A Matter of Perspective

I was driving through the country with my wife and three-year-old sometime before Halloween last year and I mentioned to her that I was going to pick up a few hay bales as part of the porch decorations.  I figured they would look festive and they would be useful for elevating the jack-o’-lanterns and holding the candy bowl.  My son’s ears perked up at the mention of “hay bales” since we happened to be passing by a farm at the time.

“Hay bales like those?” he asked, pointing to the huge one-ton cylindrically shaped ones I am sure you have seen.  “No, not those.  I am going to get some smaller square ones from the flower store near the 7-11”.  He was quiet for a few seconds and said “No, daddy.  Those aren’t squares.  Those are rectangles. [pause] But... but... if you turn them and turn them again then... they could be squares if you want them to.”

My wife looked at me and I looked at her.  She was grinning in a way that said “Whatcha gonna do now, big-shot?”   I would like to think that there simply does not exist an alternate universe out there where I didn’t snap out “What?!  You think yur better than me or sumptin’, smart guy?   You think you can take yur old man?! I’ll pull this car over right now and we can see who’s better than who!”, but there probably does... 

To my credit, instead of going all Great Santini on him, I just laughed and said “Dude, that’s right!  Good job!”  I was pretty impressed with his ability to see things from different points of view...

And all of a sudden that blasted out some cobwebs and solved a mystery I had been unable to crack for a very long time.

Sometime before his second birthday he started playing with Duplo blocks and a few times I was presented with, for lack of a better word, a brick of bricks.  I built an example of one a few minutes ago and took a picture of it so you can see what I mean.

“Thank you, buddy!  What is this?”  I would ask.  He would say either “It’s your exercise.” or “I made-uh exercise fur you”.  I would look at it, feign unconditional and boundless delight, and say “That’s awesome!  Thank you so much!”.  Pleased, he would take it back, put it on the kitchen table, then run off to do something else.  In the meantime, I sat there completely flummoxed.

He had heard the three-syllable gibberish-noise “exercise” before because we sometimes used it to avoid misunderstandings.  See, whenever he would hear that I was going to the gym (a place he knew nothing about) he would smile and say “Yur goin’ tuh see Uncle Jim?” (someone who he knew).  So we changed it to “Daddy is going to exercise”.  Obviously, a one-year-old has no idea what that means, either, but at least it avoided the confusion between sound-alike words.

I would walk over to this thing and turn it over in my hands a few times then put it back.  An “exercise”?  What the hell could he possibly be talking about?  

He only did this a few times but it was just so odd that I would occasionally think about it and shake my head, bewildered.  The puzzle remained for over a year until he made the comment about the hay bales.  Then it hit me that, when he built these things and showed them to me, he would always put them on the kitchen table... always right next to my gym bag.

This is what it looked like from his perspective.  

Oh, I am not trying to say that he pulled out his blocks and with superhuman thought and planning designed and built a model of a gym bag.  That’s ridiculous. I am just saying he built something just to build something, looked at this symmetrical creation in his hands, saw that it was good, and christened it after the fact based on the things he has been exposed to that he knew the name of.  He knew when I went to the gym I carried this thing with me, so there you go.  He made me an “exercise”.

Forgive me if I kinda took the scenic route here explaining the next entry on The Fridge section of this blog but his one needed a little more backstory than usual.  Besides, writing this down helps me remember a story I don’t want to forget.   

The drawing is in the upper left corner of this post.

We asked him about this doodle since it departed from his usual motif of robots or people or monsters and he said “Oh, that’s an escalator”. Now that I know what to look for and what height and visual angles and depths of field are possible/probable for the little guy, I can totally see how this otherwise unrecognizable pattern of color is, from his point of view, a moving escalator.