Heinrich Baumgart

They didn’t want to let me in. The young man at the door looked me up and down, took in my frayed coat, my scuffed shoes, and made that polite but firm expression people make when they’re about to turn someone away.

I laughed, maybe a little too loudly. “Do I really look that rough?” I asked. He hesitated. Maybe I smelled like turpentine again—I forget sometimes when I’ve been working in the studio all day.

I was still chuckling when my grandson appeared, waving his phone in the air like a magic wand. “He’s the artist,” he told the doorman. “The artist.”

Recognition flickered across the young man’s face. He stepped aside, muttering an apology, and I walked into the gallery that was suddenly filled with my name, my work, and people discussing me as if I were someone important.

It was strange. At eighty-two, I was used to being overlooked. I had spent most of my life in the front seat of a taxi, watching Berlin, Germany, rush past while I stayed in place, waiting for the next passenger. At night, I sculpted and sketched in my small apartment, never thinking much about where it would lead.

Recognition had never been my goal. I did art because I had to—because my hands felt useless otherwise, because ideas swarmed in my head like restless birds that needed to be set free. I had once tried to study art, but rejection came quickly, and I didn’t try again. I needed to make a living, so I drove a taxi and made art in the hours when no one was looking.

Then, years later, my grandson filmed me at work, and the world suddenly cared. People from places I had never seen wrote to me, praising my hands, my mind, my patience.

And now, here I was, surrounded by strangers who whispered my name, some of them trying to act as if they’d known my work all along. A woman in an expensive coat turned to me and asked, “So, what inspires you?”

I smiled, shaking my head. “Time,” I said.

She nodded as if that made perfect sense, but I knew she didn’t understand.