Working on a Building

With Playdoh and toothpicks my daughter worked for days on a math assignment at school. She was given a list of requirements to meet. Build a three-dimensional structure with at least ten faces.  Fifteen intersections. Twenty corners.  She had to leave the project at school each day, but the work stayed with her long after she returned home.  At night I’d clear the dinner dishes, and she’d fill in the empty table space with drawing paper and pens, sketching out her next move on the structure.

“Mom, can you show me how to draw something three-dimensional?” she asked one night. I joined her at the table and sketched a square. Last year in kindergarten art we studied Robert Indiana’s three-dimensional  L-O-V-E sculpture. But she was thinking about geometry now. “See, you draw two squares, one above and to the side of the other. Then connect the corners,” I explained. That was all she needed. She drew cubes. Then bricks. The lines were sweetly askew, but pulling forward on the page all the same, holding space and possibility.

I returned to the dishes, then went hunting for clean pajamas for my son. Passing through the dining room, I saw that my daughter was onto something else involving Popsicle sticks and tape. She worked silently, head bent.  I found other things to do.

Fifteen minutes elapsed. I could hear the hushed tones of my husband reading bedtime stories to our son upstairs. If I corralled my daughter now, she’d still have time for a splashy, sing-song bath without disrupting her brother’s sleep.

By 8:00 we got it all done: bath, PJs, homework, milk, brushing, flossing, and a chapter of The Incredible Journey. Her head nodded with exhaustion while I read to her. I came downstairs and went to the dining room table. What had she been working on so intently before bath time?  There was a drawing, and a sculpture. Both cubes. In the span of one evening, she’d been both architect and builder.

The cube remains in our dining room. I looked at it often last week while I listened to news stories about Egypt, Bahrain, and Wisconsin. There is hope and power in building something new, whether it’s a bridge between synapses in the brain, a movement, or a nation. And there is beauty in the scrappy messiness of it, too: the racked sides of the Popsicle stick cube, the sooty cobblestones removed and then replaced in the streets of Cairo, and the rough draft of the Declaration of Independence.

“If I was a gambler, I tell you what I’d do
I’d quit my gambling and I’d work on the building, too.”

-Bill Monroe “Working on a Building”