Giant Dreams, Midget Abilities

David Comeaux Quoting from Aimé Césaire, “Culture is everything. Culture is the way we dress, the way we carry our heads, the way we walk, the way we tie our ties --- it is not only the fact of writing books or building houses.” This is to say that everything we do in our lives is, in fact, our culture. In “Giant Dreams, Midget Abilities” by David Sedaris, Sedaris uses his own family background to explain a segment of his childhood in which he rejects a traditional culture in favor of his own.
David Sedaris is a young man and his father wants him and his sisters to learn to play instruments for their family band. Sedaris is assigned to play the guitar by his father and he starts getting lessons at a nearby mall. The only problem for him is that his teacher is an sexual midget. The theme of this essay is that you need to be good and honest to others. Sedaris’s father wanted to have a family of musicians that could perform on stage one day. Sedaris writes about his father’s heritage of which his father’s parents listened to only Greek music while prohibiting his father from listening to anything else. Sedaris’s father would listen to Jazz music in secret as a form of rebellion. Then, in the following generation, Sedaris’s father would in turn force his dream of forming a Jazz combo band upon Sedaris and his sister. This is proof that children will always rebel against any forced traditional culture. Sedaris writes, “Hold on to your hat, “my father said, “because here’s the guitar you’ve always wanted.” Surely he had me confused with someone else. Although I had regularly petitioned for a brand name vacuum cleaner, I’d never said anything about wanting a guitar.” Sedaris seeks individuality as most young children do. Often parents try to live their dreams through their children. Children have their own dream of what culture they have for