The Joy of Making Special
"When you wake up in the morning, Pooh,"
said Piglet at last,
"what's the first thing you say to yourself?"
"What's for breakfast?"
said Pooh.
"What do you say, Piglet?"
"I say, I wonder what's going to
happen exciting today?"
said Piglet.
Pooh nodded thoughtfully.
"It's the same thing," he said.
A. A. Milne
Creating a portfolio that reflects me and my learning has been the most challenging and awful process I’ve been through in awhile. Self-reflection can be such a trap for me as I think and rethink and change and modify and re-evaluate and then start all over again. I thought of several visual metaphors that would have worked well but nothing grabbed me as ‘IT’. I thought of doing something with hands as the theme. I tried making some pastel silhouettes rubbings of shapes that represented me or parts of my life - a light bulb for ideas, a question mark for questions, an exclamation mark for the ah-hah moments, a heart for my family, a cross for my faith, etc. I soon scrapped this idea as I considered making a Grandmother’s fan quilt pattern out of paper, showing that my grandma has had a huge influence on my life. I thought about making some kind of wheel with several layers all held together with a brass fastener. I toyed with the idea of bringing in my daughter’s lunch bag and talking about its contents. I asked my friends and family what they thought I should do and I heard words such as colourful, diverse, thinking, unpredictable and fun. This still did not give me the artifact for my portfolio. With all the thinking that was going on, something had to result and eventually it happened. I can not put a finger on the exact time I discovered my metaphor but it only happened about a week and a half ago. Both Kathy and John had said “you will know when you find it” and they were right.
So the metaphor that I have chosen to use in my portfolio is food. Seems pretty basic......we all need food, food is in every culture, food comes in many forms, etc. So why food? Food plays such a big part in our lives and many things happen around food. Food is present at our celebrations, our mournings, our meetings and our waitings. It can comfort and stress us. We go out for coffee, we meet for lunch, we have a bedtime snack. As Samuel Chamberlain says, "The gentle art of gastronomy is a friendly one. It hurdles the language barrier, makes friends among civilized people, and warms the heart." Food plays a fundamental role in relationships. We make birthday cakes, breakfast in bed and potluck dinners. Sharing food seems to forge and reinforce friendships. It is very hard to stay angry at someone when you are sharing a fondue. One of the most wonderful things about life is that we must regularly stop what we are doing and devote our attention to eating.
So for me, food can be art. I really enjoy making food special for whomever I’m feeding. My grandmother had a knack for that. She made liver and spinach into the most wonderful treat and eating her shortbread was like eating Christmas gold. Feeding people was one of the ways my grandmother showed her love. Relationships were very important to my grandma and they are important to me and like relationships, food is trans-generational and cross-cultural. Like relationships, food bridges differences in age, language, religion and nationality...Chinese food, Mexican food, Thai food, Indian food and of course Scottish shortbread made from grandma’s recipe.
My grandma instilled in me a sense of “making special” every time she used the serrated cookie cutter and the tines of a fork to make the pattern on each piece of shortbread. I watched her carefully roll balls of dough in icing sugar to make pecan snowballs. I remember her pouring tea from the gold teapot into the small hand-painted teacup that I now have sitting in my china cabinet. “Making special” was a way of life for my grandma and she has bequeathed this tradition to my mother and me. “Making special” is intergenerational and cross-cultural.
So how does this all connect to what I have learned about arts education in the last few years? Like food and relationships, the arts transcend status, ethnicity, wealth, geography, colour, race, age, religion...any of the states that we find ourselves to be in. Like food, art bridges all kind of differences. Like food, the arts give us a way of expressing, celebrating and appreciating. My grandmother synthesized all this in a simple piece of shortbread.
In working through the diverse arts experiences of the last four years, I have come to this simple conclusion - we “make special” because we love. That is what my grandma knew - that is what I want to give away. So come sit at the table, enjoy some shortbread and let’s be friends!
