I loved the cheap toy loom, square metal with upraised "teeth", upon which one stretched little colorful cheap yarn circles. I always made potholders with mine, being far too uninspired to make blankets or bibs. It's a bit like Lego blocks. It's certainly possible to make elaborate castles and mansions in Lego blocks, but I was always much more likely to take a rectangular block, interlock it with a square block, and christen the result a naval ship. I used to have huge military battles made of such stuff. For me, as for many, the mind's eye sees things the hands cannot fashion.
Tonight I met with people at the free legal clinic. It's so easy to draw broad conclusions and pithy moral input from such evenings, but pardon me if I don't.
I went, and I heard, and I told, and I'll go back soon. Thus endeth the biographical section.
Imagine, if you will, a loom in my mind, in which I string the facts of legal matters. It's string art, and sometimes the patterns are familiar, and sometimes they are not, but they are always haunting and intricate and endlessly fascinating to me. This is the way life works for me.
In tenth grade we had to make stained glass out of colored cellophane. I recall making a replica of the glass in the cathedral at Chartres. Years later, when I saw Chartres, I gasped at how beautiful it all truly prove to be. But I was exhausted by the effort of fabricating cellophane replicas.
I can't paint. I can't sculpt. But sometimes my mind expands around a problem, as if it were intricate lace. I grasp the problem as though I'm a dancing Shiva of a thousand hands. But I'm no destroyer, really. I'm an integrated circuit, and a kind of genome project, and the coolest cog in the neatest clock. What do you do if your gift is so small that a microscope is required to appreciate it? Why, you just do what you can, and luxuriate every moment that your mind tells your body to pump you full of adrenaline, because you're thinking about fascinating problems, and you need the juice.