coloring the night away
Some of my happiest childhood memories are from moments spent on the floor of this living room, coloring. This picture is cracking me up. You can see the aluminum dinette chair with the plastic upholstery in the dining room, and up against the wall is my doll house. Also aluminum.
In fact, our Christmas tree was aluminum, too. With deep green glass ornaments. And a tacky little green spotlight that made the silver tree shine green. Oh. My.
What can I say? My dad was into the space program — we were whooping it up like The Jetsons.
And that’s me, Judy Jetson, with my hair picked up and flopping off the top of my head. I hated that hairstyle my whole childhood. And then I inflicted it on my own girls. Teehee. It’s so cute.
I spent a lot of time sprawled on the floor…listening to the TV, listening to the grown-ups visiting, listening to my mother play Tom Jones and Engelbert Humperdinck LP’s.
Just plain listening.
It’s why I like to distract myself when I listen to things now. I doodle and fill in letters on meeting agendas, and generally make a gigantic mess of any paper in front of me if I’m sitting through something that I find interesting. It takes me back to a time that was carefree — truly free from any cares. My biggest dilemma was trying to figure out what distinguished the green-blue crayon from the blue-green one.
If only my life could be reduced to the simplicity of a Crayola crayons box, with everything neatly labeled.
Meh. It’s only a temporary and fleeting desire. The truth is that more often than not I tried my hand at creating my own pictures. I tired of coloring inside the lines a long time ago, looking for adventure outside the traditional box with the 8 colors. I wanted the box of 64, with the neat sharpener built into the back.
Yeah. I wanted lots of colors.
I got it, too. The big box, that is. I have no complaints, no regrets. In fact, things around here get more colorful all the time, and I’m happy to throw myself on the rug and enjoy it.
I don’t color anymore — I fill up journals now, but it’s kind of the same thing for me…the sound of the pen scratching against the paper takes me into a little world that’s all my own.
reading is fun-damental
When I was a kid, fascinated by comic books and cartoon adventures of superheroes bounding through the air, I wanted more than anything to have a superpower.
Of course, I never realized that my superpower could be cultivated by my silly little adventures hiding from my mother while I secretly read, not so much forbidden books, as being forbidden from reading at the moment when I should have been doing something else, such as cleaning my room.
My secret place, the space behind the bookshelf that was in the corner of my room, was the perfect hiding place. No one knew I had the strength to move the shelf just enough to squeeze my little body through. Maybe they knew, maybe they didn’t, but I read many books in that little corner of my 10-year-old heaven. And a few years later, read one or two titles that I had no business reading.
In all that time, I was developing a superpower that would be particularly useful in my major, and in my career. I learned to read fast and retain some pretty decent comprehension. I had to read fast. My mom could swoop into my room at any moment to check on my progress.
Believe me, I got busted plenty of times, but it never kept me from going back to the book the minute she took off down the hall.
So now I find myself in the grown up version of those Saturday afternoons. I have plenty of chores to do, Mom-sized, not kid-sized, and the allure of my reading stack is pulling and pulling and pulling. I want to disappear into the little office off my kitchen, throw myself on the sofa that’s too short for my long legs, and bury my toes into the cushions.
I want to read with the kind of abandon I had as a child.
Hmmm. Come to think of it, there are lots of things I should be doing with the abandon I had as a child.
But grown-up me says I have to clean my room, first. And so, I will. Clean my room. And then, I’m gonna read. Cuz it’d be a shame to waste a rainy day.