Pockets of Loveliness

 

I don't remember all my school assemblies. Occasionally, however, the headmaster would use the opportunity to take the school to task for bad behaviour that had been reported to him. His evocative expression for this was 'pockets of ghastliness'. That expression came to mind when my 3 year old recently started assembling a rock collection.

Many of the rocks he collects are far too big for my pockets let alone his but they presage a period of boyhood that I think is little observed or commented upon. It is sometimes said that if you want to know a woman make an inventory of her handbag, hence the fascination with what the Queen carries in hers. But if you want to know the soul of a small boy turn out his pockets.

These pockets of loveliness can often contain the unloveliest things but they contain the things of value to the boy and that makes them valuable. It is often difficult for me to understand why my son discerns value in one rock rather than another but if he catches me decanting them from the car he takes tremendous umbrage.

In some unseen and unexplained way these stones have captured his imagination and it is wondrous how small children have an instinctive and comfortable relationship with their imagination. Most children will take a screen over self-motivated play but if you take the screen away from them they have an immediate and easy access to their imagination in a way that should be the envy of most adults.

It's interesting how we talk about imaginations being captured as if they have to be confined like birds in an aviary or tamed like a savage beast. In fact children need to be encouraged to allow their imaginations to roam wild and free, safe in the knowledge that they will never be mocked or punished for where their imagination takes them.

My son's favourite stone, with which he insists on sleeping, is in fact a piece of slate which bizarrely he calls 'My father's journal'. I have no idea why he calls it this but suffice it to say I am fairly certain he is not a reader of this blog. I don't believe that my son is an embryonic geologist and I don't doubt that in time the rocks and pebbles will give way to marbles, foreign coins, small toys, and feathers. When they do I fully intend to chronicle these ephemeral evocations of who he really is.