Who has not been touched by the remarkable affirmation of life that Randy Pausch brought in the face of death? If perchance you haven't seen his Last Lecture, you must. Every now and then, a person is very clear about the meaning of life and if that person happens to be a happy one, who is articulate, smart, and warm, all the rest of us are very lucky. Dr. Pausch died of pancreatic cancer this past Friday at 47. Too young, too sad, and hearts around the world are encircling his wife, Jai, and their three small children.
Beyond the inspiration that his life offered, there was one thing in his NY Times obit that resonated here: "In his lecture, he praised his parents for letting him paint pictures on the walls of his room."
If all of our family pictures were digitized (not), I would be able to post photos of the room our daughters shared when they were little and which our artist daughter remained in after her older sister moved down the hall when the latter was thirteen. Relevance? They wanted to write on the walls. As did their friends. Always forbidden, according to modern, intelligent parenting. I'll fess up to this one: we said yes. Write, paint, scribble, tag - all the graffiti you want.
And so the walls of that room were covered, every one of them (the room is oddly shaped so there were in fact six separate surfaces), top to bottom, in black, red, green, blue, and every other color, words, designs, portraits, caricatures, "i love (names omitted for privacy's sake)" until the artist was well into her teens and wanted a more grown-up environment, whereupon she painted it a deep red. And she's grown into a very fine artist.
