Negotiating with Luke.
One recent evening, I was home alone with my 7-year-old son, Luke. We were determined to spend some quality time together. But it turns out that we have different definitions of quality.
“Let’s play ‘Tears of the Kingdom,’” Luke said.
I groaned.
“Tears” is a Legend of Zelda video game in which you direct a cartoon character around a cartoon land, and sometimes it gets worse: You get stuck for hours in confusing shrines to solve puzzles. And if that doesn’t sound bad enough, it’s also a one-player game, so I would just be watching him scurry around on the screen, while I twiddle my thumbs.
“How about if we read a book I just bought?” I countered.
Luke’s face went pale. “No,” he said, quietly horrified.
“Did you know they sell books at the library for two bucks?” I said, trying to make my enthusiasm rub off on him.
Unswayed, he offered a compromise, a video game that even I could understand: “We could play Mario Kart.”
“You don’t even know what the book is about yet,” I said. “You have to give it a chance. It’s called ‘Degas.’”
He thought I said, “Te Ka,” which is a character in the Disney movie, “Moana.” But even that wasn’t enough to spark his interest.
“Let’s play something,” he tried again.
“Just sit tight,” I said. “I’ll get the book.”
From the other room, I returned with “Degas,” a gorgeous coffee table book.
“Can you believe it? Two bucks?!?” I said.
Sensing that he was about to lose, he negotiated, and we settled on a system: I read aloud one page of “Degas,” and then he would play five minutes of Zelda.
I went first. It was hard to get past the cover, which is a detail from “Dance Class at the Opera” (1872). The composition is strange, with a large corner of the painting dedicated to a depiction of a blank, open floor. Is this an error? Why not paint another dancer in that space? A group of ballerinas form a crescent in various poses: practicing or simply leaning against the wall, bored. Then you see it: the open floor forms an opposite crescent, a kind of path crossing between the ballerinas, and to a door in the back of the room, open, giving us a view of the industrialized city outside. The contrast in styles is striking: Inside, the gauzy costumes of the ballerinas are impressionistic, while the outdoor scene appears to have been painted with tiny brush strokes, contrasting the busy “important” life of the city with the dreaminess of the life of art inside the ballet studio. Or was the ballet studio just one more factory, creating a product without regard to the souls creating the art? An older man with a cane keeps his eyes on the ballerinas, perhaps watching over the ballerinas, as if they are merely an investment.
“Wait,” Luke said, “Dad, where are you reading?”
“I accidentally started reading the second page.”
“Dad, no!”
Uh oh. Luke was rejecting my book, and our quality time together was turning into my quality time.
I gave up and set aside “Degas.”
Instead, we entered the world of Link in “Tears of the Kingdom.”
At first I was anxious to return to “Degas.”
But I slowly became convinced by the cartoonish world of Link. It was an unabashed digital world of polygons. But the muted colors harmonized nicely, the grasses waving slowly, the screen creating an illusion of depth, with mountains many miles in the distance. Suggestions of realism, but not realistic.
And most importantly, the smile on Luke’s face, which brought a smile to mine.
It would appear that quality time, like cartoons, art, and other illusions, are in the eye of the beholder.
