The Whittling Lesson

When I was a boy our family would travel from Amarillo, Texas to a small town called Elmer located in Southwest Oklahoma. It was a tradition to visit my grandparents there for the Thanksgiving holiday. With all the aunts and uncles, along with many cousins, it was sometimes wall to wall sleeping bags when it came night and time to sleep. Eating the turkey and fixings along with games and playing baseball and touch football in a field next to my grandparent's house was a time of exuberant fun. Those times still brings back nostalgic memories. There was an old time store about a mile away that sold groceries, snacks, and pop (we called it pop instead of soda). My brothers and a few cousins would walk to the store to buy items. There were some Novembers that were cold and we had to put on our coats and when we arrived at the store it felt good just to stand by a gas stove with a warming orange glow coming from it. Some older gentlemen would be sitting close to that stove and would be playing cards or dominoes on a card table. I even witnessed at times one of them whittling a piece of wood. We live in a time that you do not see old timers carving on wood with a pocket knife, but it was more common back in the day. Sometimes my own grandfather would be sitting with these men and playing dominoes (a game he really loved). I even witnessed him whittling sometimes. So I decided to do a pencil drawing of a grandfather showing his grandkids how to whittle. As with youngsters, they can grow bored or be easily distracted from this intense and important lesson, at least to the granddad. The boy seems to be fidgeting in having to sit still and the girl is watching intensely while proudly holding a small horse head that her grandfather had just whittled for her. The grandfather is now engaged on carving out a flute which was a common item to whittle. The man is a spitting image of my own grandfather who passed away many years ago. When my own mother saw the artwork she teared up because she realized that he looked like her own dad. It is a shame that such simple things in life have been replaced by video games. "The Whittling Lesson" is a tribute to days gone by.