"What Makes Their Beauty is Invisible"

My wife is a big supporter of mine, although she isn't always happy with my middle class bag lady habit of collecting bits and bobs, doodads and doohickies, parts and portions. I ate the same brand of yoghurt for over a decade, not because the product was so special, but because I wanted to keep adding to my collection of matching containers which we used around the school for everything from storage to sand play. There's a box on the kitchen counter for collecting the debris from our lives, another box in the laundry room is there for the larger stuff, and there are informal piles and stacks in drawers and side tables throughout the apartment. I know she lives with the perpetual urge to toss it all out behind my back. The fact that she fights that urge tells me how much she loves me.

Most of what I collect winds up in the "glue gun box" a large tub of miscellaneous garbage through which the kids rummage for materials with which to construct their hot glue gun creations. Consistently, among the most popular items to be found in the box are the leftover shells from my asthma inhalers. I know, it sounds a little gross, I suppose, but I do sanitize them at home in my dishwasher, and no matter how many I've collected, they all get used within days.

The sort of letter L shape makes them perfect "blasters" with which to arm a space ship. Their sturdiness allows them to be used as a solid foundation. The fact that there is a moveable part (the cap comes off and on) lends them to being secret passageways into the interior of a castle. Their pale blue color makes a nice decorative accent, perfect for any occasion. Whatever their beauty, the children see it, and utilize them as fast as I can provide them.

Audrey was particularly proud of the parking garage she had built, a comparatively massive structure she spent an entire afternoon assembling that featured one of my inhaler casings front and center. Not all the kids want to take their creations home, which means that they eventually get disassembled and returned to the glue gun box for yet another reuse, further delaying their inevitable journey to a landfill. But Audrey's project was going home with her that afternoon. Her mother, of course, enthused over it, asking all kinds of questions until she came to the inhaler remnant at which she balked, looking at me accusingly. As Audrey explained how it worked, her mother let me know with her eyes that she was sufficiently repulsed, later telling me that her plan was to dispose of it ASAP.

Months passed. The school year was over and Audrey moved on to kindergarten, although I would occasionally continue to see her since her younger siblings were still enrolled at Woodland Park. Another school year passed. Early the following year, Audrey's mother found herself responsible for overseeing the hot glue guns. I had just replenished the supply of inhaler cases that morning. 

"I recognize these," she said, holding one up between pinched fingers. "In fact, I still have one at my house." It seems that she was never able to carry out her plans and Audrey had kept her preschool glue gun project in her room all that time, by now a beloved memento from a bygone era. "She still even plays with it! And this thing is her favorite part!"

I was reminded of the classic book, The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery):

You are only a little boy for me just like a hundred thousand little boys. And I don't need you. And you don't need me either. I am only a fox just like a hundred thousand foxes. But if you tame me, we will need each other. You will be unique in the world for me. I will be unique in the world for you.

Audrey had tamed that singularly problematic piece of trash, imbuing it with significance, importance, performing the magic of turning it into something other than one of the hundred thousand other pieces of trash. That's why it had outlasted so many of the other more "proper" toys that had flowed through her life over the course of years. 

It is the time you have spent for your rose that makes your rose so important.

This is what children do with their world if we'll let them, if we don't insist that only we know the value of things. And the real hero of this story is Audrey's mother who understood, despite herself, that my old inhaler casing was important.

"Yes," I said to the little prince, "whether a house, stars, or the desert, what makes their beauty is invisible!"

The other hero is my wife who also trusts that beauty is there, even if it's invisible to her.

******

Teacher Tom's Second Book is now available in Australia and New Zealand as well as the US, Canada, the UK, Iceland, and Europe. And if you missed it, Teacher Tom's First Book is back in print as well. 

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!