A Colorful Post

Ursus maritimus (polar bear). U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

I have chosen these playful yellowish-white creatures with amazing midnight eyes to punctuate my post on color. This evening, laying down to try to forget pain, I began fall course planning in my head. Yesterday, I think the theme of color might have begun to incubate because the door fell off my closet. Again. (It's not the heat, it's the humidity. Cabinets stick, doors fall off.) Like any sensible person, I figured I had better do a better job of organizing my clothes lest anyone look into the closet while fixing the door. (If there had been a way to hide all the clothes into another closet, I would have done so--but I could only stash the summer dresses there.) I spent ninety minutes sorting my clothes in approximate, inverse-rainbow colors. (Starting with pink and violet, to navy, to green...with blacks and greys interpolated...and red at extreme right, as I rarely wear it). This type of compulsive behavior while battling shoulder pain is a very bad idea.

Today, from wherever such thoughts come from, I found myself with the idea of an ice-breaker exercise to be done early in the semester. Students might write about a rainbow with hues of their own choosing, their own rationale, and in any order. The truly adventurous could illustrate it, but that would be optional. For example, I could put pink in my rainbow somewhere because of my former love of the color; I would include something like cranberry or maroon because I like the drama of it; I would include copper, silver, and gold because they are awe-inspiring even when achieved through crayons, which is how I came to love them. I might include earth brown and new-growth green, which stretch endlessly on the freeway in spring and remind me that winter does pass...

Well, before I knew it, my mind leaped into remembered childhood colors...I moved from my former pink bedroom to shiny red tiles and countertops in the kitchen to our yellow attic...if you ever do this exercise, caution! It may trigger nostalgia or other pains. Color carries powerful potential to evoke memory. If I think hard (or soft) enough, I can recall my childhood dog's golden fur (not only the color but the texture and the scent) and the beautiful white dot at the center of what I called her forehead.

Are such memories powerful because they were encoded in childhood? Or is it because--pulling them once more from the musty trunk of one's mind--one knows for sure that the times are gone, for good?

Yes, one can defy the rules of optics with imagined rainbows. But color-recollection allows one to leap through time and space anyway. As I remember those I loved, I recall my dog Happy...who ate crayons no matter how well I hid them (she was part retriever). Perhaps crayons evoked memories of carrots, radishes, green pepper...or were easier to access than the bone hidden outside. Upon finding the chewed-up remains of crayon-label, I would be angry. But Happy looked so guilty: she could not help herself. And if I could bring her back, I'd buy her a whole box.

I scribbled at a very young age--with crayons--on our dining room wall. It was long before I could write. It was more than a compulsion; nothing and no one could stop me. My mom, at her wits' end, asked a neighbor what she should do. The response: "Buy her a blackboard."