Fly low, fly slow, know nothing and know you don't know

The artist worked on a larger piece today attached to the sitting room wall while the children prepared to join me for a walk. Hey, it's the weekend and we needed adventure – a user-friendly version - so we wished the artist well, gave a kind of wide but affectionate berth, and made our chatty way past the one-person double-locked travelling cars, the camera-pocked smile-shy buses, the impossibly hi-tech bicycles, and the slightly lopsided police van. We were headed for that mass of green in the middle of our urban romp. Anyway, the girl had a smile and the boy an old pair of binoculars, a rare leftover from my childhood. (I used to sit with the binoculars by the sea and watch the coasters running the feeder route and struggling through the water.) My son clearly enjoyed their maritime presence around his little shoulders as he stared from the bridge of his four small years. ‘Did you take them with you when you were little?’ asked our daughter. ‘When I was allowed,’ I smiled. We were surrounded by starlings, pigeons, sparrows, warblers, song thrushes, and woodpeckers, but I think the boy with the binoculars looked better suited for the gannets, guillemots, cormorants, and kittiwakes of his father's childhood. ‘Have you ever seen a plane crash?’ he asked, taking this flight thing a step further, or higher. ‘No,’ I said. (I had to think about it.) 'Not in person.' Anyway, we continued through the lines of sweet (Spanish) chestnut trees and time-honoured oaks and reached a secluded and vibrantly coloured flower garden and I was thinking that whenever I see bright colours it reminds me of the artist. ‘No!’ said my son. There was panic in his eyes. ‘What is it?’ I said. ‘I don’t want to go in there,’ he said. (Was that man, the so-called psychic, correct when he said our son had a talent for atmospheres?) I tried calming him and remembered somewhere in the ether hearing that the flower garden was used for anti-aircraft guns when years ago the city was bombed regularly from the air, and that some of the trees – for all I know those two over there - were cut back to ensure a good field of fire. Do you think that people had been blown out of the sky from here, or was he just a creature of habit who didn't like going a different route? Back home again, the artist was continuing her assault on the new large piece and we spread the financial and holiday sections of the newspaper across the plastic table outside and set about doing our own art. My son began with a landscape, while my daughter painted an imaginary person. Half an hour later, we were still at it. When we met up with the artist she said she was excited about the piece, and for one brief and beautiful moment we didn't know which piece she was talking about. Hers? Mine? His? Hers? There were so many.