When I was 14, I volunteered at the Steinhart Aquarium in San Francisco, and, through an elaborate set of circumstances, I was lucky enough to go on a trip to the South Pacific to swim on the back of a 30-foot whale shark. The night before I left, my grandfather, Charles Eames, showed up at our door completely unexpectedly. He came with a camera, one of those very basic 35mm models that came to market in the mid-1970s, for me to take on the trip. Charles told me that it was the least expensive one he could find and he wanted me to know that if it was lost or drenched it was no big deal. He said he and my grandmother, Ray, had gotten it for me because they knew that if I borrowed my partents' Nikon, I would be too agraid of dropping it in the ocean to do anything with it. In fact, he feared I might never take it out of the room What was amazing to me even then was that this exact fear had been tugging at me - what if I destroyed my parents' valuable camera? Charles had brought precisely the right gift. I even took some pictures of that whale shark that were part of my own first publication.
This story is connected in my mind with another that my mother, Lucia Eames, told us about times a generation before when she and Chearles, her father, painted together in the out-of-doors. To her, it was "perfectly natural to be sharing my father's paint and paintbrushes." But, later, she heard Charles respond to an onlooker's surprise at a five-year-old's having been allowed to touch, let alone use for the day, his expensive sable-hair paintbrushes. Surely such things were being "just wasted on a child." Charles observed that, on the contrary, letting her do so helped him; made him "darn sure to show Lucia, from the very beginning, how to properly respect and care for brushes and paints." So instead of creating bad habits, good practices such as taking care of one's tools could be taught from an early age.
Taken alone, each story could be about frugality in one case and extravagance in the other. One can easily imagine turning the stories on their heads: grandparents getting the fanciest camera around for a grandson setting off on an adventure, or a father buying the cheapest brushes for a five-year-old. But taken together in their actual orientation, these sotries are about the difference between cost and worth. It is just the actions, but the thought behind them that is important and that is where the connection between these ideas live. The story of the camera and the story of the paintbrushes are both ultimately about appropriateness.
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