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It’s a rabbit. Well, a bunny really. Two long ears, two eyes, a small round head, the barest hint of a body. Sure, the right ear is pinkish-purple and the left is purplish-blue, both shaped a little like butterfly wings, and the head is sea-foam green, that old Crayola color. The eyes have a spiral to them that few rabbits’ eyes do. But it’s still a bunny, more real to me than that velveteen one people are always going on about.
He painted it because he was copying me.
Kids do that, copy the people they love. “Which one do you like? The yellow one? I like that one too!” The quick, cute bunny doodle is one of my hallmarks. He used to follow my hands with his eyes as I drew, a smooth line up the ears, curving around and under to form a perfectly round bunny head. He was four when he painted his bunny. He was serious—the tip of his tongue peeked out of the corner of his mouth as he painted, that’s how serious he was. With a look of determination in the tilt of his head, he made in one stroke a deliberate circle on the paper. To an outsider it might look like a scribble, but to a parent, it’s the finest of art.
It’s been eight years since he painted that picture. He’s too old for fingerpaints now, having moved on to baseball and his acoustic guitar and maybe even girls. But I finally found the perfect frame for this memory of my son’s childhood. Black, streamlined, simple. There are portraits in museums you can’t even see for all the gold and whorls and cupids cluttering up the frames. But in my personal gallery the bunny is the centerpiece.
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