What does it mean to be a kid at heart?
Wednesday, 29th October 2025
The harbour looked a touch mischievous at dawn – masts like pencil marks on a child’s drawing, water scuffed into dimples by a breeze that refused to behave – so the answer arrived in the body before the mind could tidy it: a lightness in the chest, paint still ghosting the cuticles from last night, and the sudden urge to say yes before the sensible voice cleared its throat.
Last night was the first of the Tuesday watercolour sessions on Harbour Street, the room full of easels and the practical murmur of people concentrating the way children do when play is serious business. I arrived with the entirely unsuitable brushes I’ve owned for years as evidence of postponed courage and the sort of curiosity one tries not to make a spectacle of, and the instructor – a kind woman with paint on her sleeve and mercy in her cadence – said, “Start where your hand is.” So I did: a clumsy boat, a muddled sky, and an unembarrassed pleasure in making marks that didn’t have to prove anything to anyone, least of all me.
This morning, in the blue-grey before the first appointment, Tim walked beside me with his decision still undecided, both of us careful with the parting that may or may not be coming. We did the circuit we could draw blindfolded and then, instead of our practiced valediction, I asked him to try breakfast on Saturday – real conversation, not theology in weather’s clothing – which is to say I broke the rule that says dawn is for moving, not meeting. He looked almost relieved, the way a person does when the next small door opens by itself and all that’s required is to step through.
Midday broke another private ordinance: no personal messages during clinic hours, a boundary I’ve kept as if the work would collapse without its guardrails. I sent a photograph of my paint-smeared fingers to David – the careful-handed conservator of fragile things – and asked, with undignified honesty, whether paper matters as much as everyone at the community centre seems to think. He replied with a picture of a folded paper boat riding the lip of an archival box like a tiny pilgrim, and a line that made me laugh out loud in the stairwell: “Acid-free is kindness, in art as in libraries.” It was nothing, and it was not nothing – the sort of levity that shifts posture, makes the next hour’s listening less tight, the jaw a fraction less determined.
The hours did what they do – brave ordinary talk, a few silences that were exactly the right size, one conversation that felt like weather finally breaking and then deciding, on reflection, to postpone its dramatics. I noticed the small changes that never make case studies: a patient who’s been rationing eye contact allowed it to linger long enough to register mutuality, a careful feat of engineering accomplished millimetre by millimetre. And I heard myself offer, without performance, a sentence I’ve been trying to live into rather than merely prescribe: “Curiosity is not immaturity; it’s the discipline that lets fear come along without driving.”
After clinic I walked to Marcus’s for the civilised mercy of coffee at a table that overlooks the day’s comings and goings, and he did that thing he does – placing my cup without asking, as though attention could be brewed to order. Jenny appeared with a grin large enough to require its own civic permit and said she’d expected as much about the class, which was her way of approving without fussing. Elena sent me back out into the late light with lemons and a stern lecture about paper weight that somehow felt like affection; apparently, like good stock, it should carry itself.
Maggie’s note awaited me at the Historical Society later – would I mind adding a few lines to the recipe I offered for the oral history project, a brief footer on “what it feeds.” The truth is embarrassingly simple: it feeds the part of me that forgets she’s allowed to enjoy what serves no purpose beyond joy, the part last night’s paint restored to circulation. In the stacks, David lifted a palm in greeting, a small and sufficient wave, and I thought about the dignity of not rushing anything that might benefit from being named slowly.
Michael, in Baltimore, sent a photograph at tea-time: a lopsided clay bowl with a thumbnail’s worth of swagger, accompanied by a message that read, “Hobby under construction.” I told him it looked like courage cooling on a shelf and refrained from adding that I’d been waiting decades to see him make something imperfect on purpose. He replied with a rare joke – “Load-bearing won’t be required of this one” – and for a moment our shared architecture felt reimagined: less blueprint, more sketch.
What does it mean to be a kid at heart, if one refuses to say the phrase aloud? Perhaps it’s the licence to start in the middle, to try with the wrong tools and let delight outrun embarrassment by a nose, to let the body remember games the mind would schedule out of existence. It isn’t regression; it’s an ethics of play – serious in its way, because wonder has standards and keeps receipts. It’s admitting that the rule about not texting at noon can survive a picture of a paper boat, and that professional gravity doesn’t evaporate just because one’s hands smell faintly of lemon and Prussian blue.
Tim says decisions of vocation are rarely about destinations and almost always about the quality of presence one can offer in a given place, which is the gentlest argument for staying I’ve heard that doesn’t scold the part of him that longs to go. I thought of that as I stood at the window this evening, the Delaware wearing the last of the light like a shawl someone will mislay and find again in spring, and noticed how the day had made me less efficient and more alive. The inbox unhappily confirms that efficiency will want its tithe tomorrow; the body quietly insists that aliveness is not negotiable.
There were two small ripple effects from rule-breaking that surprised me. First: the steadier sessions – less braced, more porous in the right ways – as if the part of me that paints lopsided boats had slipped into the consulting chair and upgraded its capacity for tenderness without fanfare. Second: Tom, three doors down, caught sight of the paint on my hands as I passed and said, “About time,” with the satisfaction of a man who’s been waiting for a neighbour to inhabit the whole of her street. He then informed me, with proprietary pride, that his granddaughter keeps a chalk hopscotch by the pier and would permit my participation if I behaved. The invitation felt like a benediction disguised as mischief; I accepted in principle, which is to say I’m terrified and I’ll go.
I’ve avoided the word joy in these pages, partly out of superstition, partly from professional allergy to anything that smells like slogan. Tonight it doesn’t feel like a banner one waves but a quiet competence one practices – stirring stock one ladle at a time, letting a sentence breathe before answering it, asking a good man to breakfast because company wants a chair, not a circuit. If childhood has anything to teach adulthood, perhaps it’s that the heart’s work is not to become innocent again, but to keep wanting in public.
Three modest intentions before sleep: buy proper paper but keep one cheap pad for anarchic experiments; text David an actual time for Saturday coffee rather than hiding behind the elegant ambiguity of maybe; stop on the boardwalk if the hopscotch grid appears, and take my turn without editing my jump for dignity. None of this will make the day more efficient; all of it will make it more true.
Lights out, then – hands faintly stained, inbox untamed, breakfast with a priest pencilled, a paper boat drying its small hull on my desk like proof that play floats even in grown water.
Catherine
Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.
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