So, I have reluctantly agreed to be a guest blogger on my brother’s site. Not because I have anything against my brother per se, but because this whole blogging thing is new to me. What would I even blog about? I asked him as he we circled around the parking lot of my favorite sushi place. He assured me that any topic is a good topic to blos about, if written from the right perspective. And, after reading some of his blogs - farts, family dinners, Korean food, etc. - I’d have to say that I agree.

My first thought is that I’m still not sure I want to do this. It feels like I’m at the edge of the rabbit hole and I’m not so sure I want to jump into this alternate universe. My life is already too busy as it is - work, kids, school, etc. Plus, I’m the kind of person who runs all his emails through SpellCheck and uses the proper punctuation marks on text messages. Blogging seems so … informal for someone like me. Are you sure I could pull it off? I’m not funny and I don’t have any profound thoughts I’m dying too share with the world.

That’s ok, my brother assured me as we pulled into my favorite bookstore. Neither are most of the other bloggers out there.

So, somewhere between being bribed by books and sushi and a sincere desire to write for a different audience, I’ve decided to jump into the rabbit hole in the name of aesthetics. After all, I’ve bungee jumped, gotten tattoos, lived in foreign countries, worked as a high school teacher. After experiencing all of this, how hard could it be to write a blog?

Initially, I thought I would talk about what my brother was like as a child, how he once convinced me I had been found in a shoebox outside a dumpster and wasn’t really part of the family. I was in pre-school at the time and I think he wanted me out of the house so he could make room for his growing Star Wars collection. He tried to get me to leave out the backdoor so my parents wouldn’t see me. Good thing our mother came in to see if we were ready for dinner. Otherwise, I might still be roaming around Ft. Leonard Wood, Missouri.

I’m still a bit traumatized by the whole thing and have been waiting for payback ever since.

However, this is not the place or the time for that. Instead, I am going to talk about what it has been like to grow up in a home where we were all encouraged to be artists. My brother with his stories and his paintings. My sister with her music. Me with my words. Our parents always encouraged us to pursuit our artistic talents and, like most artistic families, it seems like we were all touched by that magic. I can’t say that we all listen to the same music or appreciate the same visual artists. We certainly don’t read the same books. There are no vampires or spaceships in the books I read or hope to write one day. However, we can all be found immersed in our art on any given day. And we have all learned to communicate to each other and to the world through the special role of an artist in society.

Learning to be an artist, a writer, has been the most important lesson I have learned from my parents. It has had a profound effect on my identity and how I see the world. It has been with me through every dark moment and every blissful day. I have filled my soul with words the way some people fill their soul with religion. Like a true believer, I can say these words have never let me down. As I watch my two young children develop their own individual personalities, I see that they have also been bitten by the bug. My son goes around the house making up his own songs and singing all day long. My daughter asks for paint, paper, and jazz music every evening. And because they are my children and literacy is important to me, they have been inundated by a flood of books since before they were born. This is my gift to them. I am providing a room, a space, where art is not only appreciated, but loved, nurtured, and created by the girl and the boy who call me Papi.