Immortality on a School Brick, Until the Kindergarten Lunch

Before they leave, final-year students at the American School of Milan are allowed to paint a brick on a school wall. It is the nearest thing a school offers to immortality. In May 2021, it came with a timetable.

9.00. Painting begins in the corridor, four students at a time, masks on. Everything has to be cleared before the kindergarten comes through on the way to lunch, because the kindergarten is not being rerouted for anyone’s legacy.

Immortality had a morning slot.

One student, who later wrote about it for the school paper, arrived with a plan: a border of green plants for youth and happiness, and her name across the middle in the elaborate lettering from the cover of an album she loved.

9.05. The paint is issued. Six pots: red, blue, yellow, green, white and black. The plan calls for roughly nine shades of green.

9.20. Mixing. The palette becomes a small, damp lawn.

10.00. One leaf.

10.30. It emerges that leaves are hard.

11.00. The border is done, and it looks much as she had hoped. The lettering is not going to happen. She paints her name in plain capitals among the leaves.

11.30. The kindergarten arrives, exactly on time. The brick is dry.

I recognise every stage of this, because I have attended a school craft afternoon with the youngest, and I brought a plan. We were to make a lantern for St Martin’s Day. I had seen one online with a stained-glass effect involving tissue paper in eleven colours. The school supplied four colours, one glue stick per table and fifty minutes.

At minute twenty I had one panel. At minute thirty-five I discovered tissue paper and glue make a material best described as wet. At minute forty-eight the youngest took over, cut a large hole in the side, called it a window and stuck a single orange star on top.

Her teacher held it up to show the class.

What I most admire about the Milan brick is the decision at 11.00. The student looked at her plan, looked at the clock and simplified, without fuss, so that the name could go on and the brick could dry. My lantern needed that decision at minute ten, and I never made it.

The lantern came home. It now hangs in the youngest’s room, window and all. It has outlasted my tissue panel, which was thrown away at minute fifty, by the youngest, without consulting me.