Gaudy yellow rackets and maroon foam balls

The artist stands fetchingly on a short plastic shiny blue stool in order to reach the parts other artists cannot reach: today is the last day for this piece. Every inch is under scrutiny. Among the newspapers on the floor is a large photograph of boys playing in a flooded part of Kolkata (Calcutta). But the only thing falling today is dust from the artist's materials. I spend most of the afternoon keeping a distance and playing a crude form of tennis with the little people. At one stage I pick up the gaudy yellow racket and hit the perky maroon foam ball so high into the blue sky it seems to go on and up forever, higher and higher, above the dark-green foliage and ivy-strangled linden tree, above the flat belonging to the depressed young couple and their need for three cars, above the charming Irish man and woman in their sixties, above the shy young man's flat at the top, and higher still, as if towards the passing white cloud, so high in the end my daughter says out loud that she thinks she's having a dream, but then, just then, as if woken from the dream, the now not so perky maroon foam ball admits defeats, admits to a kind of homesickness, and returns, slamming bouncily, to the grass again. I really thought I was having a dream, she repeats. I return inside to tell the artist what our daughter said and write it down. But the artist is working and in some kind of dream herself. I've discussed completion before but never the enduring habit of artists to dream. Art and its execution is like time out, like Kurt Vonnegut's mirrors or 'leaks' in Breakfast of Champions. Just like my daughter's take on the ever-rising perky maroon foam ball.