Dumbo

I saw the movie in elementary school in LA during a heat wave. The auditorium was the only air-conditioned space, so they stuffed us all in there and played a movie. At least, I’m pretty sure it was Dumbo; I don’t remember much about it. I didn’t think the weather was all that hot, but I was just a kid. I didn’t mind not being in class: a boy’s natural habitat is “anywhere but class.”

Somehow or other, around that time, I acquired the conviction that Disney animations were kid-stuff, childish and beneath me. No, I don’t know why–maybe it was being crowded in with all those really little kids, or maybe I picked up on some older kids’ blase attitudes. Just guessing, since I remember neither.

It didn’t matter much, because shortly the scene changes to Africa. At that time the theaters were about an hour’s drive away, and we didn’t see a lot of movies anyway. When we did, it was generally something my parents thought they might want to see and didn’t suspect would be inappropriate for us. (The trailers were not matched to the current movie ratings, and I suspect they regretted some of the trailers.)

With very few movies and not much TV as alternatives, I read a lot. We had a set of the Book of Knowledge, which at that time mixed art, poetry, story summaries and science and history and all, all together in each book. You had to use the index to find a topic you wanted, but at the end of an article you probably found something else completely different but interesting. Kind of like the internet...

We also had the Britannica. One of the volumes had a special illustration page–it must have been a serious extra cost to produce–that showed how animators created an image based on layers. Transparent layers lifted off to show the various cells that made up the final image.

It was fascinating. I’d take it out, lift off the layers, and let them fall one by one to make the picture. I went to it dozens of times.

The image was Dumbo.

I was fascinated, but I didn’t want anyone to see me looking at a kid’s cartoon. When once or twice someone did, I acted like I’d been caught looking at porn. (Which I wasn’t familiar with–my mother’s medical books were decidedly not erotic, though many parts were interesting, even bizarre.) It wasn’t that it was wrong, just unworthy.

I suppose the same sort of thing happens now, if I follow a link to a link to a reference to a reference and wind up looking at something that isn’t really part of my interests–and someone looks over my shoulder.

Curiosity is too strong a word for how I got to where I was, and it’s embarrassing to realize how far drifting will go. No, I’m not really interested in horse breeds, or obsolete Japanese calibers, and the steps for how I got from Haydn to here is one of shameful unthinking “a-musing”.

UPDATE: On the other hand “When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.” ― C.S. Lewis Still, drifting is not a noble use of the mind.