My somewhat pompous Uncle Bill once explained to me that “Art” was more than drawing. I was around seven, an age when I listened to him, although even then I thought he was a bit overbearing. Art, he said, was music, was dance, too. I’m not sure whether he included writing. Probably not. I already went to dancing school and liked crayons and my watercolor paintbox and so on, but writing? No one in that family ever “wrote”—that is, as intransitive verb. The verb, if it was used at all, demanded an object. Wrote a grocery list, wrote a letter. No one even wrote checks then. I walked next to my mother as she paid the grocery bill, the electric bill, the phone bill, in person, in cash.
Art. Art has repaid me. I didn’t do much with “drawing art” except for a few classes in my 30’s, and the little paintings I’ve done at the Cape and elsewhere that hang about my house. They are not “art,” per se. “Not Art” is the name of a story I wrote where the couple argues about each of their faulty creations.
But The Arts, plural, have been my life.
I stayed with dancing school until I graduated from high school. I loved it. I even returned to dance classes when I sent my daughter to dancing school, danced with her.
I played instruments, was in a woodwind quintet, in the concert band, danced in the musicals. Art has repaid me. I went to a Liberal Arts college – that’s what we called them then, was involved in the theatre.
But “repaid” suggests a monetary reward, too. Was I ever paid? Well, when I was head of the “Performing Arts” department at the New Jersey high school , I received a stipend. So I was repaid. But the art, ironically, I identify with most is the Art of Writing, which has not repaid me that much; in fact, if one considers money, very little.
What happened to Uncle Bill and his lectures? He had three children with his third and young wife, and, as far as I could see, did not provide them with “the arts” at all. I suppose he was too busy with them to attempt to philosophize.
Here’s an irony, though. I dated a boy named “Art” throughout my senior year of high school and beyond. I was in love with him, and we had a great deal of fun. At least the first few years.
Then, a few years later, I married another Art, different in all ways except for the first name. The irony! That Art repaid me in more ways than one. In fact, in two. That art repaid me with my children, John and Susan.