Boids

My grandmother's birds, drawn by Laura yesterday with her brand new box of Crayolas! Sixty-four colors!

What's a boid?

See those blue things in the picture? Boids.

I never spoke Brooklynese, despite having been born in Brooklyn. I was raised in large part by my maternal grandmother who was French-Canadian by way of Montpelier, Vermont, and always claimed that she spoke the King's English. In fact, my memory suggests that her accent was quite bland, with most things pronounced exactly as the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of American English would have specified. And thank goodness for that; regional accents mark one, especially in America which is much more stratified than the UK.

My grandmother also taught me many other things. She taught me how to sew. She taught me how to cook. She taught me that the ONLY appropriate colour for nail polish and lipstick for a respectable woman was red. Yes, I've violated that one! But I do attempt to keep the colours ladylike...which is not anti-feminist in light of the personal accountability and insistence on equality in meaningful things that she also taught me.

And she taught me how to draw birds.

I used to draw ALL the time. I used to make the neighbour boy, three years older than I, draw with me. If he didn't, I gave him a whack on the head with my pink plastic hair brush. I loved him, you see, and I was only three.

But I didn't know how to draw a bird in flight, so my grandmother showed me. I wonder if that's something everyone knew back then, how to represent birds in flight kiddie-style. I wonder if anyone knows it now. I wonder how many mothers, grandmothers, aunties and other significant adults sit down and draw with their toddlers. I should think it would be just as important for the toddlers' mental development as reading to them. It develops awareness of spatial relationships, observation skills, colour appreciation, curiosity about the world...all sorts of things.

But the emphasis has been so much on reading and maths the last couple of generations, I really wonder how many kids ever had the fun of seeing how Dad drew a cow and telling him that wasn't how cows looked; cows were bigger, or had horns, or their tails were longer and so on. My Uncle Eddie used to draw farm animals for me. His were really good. I particularly liked the pigs. All this was odd since the entire family had lived for generations in Brooklyn, where if there's one pig or ever has been since the invention of the motor car, I'd like to know about it.

Among the first cuts to school funding is always arts instruction. And yet, art offers so much in educational value, and even more in human values. Certainly, life is easier if one reads competently, and if one can do sums enough at least to balance the monthly budget. A smattering of science, geography...and so on. But why leave art out of it? Most students are not going to become physicists nor world explorers. Most will need to do something in their spare time; maybe art. They will need to decorate their homes: art. They will need to show their own kids how to have fun with finger paints and make a total mess of the house: art.

There is art in every aspect of human life and every aspect of human life needs art. If a person can do no more than paint my grandmother's birds on a cardboard box to decorate it as a gift, isn't that enough? To add some hand-painted primitive flowers to a crumbling kitchen wall that there's no money to repair? To draw something to entertain a sad child? Aren't those reasons enough to ensure that art is taught in schools? Then, when broke or the victim of poor planning or in need of a skill to improve a place or a life, the adult can come up with a creative way to cope because he or she is not afraid of art.