the world is indeed a marvel

He is eleven, my Mathias. The whole of his life, he has been bent on creating. Lately his attentions have turned to animations and short movies. He and his best friend spend three Saturdays out of four trailing around with a video camera, shooting hours of footage, most of which that will never see the light of day as more often than not the two of them pare things down to ten minutes or less.

I am in the kitchen peeling potatoes, chopping carrots, steeping garlic in butter when Mathias calls to me across the dining room, “Hey mom, when you finish what you are doing, will you come into the living room and watch something?”

A few minutes later and I’m drying my hands on a kitchen towel; my favorite, it has tiny olive branches embroidered across it. It was a gift from my great-aunt, who had plied the Italian linen with her genius of a needle. She gave a set of them to me when I was twelve; it had been a hard year that year, and fine things were at a premium that my mother was in no way equipped to meet. The two that remain are soft now from years of use, but still strong and suited to task. I don’t know what happened to the third; when you are a person that pulls up stakes and flies into the wind, things that you’ve grown fond of sometimes get left behind in your wake.

I exit the kitchen, cross the dining room, up three stairs there is the family room and then I am entering the living room where Mathias waits expectantly for me.

I settle in to the loveseat that sits kittycorner to the desk, and he turns to me before he clicks ‘play’. “It’s kind of sad….”

And I think about it, about the technology so readily at his fingertips and its ability to proffer up vast amounts of knowledge and culture within mere seconds. I think about the ways that this influences his works now (and they are works, of this I have no doubt….their scope and depth are sheer amazing); it is in the throes of this considering that it occurs to me:

If this is the type of content he is seeking out and somehow incorporating into his expression(s) of art and communication at eleven, what amazing things will he be gleaning from the world at twenty-two and, in turn, gifting back to it?