Rainbow Connection

 The Thrifty Rocketeer blog continues...  

Recently, I was searching the internet for things related to rocketry, trying to inspire another topic about rockets to come to mind.  Among the listings, I spotted something else, totally distinct from rockets that caught my attention.

It was a latch hook rug kit that had been 95% finished.  It was a pleasant scene of three sail boats on a lake, with rolling hills behind, and a rainbow that soared overhead.  Except for one rolling hill and one more color in the rainbow, the rug was completed.  It looked pretty good, but was unfinished. Somebody was trying to sell it for $8.  Maybe someone would buy it.

Something began to bug me about it, and I went back to look at it a second time.  Most of the rolling hills were colored by violet rug yarn, and it looked like most of the final stripe in the rainbow was also violet.  

That's when it hit me.  The rainbow was out of order. 

That is, the sequence of colors in the rainbow weren't in a logical order, whether by accident or intent.

As an adult, I'm familiar with the acronym "ROY G. BIV"  that lists the order of the visible spectrum.  Most of us know this as Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet...

But in this rainbow, the colors took a departure.  They started Red, Orange, Yellow, Blue, Green...gap...Violet.

Now, I don't know if the person plugging away at this rug got distracted, or what... perhaps they started making the hills Violet and then ran out of the final color for the rainbow.  Personally, I would have made the hills green, and saved the purple for just the final stripe of the rainbow.  But I don't know, perhaps they wanted it that way... maybe the quantities required this.  It doesn't matter, except it caught my attention and it triggered another memory in turn.

When I was a kid in First Grade, we were required to bring some personal supplies to school... glue, scissors, pencils, eraser, and crayons.  But at this level, the crayons that we were required to bring were NOT CRAYOLA... not the small pencil-like paper wrapped pointy waxy writing version.

No, the entry style of crayon was a set of what I recall to be 8 thick, flat crayons, much like a Kit Kat bar or Twixt candy bar.  They were flat on one side (to keep them from rolling off our desk), and had a broad round nose.  And they were much harder than traditional Crayola  crayons.  

Now, I am not certain of this, but it may have been the beginning of my OCD... cause I remember vividly putting these eight flat crayons back in the box in a specific order.  I don't remember WHY this was the case... if we were instructed to do this, or if I came up with it on my own... but I put them in order from left to right, from my favorite color to the worst one.

The order was NOT the now-famous ROY G BIV, but instead was Red, Blue, Green, Yellow, Orange, Purple, Brown, and Black..  There was no white...no silver...no gold..no peach.  nothing else.

So when I got home, I proudly informed my mother how I had organized my desk, and the sequence of the crayons, and she made amused noises as she went ahead and prepared the evening meal...not really listening to me at all.

So I broke out the coloring books, and the box of broken Crayola crayons that had accumulated in our house (WHO had bought all of these crayons for just my sister and me??)

I never wanted for a crayon stub at all.  I could always dig around and find one in that box.  (I can't imagine why we had so many in that shoebox.)

Now, as a kid, I could tell when I didn't have my mom's attention, and I was a pest enough to draw some attention by acting up.  So, when my older sister came over to color the page next to me, I wanted to pull a stunt.  I selected a purple crayon to color the face of the boy with the fishing pole.  

Color inside the lines?  Not me... I was too young, and made broad strokes that went far outside the lines.  It was basically defacing the drawing, not complimenting it.  My sister rankled.  "Mom, he's coloring outside the lines..."

To keep peace in the house, my mother told her never mind and to break out one of her own coloring books and leave me alone.  I turned to another page.  This one had a mailman on it.

I selected a brown crayon and set to coloring (smearing) the face, laughing and calling attention to the fact that I had colored people brown this time, instead of purple. 

My mom was not pleased.  She couldn't see the humor of it at all.  She sat down and began to lecture me that "There ARE brown people in the world".  I was indignant, trying to get her to laugh, but she wasn't going to. She was going to teach me a serious lesson.  No matter how I tried to get across to her that this was a joke, a lark, that I had chosen such a ridiculous color, she was over-reacting, and I could do nothing to dissuade her disapproval of my antic.

I was told to clean off the table and put the crayons away (in that large shoe box!) and place the coloring books underneath it in the next room (our "play room" as it was known). We kids moved on to something else until called for supper later in the dinner hour. 

To my complete embarrassment, she brought it up to my father during supper just a half hour later. My humiliation would know no end....  I must have committed a cardinal sin to have this brought up yet AGAIN.

To his credit, my father didn't get what was so terrible.  He just couldn't grasp what I had done wrong, no matter how my mother stated it.  Eventually, she had to get up from the table, go to the playroom and retrieve the coloring book.  Flipping to the offending page, she held it out before my  father to see the offense.  I cringed.

He shrugged, and said, "So what?"   That ended the topic, and my mother put the book away.

We NEVER spoke of it again, but it did teach me one powerful lesson that my mother had not intended to teach me...  That the topic of skin color was a loaded one, and that I had better never forget it. 

All this comes back to me as I stare at the rainbow latch hook rug.  

I guess there's no accounting for taste, I think... but I know better than to comment on it.

This has been the Thrifty Rocketeer saying, "I never colored with a crayon again, but I remember that shoe box full of crayon stubs."