I am twelve or thirteen years old, and I am sitting on the floor watching Albert Lamourisse's short wordless film, Le Ballon Rouge (The Red Balloon). I will not see it again for some twenty years, until it turns up in a catalog of films for writing practice. When I show it in class, I will remember every scene, every note of the music. My students, feigning the disaffection that they think passes for sophistication, will brand the piece "stupid," but I will be mesmerized once again.

At first, of course, it was a gray balloon. We didn't have a color television when I was twelve or thirteen, only a 10-inch black and white Philco. When I was twenty I took my first art appreciation course. It met once a week for three hours beginning at 4:00. We saw slide after slide, a thousand years of art in fifteen sessions. The semester began in January, and the weak light that came through the high windows would fade as I scribbled my notes. I would emerge then into winter darkness, my head ablaze with the images I had seen.

In April I went with my class to New York City. We went to the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim, and I knew for the first time what it meant to stand in front of Vincent's Starry Night instead of to look at it flat on a page. I bought a postcard reproduction of Paul Klee's The Red Balloon, seen above. I liked the painting, and it reminded me of the fantastical red balloon that takes a lonely little boy up and away from his troubles.

I have been learning the vocabulary of art again, terms like en plein air, tromp l'oeil, pochade box, and the names of the colors, alizarin crimson, cerulean blue, cadmium yellow light. I did this because I created a character who is an artist, and as she developed I needed to know what she was painting, to learn the geography of the world she was giving all other worlds up for.

In creating this character I was trying to write a story with no me in it, no autobiography. Carolyn is so dedicated to her art that she is ready to give up all the things she thought she wanted, including having children, in order to create. Her husband, on the other hand, wants to start the family they have always planned. I worked hard to make both characters sympathetic. It's Barry's story, but I don't want Carolyn to come off as heartless or selfish. Both characters are entitled to want what they want, but since the situation cannot accomodate compromise, one will have to give up utterly.

No piece of fiction, of course, is entirely free of autobiography. We write what we know. But sometimes a piece is impeded becuase it's so hard to lose the autobiography, to change details to serve the story rather than the memory it springs from.

For some time now I've been trying to write a piece about my daughter's first spoken paragraph. She was nearly two, and I'd taken her to a mall to see Grover from Sesame Street. He gave her a green balloon, which got away from me on the parking lot. We watched it get smaller and smaller as it moved away from us, and she howled with the depth of her loss. Later she said to a neighbor, "I see Grover. He give me green balloon. Mommy let it fly away," the first time she'd strung three sentences together into a narrative.

The piece was not working, not as a poem, not as a prose memoir, not even as an anecdote. Then this morning, thinking through this piece, I remembered her leaving for the Valentine dance a few weeks ago. She was dressed in red, with her hair done up. Her date was another ninth grader, but they didn't need parent transportation. An eleventh grader, a boy who goes to our church, would be driving. That boy and his date came into the house along with Isaac to collect Lynn. I bid them a cheery goodbye, but stood at the window longer than was really necessary, watching the taillights recede down the driveway.

Lose the autobiography. Make it a red balloon that marks Lynn's first big loss, as the lights on Derrick's car mark my most recent one.

When I finish this piece I'm getting out my tape of The Red Balloon, itself a fable of loss and change. Later still I'm getting out fresh white paper and the Derwent watercolor pencils I bought a year ago but have been afraid to use. There is an undiscovered artist in me, I've learned this past week, a little bit of Carolyn I need to get to know.