Growing up, I never drew. The only picture I can remember making was a crude, stick-figure air-raid. Planes with only one wing visible shot fiery missiles at rectangular buildings. In art class, Miss Lease had rolled blank newsprint on the floor, and we drew while laying on our bellies. Other than that one time, the frustration of lines on the page refusing to conform to my will was just too much to tolerate.

In the last year or so, my mother found another drawing of mine. It was of a horse's head. Though I do not recall making the picture, I am certain that in some vague way the drawing was inspired by Johnny Tremain, a book that I read at least a dozen times when I was in third and fourth grade. In it, Johnny is a young son of the American Revolution, an apprentice to a silversmith who has his thumb fused to the palm of his hand in a crippling workplace accident.

Now, twenty-some years later, as the adult sneaking up on the child engrossed in his work, I can see that I was clearly grappling with something like Johnny's trauma when I drew the picture. Looking at it as an adult, I see neglected potential. The horse I drew was expressive. There was something there and I resolved to explore it.

Why I chose to stage this exploration on a patently juvenile medium is not exactly clear to me. It had something to do with the usefulness of the object and the immediacy of the materials. My awesome wife, Rosa used to make plates when she was a kid. I liked the way the plates endured. Most of them are over twenty-years-old, and they are still on kitchen shelves (and if that's not quasi-de-facto-immortality I don't know what is!)

But there was something else about the medium-- something about the quality of the markers captured beneath melamine film. The medium lends itself to capturing a fingerprint of a moment in time.

I am 33 years old. I went to boarding school and then to college. I have lived in 14 different cities, on three continents. I worked as a soda jerk, video store manager, temp, legal assistant, private investigator, peace corps volunteer, and standardized test tutor. For one ten-month period I occupied a window at the Superior Court of San Francisco, where my primary responsibility was referring people to other windows.

Soon I will be a lawyer. In 2008, I graduate from the prestigious, Harvard Law School. In the fall, I will begin a clerkship with the Honorable Martha Walters of the Oregon Supreme Court.

Rosa and I have one child: the indomitable Manu Klein.

I gladly accept inquiries on private commissions and fundraising projects.

* I also enjoy writing fiction. Here is a sample.