One of the many things I love about James–and there’s no shortage, James is an absurdly wonderful person, and I occasionally contemplate that I am stupidly lucky in that regard–but one more thing on the pile is that I can IM him at work out of the blue and say “Come home for lunch! I need the car! I’m having an art supply crisis!” and he will say “Okay, I’ll be there a little after noon.” There is no question that an art supply crisis is a perfectly valid and deeply horrible thing to be having, which must be addressed immediately and could not possibly wait until tomorrow. I need to blow money on art supplies that may or may not be the right thing but which I absolutely positively must try on this particular piece RIGHT NOW or else? Not a problem.

He respects my art, which is a good thing, but he also respects the…mm…the vagaries of the process, the fact that my brain sometimes fires up and I really need to do this RIGHT NOW or suffer a hideous fate, that art sometimes takes over and cannot be dropped. If I was an obsessive compulsive instead of an artist, James would help me check all the doorknobs forty times before I slept, because hey, that’s just what needs to be done. And I suspect that this may be a rarer thing, and I’m grateful for it.