The best ever drawing smiled at me from the wall. A simple flower with a smiling face, tiny petals, and a thick stem, drawn by my oldest daughter, Emily, when she was five years old. She signed it with her first initial, “E” perfectly printed. It had somehow survived 11 moves over the course of 23 years, and now hung on the wall of my new home.
The drawing’s simplicity made it a profound statement piece that always said to me, “Everything is going to be okay,” even in my darkest hours.
I stood grinning back at the flower, and suddenly wished it could jump off the paper and into my arms. I wanted to hug that flower, hold it in my hands, caress it, and talk to it.
And then it dawned on me: I could.
I hunted down my cell phone (which I never carried with me, and was constantly hiding somewhere in my house), took a photo of the flower and texted it to my technically savvy and artistic younger daughter, Bobbi, who owned a 3D printer.
“Do you think you can turn this into a 3D object?” I texted.
“Absolutely!” she texted back almost immediately. Ah, technology. Sometimes I hated it so much that I wanted to throw my phone on the ground and stomp on it. This was not one of those moments.
Nevertheless, I grappled with the conflict that periodically raged inside of me: I simultaneously found myself fascinated by and despising the various new technologies. Here I was taking a simple child’s drawing and using technology to bring it to life. I literally found myself in a moral dilemma as to whether I was compromising myself in doing so, contributing to the downfall of society by engaging with this new technology. Or was I perhaps putting a positive spin on technology by using it to grow a small smiling flower that would bring joy to everyone who it?
The overthinking exhausted me, so I stopped doing it.
Bobbi and I agreed on a stone colored filament that she would use to create the 3D printed sculpture. She went to work designing a beautiful digital 3D interpretation of the flower and printed it. It was about 9 inches tall, and she also created a beautiful gold stand for it (reminiscent of the stands she had that held Barbie dolls when she was little). Emily’s notable “E” was prominent on the stand. We decided to surprise her with the flower on her 38th birthday, and predicted accurately that she would cry tears of joy and recognition when she received it.
Well, apparently, the flower wanted to propagate, because in process of creating the 3D flower, one was a test model which Bobbi kept, another was lost in the mail, and a final one was made for Emily. Later, I received a wonderful surprise when UPS delivered the lost flower to me.
As we all sat at Emily’s table eating the three layer chocolate birthday cake that I’d made, I looked at the smiling flower that was now displayed on the shelf nearby and smiled. Maybe technology, when used right, wasn’t so bad after all.
I turned my attention to my granddaughter who was eating her piece of cake. I watched in fascination as she pulled fork fulls of cake from between the layers of frosting. She turned to me and said, “The cake is good. I just don’t like frosting.” She continued to pull cake out while leaving the frosting standing undisturbed.
She soon finished her piece, and proudly presented her plate of frosting to her mom, Emily. “Look, Mommy! It’s an E!” Sure enough, the standing frosting was in the shape of a perfect E that looked just like the E on Emily’s childhood drawing and the 3D printed stand.
What a precious moment, I thought to myself. How I love the analog life.
And then I thought, I should take a photo of that.
