Point of View

After David and I returned from Europe, I asked my teenager to write a paper telling about what he had seen.  He came up with a single handwritten page saying, “Mother went crazy over the mountains”  Neither of us dreamed that within a few years I would go to New Mexico and live in a little house where, sitting on my patio, I looked at a beautiful view of the Sandia and Monzano Mountains.  

He also wrote down that “In Innsbruck, Mom made a wrong turn and drove on the trolley tracks   Then she drove the wrong way on a one-way street.”

He insisted those were the only things he remembered about the trip.  Not a word about Paris.  At the time I thought this was his way of letting me know he did not want to write a paper.  After all, he was a teenager. 

The young boy who went to Paris with me is now a 47-year-old man who lives in California and designs traffic control systems for cities in Oregon, Georgia, and New Jersey.  When he can get away from work, he comes to see me in Texas. 

On a recent visit I reminded him I was writing blogs about our trip to Europe when he was 13.  I asked, “How much do you remember?”

“Quite a bit actually,” he said.  He recalled going up on the Eiffel Tower and seeing the paintings in the Louvre.  “You know what I liked best?  That little museum near our hotel in Paris.” 

“The Cluny?”
“Yes, the Cluny”
“It was my favorite, too.”

The intimate setting of the old monastery was exactly right for evoking an atmosphere of the Middle Ages.  The Unicorn Tapestries were right at home in those rooms, with their ancient stone walls, as were 14th Century statues of Madonnas with delicate French faces. 

David and I stood at back-to-back easels displaying Books of the Hours.  We each stood at an easel, turning glass-protected pages of  illuminated manuscripts.  The first one I looked at had wonderful borders of vines and flowers touched with gold.  At the top of each page was a small square picture of a little man in peasant garb doing some task appropriate to the month: plowing, planting, harvesting wheat with a scythe.  For October he was standing in a barrel.

“Look, David,” I said.  “The little man is taking a bath.”

Then I realized that he was crushing grapes to make wine.

How easy it is to get things wrong, even when looking straight at something.