Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Culture Matters

We have always tried to give our children culture in their lives, e.g., music, art, theater, dance. We have shelves of crayons, colored pencils, paints, sketch pads, clay and a variety of other mediums. Each of our children have been "required" to explore a minimum of a year with a musical instrument. We've exposed them to the classics in art and literature. All of this hoping it will enrich their lives. And from time-to-time we experience the pay off.

We've had a pocket Etch-A-Sketch sitting around our home for awhile now. I'm not even sure where it came from. I know someone must be playing with it, because it moves around the house appearing from place-to-place. It appears on counters, tables, bookshelves and even the floor. That could be very exciting, no, mystic, seemingly moving around the house under its own power...if there were a message on the screen. But, when ever I see it...it's blank. Not so much as a scribble. Or, one of those scrappy wiggly lines, a vain attempt at writing your name. Or, even better, a cryptic message to the sketch pad's next user.

And while given what I've written in the first paragraph I wouldn't consider the Etch-A-Sketch culture, in the larger scheme of things, it was with much delight and interest when I discovered my son, Domenick, busily twisting the knobs "sketching" away. And it was with even more delight as he showed me what he'd drawn. Given I'm his father and easily impressed with his or any of my children's talents, still I was impressed. And, given the years I've seen an Etch-A-Sketch set in to motion I thought it was a pretty neat creation whipped out in two to three minutes. And while I know there are certainly more intricate creations on the nearly 50-year-old toy I was even more impressed with Domenick's inspiration. And here's the pay off.

"Hey, it looks like one of the sculptures we saw during our trip to the Getty Villa." I said.

"Yup, that's what I was thinking of when I drew this. 'Bearded Man." He replied.

Culture matters.

1 comment:

toni said...

Hey, did your son do the cover art for the Beatles' Revolver album?