This weekend, we surprised our kids and took them to a car show in Raleigh.
Our son has always been obsessed with Hot Wheels—and frankly anything on the road that looks like a racecar (bonus points for anything with a spoiler)—so he was in heaven as we plodded through row after row of high-end classic cars, trucks, and vans. He and his sister demanded to have a photo taken of them in front of every single car at the show. I’m talking hundreds.
As we wound through the show, I tried my best to explain to my son the level of artistry and craftsmanship that goes into making such beautiful machines. As someone who loves cars myself, but knows next to nothing about the actual machination of building one, the level of knowledge and knowhow of the men and women who do build cars fascinates me. Those who are truly great at it are genius-level savants.
I also explained to my son, as I try to with everything that seems like it has a hint of magic, that building and racing hotrods is a real job for a lot of people; how, if he wanted to, he could someday be a car builder or a racecar driver.
I don’t have many knocks on how I was raised. My parents were amazing parents (and my father continues to be. Sadly, my mother died more than decade ago) who supported my sister and me wholeheartedly. But one thing I do wish my parents did differently was to embrace the idea of working with your hands.
I was raised very much by parents who held on to a mid-century immigrant mentality that mainly manifested in the ideas of the value of hard work and the unquestioned importance of education. My parents were both second-generation Americans and it was drilled into them from an early age that their grandparents left Italy so their children and their children’s children could get an education; so they could work with their brains rather than their bodies.
And so, when I was younger, my parents forbade me from taking shop classes in high school, despite the fact that I desperately wanted to take both auto and woodshop. As my mother taught in my school, she knew those classes were where all of the junkies and flunkies hung out (which was odd, considering my parents never batted an eyelash at me hanging out with the junkies and flunkies. If anything, they encouraged it).
What my parents did instill in me was a love of the arts. Hell, they even sent me to art school for my first two years of college.
And so, after the car show (and a quick nap), I took my son to the art museum at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
As we made our way from room to room, we talked about what it means to make art and how amazing it is to look at a piece of art and have it impact you in some way. I told him how astounding it felt to create something out of nothing and how, at one point, every single piece in that museum was just an idea that existed in the artists’ heads. I told him how everyone has ideas but only the bravest among us have the courage to make those ideas into something tangible. How one form of true guts is to show the world what lives inside of us. I explained what tangible meant. I told him how plenty of people around the world make a living making art. And how cool was that?
And then, as he often does, my son said something that absolutely knocked my socks off.
He said, “Just like the hotrod builders.”
I was blown away, realizing how much and how often I underestimate the connections my six-year-old is able to create in his little brain, blown away at the cognitive process that led him to that conclusion, and blown away at the idea that my son saw a parallel between the greasy-handed hotrod builders that we so kind to him at the car show just hours before and the high-browed artists that we on display at the museum.
Unlike my parents, my son saw no difference between making a painting and building a motor. To him, those hotrods were exactly like the paintings we were looking at; ideas that only existed in someone’s head once; that they had the courage and fortitude to turn into something real; and that they created something that we, as consumers, enjoyed.
And once again, as I so often am, I was reminded that we can all learn so much if we look at the world through the eyes of our children.
Fantastic piece as always! I love this quote: "How one form of true guts is to show the world what lives inside of us." I try to live by that standard but it's hard.
I love this. It resonates — my parents are first gen from Italy and Syria — they didn’t go to college. I did — Chapel Hill. My children’s lives are so vastly different than my parents’ — and even mine.