“Daddy, I’m puking!”

Ah, the sweet open innocence of youth! But is this a harbinger of things to come? For the present he’s only a month shy of seven. That other thing lies seven to ten years in the future.

“Coming.”

Must have caught a bug. He wouldn’t eat a bite of supper after filling up on a giant cookie and cucumber slices after school. Said his tummy hurt. Went upstairs to read quietly on his own. With mommy off at the hairdresser’s it gave me a chance to do a little reading myself.

Then I heard the gagging cough. “Whoops,” I thought. Sure enough, it was splashed all over the carpeted hall. He hasn’t learned to make it to the toilet yet. Although he did later when it was time to brush his teeth. Only, I had closed the lid. Bad timing.

So it’s the next day and I’ve drawn the short straw to stay home with him. After his allotted time on the Wii he nibbles on a piece of toast. I’m fiddling with iTunes, downloading the morning’s entertainment. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Usually his screen time is limited to one hour per day, but when he’s home sick I make allowances. After all, I’m only human! Following a few false starts the movie gets underway.

It is long and delightfully entertaining. Full of magical adventures. “I think they’re falling in love,” says Sonny-Boy. “That’s what tends to happen,” I say. All ends as it should and the two of us, quietly singing the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang song, head out for a burger at the local diner.

Back home it’s quiet reading time. He’s got his Diary Of A Wimpy Kid series on the go, plus a few darkly graphic Bone books. We–mostly the Wifal Unit–have been reading to him since he could sit up. He is a strong reader, and I cannot help thinking what an advantage that will be in the years to come.

Downstairs I crack open Elie Fauré’s Spirit In The Forms. Soon after first learning about his four volume History Of Art series some twenty-five years ago I stumbled upon it at a second-hand bookstore in Montreal. Life has an uncanny way of providing. Later, raising money for travel, I sold it for a song. It took me ten years to reacquire the books. The only other set I know of is down at the Omphalos Cafe.

Listen:

“Academism, which invokes classicism, has a contrary purpose, since academism, in those epochs when the fermentation is most acute, when all laws, all systems, all dogmas are under discussion, when the family is dismembered, when the leprosy of interests and the flame of intelligence consume the ruined social body, maintains a miserable fiction of order and unity in chaos, while round about it a thousand new expressions are born or developed, and the few men concentrate the chaos in the order and unity of their spirit.” –Elie Faure, The Spirit Of The Forms

What a mouthful. Typically French? I wouldn’t hazard a guess, but it does remind me of the tortuously circuitous sentences of Faure’s contemporary, Marcel Proust. Wish I could find the paragraph were he describes the freshening of the air, the first soft tinkle, another, kin to the first, a leaf touched by a drop, then two more, and the smell of humidity shoving aside the afternoon warmth, more drops, scattered, arrhythmic, a bead-like tear sliding silently down a window pain, a hushed expectancy straining for….

Ok, I’ll stop. It started to rain. No wonder Remembrance runs to three thousand pages.

“…When the family is dismembered, when the leprosy of interests and the flame of intelligence consume the ruined social body….” I like that.

Sonny-Boy is still reading upstairs. No point in disturbing him. Perhaps while he reads I’ll sneak in a short nap.