So I picked up a brush.
And found that what I wanted to paint
wasn't greatness.
It was life.
A dog waiting by a cupboard.
Grandchildren pulling Pop-Pop toward a candy store.
Friends who stayed.
Friends who didn't.
A glass of wine.
A pair of Crocs by the door.
The ordinary miracles
we mistake for ordinary days.
I paint them in fragments now.
Angles.
Shapes.
Polygons.
Because memory arrives that way.
A little lost.
A little altered.
A little softened around the edges.
But still carrying the weight
of the moment that made it.
And sometimes,
while standing before a canvas,
I think about that younger version of me—
the one who believed
old age lived somewhere far beyond the horizon.
I wish I could tell him
that he was right to make the promise.
I wish I could tell him
that time is not nearly as patient
as he imagined.
Mostly,
I wish I could tell him this:
Don't wait.
The extraordinary rarely announces itself.
It hides in dogs by cupboards,
in candy stores,
in friends standing shoulder to shoulder,
in a child suspended for a moment
before gravity remembers its job.
It hides in ordinary days.
And one day, if you're lucky,
you'll wake up old enough
to see how beautiful it was.
Then you'll spend the rest of your days
trying to hold it still—
with a brush,
before it disappears.