I remember being in kindergarten and working on an art project where my classmates and I made imprints of our hands in clay. I remember that art project like I created it yesterday.
I glazed my hand-imprint-clay-glob a boyish, dark blue color, and then my teacher sent it off to be fired in a kiln. My classmates and I later wrapped our hand imprints in tissue paper and proudly presented them to our moms on Mother’s Day...a gift-giving of such import that today, some 50 years later, my Mom still has my blue clay glob in her house.
I recall how eager-for-approval I was when I gave my mother the art project, and I can picture quite vividly that my mother opened the gift and gushed about what an amazing artist I was. I’ll never forget how proud I felt to have made her happy on her special day.
This week I had a flashback to that experience of creating something and then hearing, happily, that someone enjoyed my art. I shot the picture you see above on a recent hike on the Washington Coast. Leah saw the photograph later and enthused that it’s one of her favorite ocean pictures of the dozens, perhaps hundreds, that I’ve shot over the years.
Leah loaded the picture onto the new, “smart” cell phone she bought recently (Leah is not one to make a big deal about possessions, but she really loves that phone.) She made the ocean picture the background to her phone’s main page, and I felt like I was five-years-old all over again.
To be honest, the picture to me seemed like a bit of a snapshot...but Leah liked it. That's all that mattered.
Here I am, a photographer in his mid-50’s, but if, during my career, I’d had FIFTY of my pictures published on the cover of National Geographic (in reality I’ve had just one,) I wouldn’t have felt the rush of acceptance as completely as I did this week when Leah put the ocean picture on her phone.
Maybe it’s just a human trait that little things can mean a lot to us.
