DAVID LANG STUDIOS

Looking up with Amelia

Amelia and Paul are almost five now. They are two of my grandchildren. They look at everything, and they mostly look at things differently from the way I do, but not always.

A friend has been helping me clean and organize the studio for the past several months, so it comes with little surprise that I can rarely find things yet. She asks "is this Art, tools, an upcoming project or garbage?" "Wait a second . . . there have to be fifty categories either side of center in that line up!" The conversation is generally pretty much the same. So when she approached me with a tiny Lego Person asking where it should be filed, I held my ground. "Oh, him. I would like to put him on the second from the top shelf on the cabinet over there." . . . pause . . ."well that's where I got him!" Ok, let's stop right here!

When Paul and Amelia come to the shop, they always check to see that things are about where they remember them being the last time they were over. Important stuff, like Barbie doll body parts, toy truck parts, hand painted ponies that my friend Harriet made for me four years ago, and so on and so on.

Well, Mr. Lego, standing sentry duty from the second shelf down on the cabinet over there, looks at things quite differently than from Amelia's point of view and from mine, too. And he looks different to Amelia than he does to me. For Amelia the whole world looks quite different from three feet high rather than from my eye level. Mr. Lego seems to be off somewhere wandering the studio these days. He is not on the second shelf down from the top on the cabinet over there right now. But at the very least, he has taught me to remember to look from way down low, or from upside down or from any way other that the way that I normally would, whatever normal is for me! And therein lies a different answer, or at the very least a different question. Thanks Amelia! Oh, yeah, and Amelia brings me chocolate chip cookies!