During the first week of the first grade, I arrived home one afternoon. My mother was sitting at the kitchen table having coffee with Mrs. Cassidy from across the street. I was in love with Mrs. Cassidy’s younger son, John. He was the smartest boy in my class. He used words I did not know yet—like pathetic. He wore rectangular horn-rimmed glasses to see the blackboard, but when he removed them, I could admire his celestial blue eyes and thick lashes and adorable golden freckles, sprinkled like glitter over the top of his nose and down along the ridges of his cheek bones. He probably grew up to be an engineer like his father.
I headed over to the bread box where we kept the Hershey bars. My mother glanced up. “The school called,” she announced. “They said you’re hard of hearing.’’ I looked at her and Mrs. Cassidy with their cups and saucers and teaspoons. Somehow I understood what the phrase meant. I felt a dense pain in my abdomen, like the time a bunch of us little girls were playing down the street on a neighbor’s front lawn. Beautiful, dark-haired Diana was twirling with joyful abandon, swinging her mother’s white leather pocketbook. The heavy purse slammed smack into my solar plexus. The breath whooshed out of my lungs and I doubled over in deep agony. Diana’s mother rushed over and chastised her daughter for being careless, but it wasn’t Diana’s fault. I had drawn myself too close and into the path of her orbit.
I made my way nonchalantly over toward the refrigerator, out of the kitchen and down the hallway to my bedroom. I was wearing my new plum-coloured dress with a floral motif and white Peter Pan collar. I struggled to unfasten the metal spine of zipper that ran down the back. Suddenly, I was aware that I was imperfect. I changed into my fringed leather Apache squaw outfit and slipped out the front door. The sky was the pale violet that comes before a September rainstorm. I spun in wild circles around the trunks of the maple trees and whooped a war chant. “Aiyaiyaiyai, Aiyaiyaiyai!” Up in the branches, the bluejays were screeching. I could hear them and me and that was enough.
Every year from kindergarten to the third grade we were given a box of Crayola crayons on the first day of school. I could always tell my box from everyone else’s because, right up until the end of June, my purple crayon always retained its special point. Purple was my favourite colour and it was important to me that my purple crayon remain new and unused. It is sad now to think that none of my drawings from my first four years of school had my favourite colour in them. But that must have been the case. Not in my rainbows or flowers or monsters or Easter eggs. It was a sacrifice in the name of perfection. More than saving each purple crayon, I was ensuring that it remained pristine. Even though I was most likely guaranteed a new one the next year, no purple crayon of mine was ever set to paper. I wanted each of them to last forever.
I once saw a woman on a talk show who would not smile or frown for fear of etching lines into her face. She spoke as though someone had filled her skull and jaw with Elmer’s glue. I guess her goal was to be a perfectly preserved corpse with no creases in her facade. I’ve heard that a collectible book is more valuable if it is in perfect condition, but what is its worth if it’s never been opened? If a face and a book are not meant to be read, of what use are they?
Is it possible to cherish something while simultaneously using it up? A crayon’s wrapper should be peeled back and its wax body ground to a nub because someone has had the sheer bliss of creating with it. A good book should be held and read and reread until its pages and dust jacket tatter and its spine breaks because someone has loved what it had to say. And shouldn’t a face display emotion and feeling and bear the traces of where it has laughed and cried throughout a lifetime?
The earth spins along its unstoppable trajectory through space. The stars slide across the impenetrable black of the night sky. How fitting that each flawed one of us should hold out a brave crayon of whatever hue and draw a perfect, fleeting, indelible, colourful streak against the silent, vast, blank age of the universe as it whirls itself by.