Mary

I am a self-employed Early Intervention teacher and needed a break. With public radio accompanying me all day in my office and while on the road, I decided to go on the website and see Studio 360’s three photos of significant objects and the wood sculpture won out. It has personality. Multiple personalities. It looks like a plane from one angle or perhaps a car. I look again and it is a bunny with a pointy ear and a well formed eye, looking at me sideways. Perhaps I am looking at this bunny sideways…I can imagine a toddler on the cusp of symbolic play using it as a phone and placing it to his ear. Silence on one end. I sit at my computer screen and wonder. Who made this? Was it a student in a shop class who could not fashion a wooden circle and sacrificed a coin to become a wheel? Was the car an homage to a Lincoln? I chuckle to myself, all alone as I imagine a middle school student with a sense of humor similar to mine. Perhaps a patient in a therapeutic art class made this piece of artwork. If so, was the art produced in conjunction with an occupational therapist? A psychologist? Was this wooden sculpture therapy for the mind, the body or simply the soul? Perhaps some grandfatherly type with a box filled with scraps of wood made a toy for his grandchild. Did the child look up at the grandfather and ask “But what does it do?” I imagine his reply “It does whatever you want it to do.” The child and I are limited by our imaginations and eagerness to please. The child wants to please his grandpa. I want to please a wider audience. Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder they say. I think how much this wooden car-bunny-plane-phone-use your imagination thrift store find would be worth if its roots (could not help but pun) could be traced back to someone famous. Then I become quite sad as I imagine that it is a lost treasured toy car with a lost wooden wheel. I look back at the photo and it too looks sad. Once beautiful in the eyes of its owner or at least beautiful in the eyes of the artist’s mother. I imagine a grandmotherly type who held onto this kitschy artwork for years. Once a child herself, then a mom and then a grandmother who could not part with something that her own child made years ago. She used to proudly tell her grandchild “Your daddy made this a long time ago.” Years before he left for the war it sat on her shelf. It sat and sat as a reminder of happier times. It sat on the shelf next to his picture until she forgot that the war was over, that the child was now a man and that her grandchild not her son. Her cloudy mind devoid of memories was unsure whether her son ever made it home. Her mind was soon devoid of ever having a son. After they cleared off her shelf, they donated all sorts of treasures incapable of jogging one more memory to the thrift shop. Then they donated her to a nursing home and no one would even consider buying her even for a dollar.