My Uncle Alan was the shy introvert you would expect from the typical budding young artist. Blessed with a soft spoken and easy going nature, Uncle Alan was hardly ever in trouble at school and usually managed to blend in well with his peers. So it was with much shock and surprise when his mother received an irate phone call from his art teacher.
Not only was she surprised by the uncharacteristic nature of the call, but also because art was his favorite subject in school. Uncle Alan struggled with the traditional academic classes due to a mild, yet undiagnosed case of dyslexia. But art class was a place where he could harness his incredible creative talents and really shine like nowhere else in his life. Every day when Uncle Alan came home from school and his mother would ask about what he had learned that day, he would literally gush about some new project they were working on or new technique they were studying in his art class. His love for the class wasn't merely limited to the subject matter either. For every amiable word he had for the class, Uncle Alan found two for the extraordinary mentor he found in his teacher.
"Mrs. Newsome, I need you to come to the school immediately!" the teacher fumed over the phone line, "You need to see what your son, Alan, has done and explain to him that I will not tolerate that level of insubordination in my class."
"Alan?" his mother replied, "I've never known him to harm a fly or speak out of turn to anyone. Are you sure it's not Kevin?" Uncle Kevin was his eldest brother and already had a notoriously infamous reputation for his stubborn defiance of any sort of authority. That combined with his overdeveloped sense of responsibility to stand up to bullies who might pick on his timid baby brothers had led to more than a few fights at school and twice as many phone calls from the principal's office. After reassuring her that it was indeed her son, Alan, who had committed this horrible offense, his mother relented and agreed to meet the art teacher in her office immediately.
All during the drive to the school, his mother tried to think of what horrible thing her demure littlest son could have done to illicit such a visceral reaction from his favorite teacher. Did he throw some sort of tantrum? But the boy never cried. Did he call the teacher a bad name? But he hardly spoke up in class at all much less talked back. Did he vandalize someone else's work? But he loved all forms of artwork and was well known as someone who regularly encouraged his peers. Giving up on every scenario she could imagine, she finally arrived at the school and headed quickly to art teacher's office to finally gain an answer to this looming mystery.
"Thank you for coming on such short notice, Mrs. Newsome. I couldn't show you this over the phone," the teacher explained, "You really have to see what your son has done."
His mother sat attentively awaiting the horrifying sight that had loomed in her imagination throughout the drive to school. His art teacher reached into her files and produced a drawing created by Uncle Alan over the previous week. It was a simple pencil drawing of a brown smoking jacket. It was extraordinary because at the shoulders instead of two arms hanging down, there were instead many arms, each engaged in some different activity. One held a tobacco pipe with tendrils of smoke wafting up. One was tucked neatly inside the coat's front pocket. Another manly arm gently lifted the coat sleeve to expose a slender watch attached to its feminine wrist. An old one waved goodbye to a longtime friend. While a younger one reached out to shake the hand of a newly made acquaintance. And yet another one helpfully pointed out directions to a total stranger. Indeed, there were enough arms coming out of this coat to make a Hindu god feel inadequate.
Impressed with the quality of his work, Uncle Alan's mother sat admiring her son's fine drawing down to the intricate details of wrinkles and hair on the knuckles. Awakening from her reverie, Mrs. Newsome looked quizzically at the art teacher. "I'm sorry, I don't understand what's wrong with his drawing."
Frustrated and impatient the teacher huffed, "The assignment, Mrs. Newsome was to draw a coat of arms. I know your son thinks he is being cute! But I want you to know that I do not tolerate this sort of insolence from my students when I give an assignment."
Mrs. Newsome blinked for a moment, then suddenly burst out into a fit of laughter so hard that tears began streaming down her face. The consternation of the art teacher grew as she began to believe such insolence ran in the the Newsome family. Heaving to catch her breath, Mrs. Newsome finally composed herself enough to address the teacher properly, "Did you show him what a coat of arms looks like before he began the assignment?"
"Well, no. I assumed all the kids had seen one from their family," the art teacher replied uncertainly.
"Well our family doesn't have one. And Alan, having the creative mind that he does, merely gave his best effort at providing what you asked for: A coat... of ARMS! I promise you he wasn't being a smart alec. He just took what you told him and interpreted it literally."
Mortified, the art teacher blanched with embarrassment. Ever the stately lady, Uncle Alan's mother simply patted the teacher on the shoulder and reassured her, "If you ever have trouble explaining an assignment to him again, just call me and I'll make sure he gives you what you want."
And that was how I first learned that the people in my family just don't think, or see, or hear quite the same way everyone else in the world does.
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