with the menagerie of pretend playmates I’d hatched to populate my games. The sewing room had a striped couch with ascending armrests that made you believe furniture can fly. A magical couch I could slink under and vanish.
When a client entered the room one morning and began disrobing for her fitting, I happened to be under the couch. Some days, the sun’s rays so tore across the veranda they still squiggled in the dark at night. On that day, there was no hiding from real people in the sewing room.
One of many memories etched in me like stills, unvoiced yet unambiguously warm and self-evident, and in them, my mother’s way of framing the shot without making it seem contrived, ever of that generation with a sense of the moment and making it count.
She let the incident come undone without fuss. We quietly picked up the threads and moved on. Lesson learned without a stitch of pedagogy.