This morning our neighborhood hosted a pancake breakfast to raise money to make some repairs on the pool, which was built in the early 1920s and is in need of a little help. As I swam laps there nearly every day last summer and plan to do so again when it opens, I felt an obligation to go and support the venture, so I grabbed AJ and hiked up the hill to the community center for pancakes and coffee this morning. I left my husband to some peace and quiet at home. He�s always been a little surly about going out to breakfast, a state of affairs I find unfortunate, as it�s usually my favorite meal to eat out. He�s even surlier about the prospect of dining with neighbors. He�s a closet hermit.

But AJ had a blast. There were a ton of neighborhood kids there playing an elaborate game of freeze tag. AJ walked into the room where they were playing and stood on the margins and stared. In a matter of seconds a little girl tagged him and he held stock still, aside from the big grin spreading across his face � they wanted him to play too! He spent a good half an hour racing around the room. After a while, as the game petered out, he began running laps around the room, shouting, �I�m fast!� every time he approached me. There was a little boy, about 5 years old, standing a little in front of me who was looking disgruntled by everything going on. After the third time AJ ran by yelling, �I�m fast,� he said, �You�re not fast. Everybody can go fast.�

I felt my stomach flip. This boy wanted my son feel bad. In a rush I came to the realization of how any degree of control I have for protecting his way in the world is slipping away gradually. I felt helpless and fragile.

The boy was clearly unhappy for reasons that had nothing to do with AJ. He just didn�t want anyone else to have fun when he wasn�t having fun. Fortunately, AJ either didn�t hear or didn�t care. His joy in his own speed, in the flexing and stretching of his limbs, was undisturbed. The other boy wandered away, disgusted.

It�s hard to describe what it�s like to watch your child interact with people on his own, apart from you. It�s both exhilarating and terrifying. Of course it�s what I want most, but it�s also what I fear most. I�ve often wondered if artists feel this way about their work. As a musician and composer, my work is easily shared without the loss of an original product. My art is not an object in the same way as that of a sculptor or painter. But a painter, for example, could easily spend months or years pouring out their very souls into a work with great personal meaning. I realize this notion of art and artist is idealized in the classical sense. Obviously there are real world needs that motivate artists the same way they motivate everyone else. But for the sake of argument, what must it be like to sell the work when it�s finished? On the one hand, I would think it would be gratifying that someone else wants to own the work. On the other hand, how can you put a price on it? How can you watch it go? Would it matter to you where it goes and with whom? If you opt to keep it and not share it, does it have the same value?

AJ is my collaboration, my creation, in a sense but in another he is something else entirely. He is his own artist as well. He is a painting completing itself, in all likelihood in a design I never considered. Watching the picture unfold is part of the fun, but it can be hard to squelch the parental urge to make corrections, to make it even more beautiful and rare. I don�t want to be one of those parents, but I can tell it�s going to be a fight. The best thing I can do is to provide him with the best paint and help him hold the brush.

After breakfast, AJ and I painted a tile that will be placed in the soon-to-be-renovated changing rooms at the pool. I helped him with the paintbrush and he selected foam stamps of a car and a moon to represent him. I painted his name in the upper right hand corner and he put his fingerprints along the bottom � his first piece of public art. And mine too.

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