See Life

The little foam sea creatures form a conga line that undulates over the tiles. Nose to tail, crab to seahorse, they ease their way along like a wave. It's called a "mixture". That's the term created by the boy to describe that which he also created.

In his evening bath a couple of weeks ago, singing and splashing as is his routine, he called out to me. I was listening for potential disasters while rocking his sister to sleep in her bouncy. "Daddy? Daddy," he called quietly. I let the bouncy's momentum degrade to nothing and then slipped into the bathroom.

He was sitting in the tub, the soapy bubbles that surrounded him a half hour earlier nearly gone. Floating next to him were soft foam letters and numbers (72 of them), part of splendid bath-toy set. Behind him, stuck to the tiles, was the queue; all of the sea life included in the foam set in a swooping line over the wall. "Look, daddy, I made a mixture," he beamed. "Wow, little man, that's great, but do you mean you made a picture?" I asked. "No, it not a picture. It a mixture."

It has remained there in one form or another for a couple of weeks. Pieces fall or get knocked off by errant towels, but they are replaced and the entire concoction is reworked. It is art in progress, changing its wave and position, nightly. Some evenings he tweaks, some evenings he rebuilds from scratch. Numbers and letters are never used, only the sea life. It has moved from one side to the other, snaking from top to bottom. Individuals are shifted throughout the line randomly, none ever getting preference; socialism in action.

After it had been up for a week or so I went to get him out and dry him off. "Daddy, know what I want to do when I grow up?" I was taken aback. That wasn't a subject we'd ever discussed. "No, what do you want to do when you grow up," I asked. "I grow up, I make big, BIG mixtures," he said with confidence.

Every parent at one point or another imagines their children becoming artistic geniuses. It's fueled by love and pride. The boy may never go beyond his mixture, instead choosing something more mundane for his life's purpose. But his acute and natural sense of poetry and his extraordinary vision of the world around him, of which the mixture is but one example, will always be able to drive me into spasms of adoration. That's saying something, considering that foam sea life and a three year old are the two biggest components that, so far, have gone into the mixture.