Arly is a good artist. She comes into the room with amazing work. She usually works with a blue pen, drawing cross-hatch sketches of eyes and faces and renditions of people that any of us would frame and put on the wall. She keeps them in a notebook.
“Will you draw me one some day?”
“Yes, Mister,” she said, smiling that wonderful smile.
That was a long time ago. And then last week she came into the room and said that she had one for me. It wasn’t a sketch. It wasn’t torn from her notebook. It was on fancy paper, painted with acrylic.
As she stood there, I taped it to the growing gallery of student masterpieces beside my desk.
And after the year is over, it will be in a frame on the wall at home.