This evening, I was looking through a closet to see if we had some black drawing paper. I didn’t think we actually had any, but since we have a number of art supplies acquired through a factory clearance sale, and I wasn’t exactly sure of our “inventory.”

As I looked, I came across a tattered pad of newsprint. It was an 18×24 pad, and I could picture my children much younger, lying on the floor drawing sprawling pictures. Nostalgic, I pulled out the pad, and flipped it open.

On the first page, there was a child’s drawing of an airport. Planes sat on runways. There was a plane on a flatbed trailer, and some maintenance vehicles. “What nerd drew that?” W asked, looking over my shoulder. He stepped in closer.

I turned to the next drawing. Wind turbines, solar panels, and water wheels dotted the landscape of the large white page. I smiled at W. “There’s your answer.” Only W was constantly producing drawings that had to do with alternate energy sources, vehicles, geography, etc. And as we looked through the drawings, this pad held it all.

By the time we had flipped the last page, we were laughing at the spelling he had used in labeling various elements of the drawings, the complicated yet simplistic concepts, the lists of supplies necessary to build some of the things he had drawn, and the calculations—always in extraordinarily large numbers—he had completed.

At the same point, we realized we had stumbled upon something that C would later label “a keeper.” This pad of newsprint was truly a gift from yesteryear.