A couple of weeks ago, an ordinary Saturday. I am reading in the living room chair. Owen props herself on the arm of the chair next to me, a fresh pad of drawing paper on her knees.
"I want to draw something. Tell me what to draw," she says.
"Draw something from your imagination," I tell her.
Exasperated, she rolls her eyes. "But that's hard."
"Why is that hard? You're very creative."
"There's so much in my imagination, it's hard to choose just one thing!"
Eventually she draws a monster with six eyes, six strands of hair, six smiles, and six necks. She calls him "Six of Everything". He has one nose, though.
Tonight, walking home from dinner at my dad's. The sky is clear, the stars are out.
Owen looks up. "I am so interested in the stars. I'm curious about space," she says. "Tomorrow I want to write a book about that."
She reminds me of a story we heard on NPR about an Iranian women who fulfilled a life's dream to travel into space and wrote a book about her experience. We were in the car when we heard it. I didn't know she was listening.
"I have so much curiosity it bubbles up to my brain and comes right out," Owen says.
When we get home, before she can put her pajamas on, she has to write her title page: Space/My Curiosity of Space of the Stars to (sic). (She asks us how to spell the words she doesn't know.)
"See," she tells me,"I'm like that lady. She had curiosity about space and she went there and then she wrote a book about it. I have curiosity about space and I'm writing a book about it."
Indeed, my girl, curiosity and imagination will take you far.
