Life, actually…

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THE CRAYON EPIPHANY

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It is dark as night in the middle of the morning in my small bunk-bedroom, just seven or so decades ago.

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I am only a few years old, sitting here on the hardwood floor, scrounging about for a battered old cigar box. It is dark because my eyes are closed.

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My eyes are closed because I am reaching as far as I can into the depths of a closet. I am afraid of what might be lurking there, so I depend upon touch and denial to survive.

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Touch because I’ll know when my hand touches the box that my quest will succeed. Denial because if I don’t see the closet monsters they won’t exist.

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This kind of operative logic keeps me going, though I’ll never tell anyone about it. Don’t want to be laughed at.

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There! I find the Hav-a-Tampa cigar box and drag it forth into the light, my eyes finally re-opened. It smells of old cigars smoked to the nub by my grandfather. The box is saved for re-use by little kids like me.

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I flip the partially-attached top open and wiggle my fingers around various collected objects trying to find enough used crayons to apply to a brand-new five-cent Robinson Crusoe coloring book.

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There is black, a peeled down inch of crayon that will last all summer.

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There is yellow, broken in two and ready to have its craggy tip smoothed down.

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And there is a blue, the only other crayon I can locate this morning if I don’t count the untouched white one. Untouched because what can you do with a white crayon, unless you have black crape paper?

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I stare at the waxy sticks. What can be accomplished with just four crayons and only two colors? Black isn’t really a color, according to older sister Barbara. And white is mostly invisible. So I’m stuck with yellow and blue.

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Would Robinson Crusoe approve of a yellow and blue island?

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I open the book, flatten it so that it won’t snap shut. I begin by coloring the seaside-sky blue, leaving gaps that will represent clouds.

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The beach will have to be yellow today, so I dig in, furiously coloring, and in the process violating the boundary between beach and sea. Suddenly, I have a third color!

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I never knew till this moment that blue and yellow combined produce green! Whattaya know?

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So…this means that the palm tree can be partially green. Its trunk can be lightly blackened—but maybe if I throw in a bit of yellow with the black it will look somewhat natural.

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And so on.

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Having conquered boundaries, I begin mixing colors, creating a kind of fairy tale land where skies are partially green, beaches are black and yellow, trees are blue, and Crusoe himself is a colorless creature standing within this faraway fantasy.

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I have discovered the magic and science of mixing things together to form new and more interesting things. I’m on a roll.

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From now on, I will be experimenting with all the worldly things around me. Twigs will become wands, caterpillars will be pets, blankets will become tents, blue and yellow will become green…

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Life is a burst of good fun right now. Just fun enough for me to forget the closet monsters and ignore the admonitions of teachers who will not approve of blue trees and imaginative little boys

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 © Jim Reed 2021 A.D.

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