Grace at the Portland Art Museum

Because she's beautiful and because she's my first granddaughter and because she loves to have her picture taken, I have taken hundreds of pictures of Grace.

Yesterday we were all doing the Portland Museum of Art. When we got to the basement where Robert Adams' neat show of b/w photos were hanging, I saw this Franz Wright poem fragment and asked Grace if I could take her picture, thinking it would be make a neat photo of a child reading a poem about God posted on a wall because Grace was looking up at the poem and reading it while God (the words) were looking down at her.

"I'm going to take your picture Grace," I said,
and Grace being Grace, a girl who loves to have her picture taken and who takes things quite literally, very naturally turned around so I could take her picture.

Grace is just beginning to read and reads really well for a 6-year old. She read the first line of the poem and the last line but had trouble with the words "visible" and "sacrament."

I tried to explain to Grace what I thought the poem meant and failed, and then we walked upstairs to look at Clement Greenberg' collection of mid-century mediocrities.