Littlethumb Sneezed

3 - The Assignment

Littlethumb and his siblings attended a small, private, liberal arts school in their neighborhood on the Upper East Side. Upper East Arts, or UEA, is a fictional school I have created for the purposes of retelling this story. The actual school Littlethumb attended had an ethical issue with allowing me to use their name for free. I was fairly confused by their attitude, but whatever.

Elisabeth Brooks did not teach at the same school her children attended, as parents who are also teachers so often do. Elisabeth felt it was important for her children to develop their personalities without one of their parents in close proximity all the time. Littlethumb wished fairly often that his mother did teach at UEA. His siblings, on the other hand, suffering the travails of puberty, were in complete disagreement with him.

The school's curriculum was designed in the style of a liberal arts university. The children had a core set of courses each student was required to take and electives from which they could choose. The classes were staggered throughout the week. Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays were devoted to core classes, with electives on Wednesdays and Fridays. The school's research reflected a strong pattern of student success based on similar scheduling for preparatory schools in other countries. In a surprising twist for an American school, the administrators chose not to ignore the research.

Anyway, I point this out because Littlethumb had art class on Wednesdays and Fridays. His first two days of school after his grandfather's funeral and the Occurrence were exercises in sheer tedium. As a matter of fact, Littlethumb learned the word tedium that Tuesday when he asked his English teacher for a synonym for boredom. As her students quietly worked on a creative writing assignment, the teacher responded from her desk without looking up from the romance novel she herself was trying to write. "Tedium," she said. The mild insult to her classroom environment had not registered with her. Perhaps she was feeling it too.

Now it was Wednesday, and Littlethumb was in a good mood as he and his siblings walked to school. He had art class that day, and even though he could paint at home whenever he wanted, he loved art class. Of course, it just had to be the last class of the day, and Littlethumb still had some pain and suffering ahead of him. On this day, however, that seemed like a tiny hill to climb. Shoot, it was an anthill to merely step over. Suddenly he was a giant, slowly and laboriously lifting his giant leg over all the tiny obstacles of this day, planting his foot firmly onto the hallowed grounds of the UEA art room.

His brother Freddy wondered aloud why Littlethumb was such a nerd. His sister Heather told him to stop through clinched teeth because he was embarrassing her. Littlethumb realized he was walking like a big ol' giant in front of a bunch of other people nearby who were also headed to school and work and wherever else they might go in the morning and he blushed earnestly. Still, he had one more giant, mutant anthill to step over with his big ol' giant leg before he could stop.

***

One of the things Littlethumb had most missed while he was away, besides his family, was art class. His reasons were twofold. First, he loved art. He loved staring at it. He loved making it. He loved when the paint or clay or whatever they were working with got on his skin. He loved the way it felt when it dried, and he loved cleaning it off. He loved staring at a blank canvas and having no idea what he was about to do to it. He loved the instant gratification of making nothing into something. The simple act of adding a colored line to a blank space gave him great satisfaction. Even as a child he was smart enough to wonder why it affected him this way, but wise enough, especially after the Occurrence, not to waste much time on that wondering why.

The second reason he loved art class was his teacher. I know what you're thinking. Maybe? No. His teacher was not some lovely woman for whom the boy would have a romantic, artist's crush. His teacher was a young man.