Friday, January 11, 2002

Painting on Windows

These days, when I look up from the New York Times to gaze out our big front window, everything I see is framed by images my two daughters painted on the glass. In washable tempera paints, they rendered lovely, drippy versions of candy canes, holly leaves, and other emblems of the recent holiday. This crazy activity of painting on windows has been handed down from my mother, who, in the early 1970s, was so cool that she made her own yogurt, granola, and culottes. One year, rather than hanging a Halloween decoration on our door, my mom painted a gigantic and truly scary witch face on our front window. My friends were impressed. And that left an impression on me.

Like me, my daughters love the extravagance and weirdness of painting on windows—it’s such a vast canvas—and knowing that a bucket of water is all it will take to clean the slate and start anew inspires our experimentation. The transparency of the glass also adds unexpected perspective both to what you paint and what you see through and around the painted images. For example, I have watched surly teenagers slouching home from school through a childish, painted frame of whimsical carrots and bunnies—and through that frame I’m more sympathetic, picturing them as the children they so recently were. Sometimes, funky frames of crooked Valentine hearts and fat cupids seem to target passersby with their arrows, sweetening the expressions of couples quarreling on their walks, and beaming at neighbors who shovel sidewalks for one another. And once, through the frame of a huge, freshly painted angel with a wobbly Woody Allen face, I watched in amazement as a person, who had ignored his dog’s droppings in our neighborhood a thousand times before, began that very day—I swear—to pick up after his pooch. Was it my angelic view of him, or his view of me peering from behind the angel, wings sternly on my hips, that changed the course of events? Who can tell? But we both began to see the world differently through that divinely altering frame.

I took this idea of seeing through different frames quite literally, when, as a late teenager, I stopped wearing my glasses for a few years. I preferred the blurred look of my astigmatism to the clarity of the world, which, to my sensitive, newly adult eyes, seemed full of sharp edges and ugly truths. While my impressionistic view of the world probably accounts, at least in part, for my mortifying grades in two semesters of college physics, it also made me dreamy enough to become a campus activist, mid-1980’s style. Ah, those memories of shouting through a bullhorn for my university to divest its interests in Apartheid South Africa, and pulling an all-nighter typing on hundreds of stickers that friends and I later plastered all over town the timely Iran-Contra taunt: “Do you believe Oliver North when he says he was lying?”

Now, as a college teacher, I introduce my first-year writing students to an idea my colleagues and I actually call “framing”—asking students to see what comes into focus when they look at their surroundings through the eyes of different experts—like sociologists, or economists, or educational reformers. Those “Aha!” looks on their faces when they reconsider familiar aspects of life through a defamiliarizing frame—seeing all new features of an old terrain—those are some of the best moments of teaching. As writer Amy Tan says of these “cognitive awakenings,” “Once I added ‘mauve’ to my vocabulary I began to see it everywhere.” Ideally, trying out new frames through which to see their lives will not be something our students do just in our classes, but will become new “habits of being.”

I spent some time contemplating my own “habits of being” while in New Year’s-resolution mode this past week, and have committed myself this year to discovering new frames through which to view the world. For example, I’d like to start reading newspapers not written in the United States, and to work on a foreign language. And I’d like to learn more science (to atone for that bad year in college physics). I am especially inspired by friends who have gone out of their way to meet a recently immigrated Afghan family, and are seeing the world through some delightful new cultural frames. Judging from my own children’s enthusiastic response upon learning that formal Afghan meals often begin, rather than end, with generous bowls of candies, bridging the Eastern and Western gaps might be far easier than our political leaders imagine, if we frame those connections the right way.

At our house, it’s time to wash off the front window and start afresh. As I sit here, brooding over the root canal I’ve just found out is in my cards and looking out our window on a bleak winter day, I am reminded of a favorite, grumpy line from a Greg Brown song: “It looks like February 19 and November 8 / Had an ugly little baby and they’re gonna call it Today.” And I think how good it will be to see all this through a fresh frame of Valentine foofery. Girls, get out those paintbrushes—let’s go to work!

Broadcast by April Lidinsky on January 11, 2002
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