Growing up off the beaten path is something those who grew up in town can hardly relate to. Living in town, as I saw it, meant nothing was beyond the reach of your bicycle or skateboard or rollerblades, and anything beyond that could be attained via public transit. For us rural children, we were lucky to reach our friends and neighbors with a bike, and skateboards were completely out of the question, given the lack of pavement. Public transit was even more foreign than paved sidewalks. Although I was limited to my bicycle, most of my friends had dirt bikes, quads, or go carts that enabled them to travel great distances that were beyond my reach.
When you are limited on how far you can travel, you become incredibly dependent on the adults around you who are willing to enable an active social life. If the adults in your life are unwilling to facilitate a social life, as was the case for me, you have none. Needless to say, something very important to my wife and I has been to adequately socialize our children. While both my wife and I were quite limited in our own way growing up, she at least had the freedom afforded to those in town.
Art, movies, and pop culture in general were all beyond my reach. My wife often laments how I hadn't seen any children's movies growing up, yet I had seen all the Jean-Claude Van Damme and Chuck Norris movies of the same era, because that is what my father enjoyed. I could talk Bloodsport and Missing in Action until the cows came home, but I didn't see "Toy Story" until after I was an adult in college and purchased it on DVD.
I should mention that seeing "Toy Story" for the first time as an adult has it's advantages. For example, all of the adult humor that typically goes over the heads of the target audience wasn't lost on me. References to "uncultured swine" and the like brought tears of laughter to my eyes. Thankfully, my children both love the "Toy Story" movies, despite completely missing all of the adult humor, and we still enjoy them as a family. My son, in particular, really loves the movies. He will randomly reference them, despite having not watched any of the series for months.
One night, when he was six, he brought out a haphazardly arranged Mr. Potato Head toy and set it on the table beside my adult beverage. His rendition of Mr. Potato Head was oddly lopsided and had the appearance of inebriation, prompting an exchange of quizzical looks between me and my wife. Before we could so much as utter a query, he exclaimed, "It's Picasso!"
Of course it is.
