Monday, November 17, 2025
My 76th birthday
Memorial of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, Religious
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Jasper’s house
Blind man sat by the road and cried
Blind man sat by the road and cried
Blind man sat by the road and cried
Oh, oh, oh, show me the way to go home
Jasper buckled himself into his car seat. Miles and Andi, with 8-month-old Finn, played rummy and hung out in our apartment with Margaret, while 6-year-old Jasper and I headed a few minutes down the street to the Pottery Studio.
Austin Classical School would be getting 30% of the studio’s profits between noon and 5 last Friday afternoon. Although Jasper nearly fell asleep in the van, he wanted to paint some pots. Nathan welcomed us and explained the procedures, and Jasper took over from there. He walked around the three walls of unpainted pots and sculptures. I followed him.
On the third wall he picked up a tall white square clay house with eight small upper windows facing the front above the door. He turned the house around in his hands. “I am absolutely going to paint this,” he said quietly, with certainty.
We headed for a table on the edge of the room. More students from ACS, all girls, kept coming in with their moms, and the room filled up quickly. Jasper said no more. I felt his confidence as he led me across the room to the paints and asked me to give him one of the plastic trays with six small wells.
He couldn’t reach the squeeze bottles of paint. “Can you give me some red?” We chose “hot tamale. “And some blue,” and we picked sapphire, “and some brown,” and he liked “brown cow.” He chose two brushes, one thin and one thick.
For the next hour Jasper patiently painted in silence, first the windows with the blue and then the door with the brown, and finally the entire inside and outside of the house with the red. He asked me to get him more hot tamale red paint several times. I read my Kindle book and didn’t say a word, except to remind him to pull up his sleeves when he painted the inside walls.
Then Jasper sat back satisfied in his chair. “I’m finished,” he said with authority. “And now I need to paint a man to live in the house.” He walked to the nearest wall of clay figures and gestured for me to follow. In less than a minute he had decided. “Here’s the one I want,” he said, with no question in his voice. He needed no one’s approval. I loved it.
He asked me to get him some black paint to fill an empty well of his pallet. I chose “tuxedo.” “And some more brown, Grandpa. And a little more red.”
The little man had a scarf wrapped around his neck, which Jasper painted brown. “Is your little guy a snowman? I asked him, and he shook his head. “This is a gingerbread man, Grandpa!”
Soon he was finished with his little man. I remembered Andi’s favorite art project at the University of Illinois – a big man made of wire, tin foil and a computer circuit board, accompanied by a very small man sculpted out of red clay, looking up with an admiring smile at his tin man king. I felt the genetics of three generations swarming around Jasper’s mom and the two of us. Sitting back in his chair, a chair bigger than he was, Jasper rested. His smile exuded confidence, and he didn’t ask me what I thought about his work. I paid Nathan the studio fee and made arrangements to pick up the fired pieces in a week or so.
Several months ago in April, both Miles and Jasper with their grandmas visited the studio as part of a Christmas gift from Andi. Jasper painted a “donut,” but the studio lost his piece, which still bothered him, even in November. It surprised all of us that he wanted to return. “I didn’t like it that I didn’t get my donut,” he told me as we were walking in.
I told the studio supervisor, Nathan, about Jasper’s experience. Nathan apologized and gave us a $30 gift card. I showed it to Jasper when we left, but by that time he didn’t really care; he was just happy to be an artist with no interference. Doing just what he wanted mattered a lot to him.
And after our ninety minutes in the studio, Jasper suddenly became a happy-go-lucky kid bursting with ideas about what to buy at the grocery store before we headed home. He chose some Lunchables and then ran around the cart, “Can we get this, Grandpa … can we get this? Grandpa, look at me!” He was holding a giant box of yellow cheddar Goldfish and beamed up at me. “Can we get this?” His smile seemed wider than his face.
I laughed. “Nope,” I said. He didn’t mind at all. I needed to get some cans of chicken soup, and he pulled one after another off the shelf to put in our cart. “Can we get this, can we get this?” He just laughed and laughed.
As Chet Garner on his show The Daytripper says near the end of every show, “What a day!” Jasper was great company in his silent artist’s confidence and his expansive joy after, and I felt the same way Chet does. “What a day!”
For sixteen years Chet has closed his show with a bit of Spanish: “Vaya con Dios, amigos!”
Go with God, my friends.
“What do you want me to do for you?”Jesus asked.
The blind man replied, “Lord, please let me see.”
Jesus told him, “Have sight; your faith has saved you.”
He immediately received his sight
and followed him, giving glory to God.
When they saw this, all the people gave praise to God.
(1 Maccabees 1, Psalm 119, John 8, Luke 18)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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