The Mazemaker

"He makes wonderful mazes,"the child said of her classmate, her eyes bright with admiration. A young Daedalus? I wondered, thinking of the complex mind that created the axe, the gimlet; that viewed in the River Meander a pattern for the Labyrinth at Crete, and traced in the backbone of a fish, the outline of a saw.

Would this boy too take impossible journeys and make perilous flights, like Daedalus, fashioning makeshift wings that turned out to be disastrous for his son, while he himself remembered not to fly too near the sun?

Perhaps on another day, he would become a master craftsman, with puzzles, insoluble to other men, easily solved, unraveled and undone, seen from a vantage point with the extra scope and range that began with a maze within.