Next to the sock in my purse are three markers. I fish them out on long drives while my husband navigates traffic. Scraps of paper wrestled from the car’s crumb-and-carpet hideouts make a canvas: envelopes, napkins, gum wrappers. My first instinct is always to draw a maze. The kids love them. There’s something reassuring about a wandering line with lots of breaks in it. I sketch the labyrinth carefully, making sure it works. My head spins from taking my eyes off the road. When I pass the paper and a pen to the back seat, a neck crick overrides my dizziness. I want to admire the crowns of my children’s heads while they work. Instead I face forward, enjoying the silence of their concentration.
Last week I was tired from a virus and drew C- mazes en route from Richmond. Dragging the marker on the page with my eyes half-closed felt like a trance-dance on Arabic script. My son’s line floated free over the walls—a call from a minaret.
Creative kids sometimes would rather have a sing-a-long with ole Gene Autry, singing “Don’t Fence Me In” . Guess it is WE, sometimes harassed parents on a long car trip, who feel the commonality of entrapment in a car overpopulated by 4 (or more) human beings and the confines of our symbolic journey up and down the corridors of a maze. Our kids escape over the walls to freedom effortlessly – their marker line can leap RIGHT OVER the maze”fence” to the “open plains” – NOOOOOO problem.
“Next to the sock in my purse…”
I got stuck right there.
I probably would never make through one of your mazes.
😀