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Pen and Ink Drawings
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Back in Indianapolis, growing up,
I spent a lot of time with my dad, as my mother worked nights at the
post office. Dad would sometimes take me out to the ballpark
to see the Indians, our triple-A club (at that time, a farm team for
the Reds). Well...that is, me...and the entire boy scout
troop from our church. Dad was one of their
driver-chaperones. One of the older scouts, who
happened to be my brother, perfected the art of ignoring me to the
point that the rest of the troop followed suit, leaving me to sit
quietly next to my dad and watch the game in companionable silence.
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During
night games, I noticed that the fluorescent lights of the ballpark
seemed to turn the infield an incredibly bright shade of
green. Bright, yet cool. A hue I could never quite
describe (Mystical? Spooky? But those weren't the names of
colors!)
The
brillance of that peculiar color mesmerized me. One time,
waiting for the game to begin, I made the mistake of turning to my dad
and saying, "Doesn’t the field look neat, Dad? Really
beautiful? But it looks lonely. The field looks so lonely
without any players on it." Dad frowned. Apparently
the observation struck him as a bit mad, and he certainly wasn’t
pleased, either. Somewhat gruffly he said to me, "Don’t think
those kinds of thoughts." Dad’s tone left no doubt I’d
committed a serious social blunder. Period. End of
discussion.
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Adults
often
forget what it’s like for a child. A child’s world is "larger
than life." Colors brighter, people and places more magnificent,
rebukes frightfully more painful. Looking back, I can’t fault
Dad for his instinctive reaction. He only wanted to protect
me from myself. He’d raised me to be like the
cornstalks. I was supposed to have my feet planted firmly on
the ground. My mind wasn't supposed to be wandering off into
the twilight zone of aestheticism. The paradigm for behavior
in our household simply didn’t include discussions of the color of the
grass at the ballpark. To say that the grass was "green" was
quite enough.
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Now
that I am older and raising a child of my own I am much more
sympathetic to Dad's point of view. Dad did a good job of
providing the basics in life. Food, shelter, education,
values. I keep my mind focused on providing the same for my
son. Not that I don't think about the color of the grass at
the ballpark anymore. But "those kinds of thoughts" occupy
less of my mind compared to the challenge of meeting everyday
tasks. I think of day-to-day tasks as similar to pen and ink
drawings. Maybe they look easy to accomplish, but there's
more of a challenge there than one might realize.
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©
1986 - 2024 Suzanne Wolf
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