Thoughts About Color

Last week at my local pharmacy, I spotted something I hadn’t seen before. A box of Crayolas labeled “Colors of the World,” with 24 crayons representing different skin tones.

An Internet search tells me this set hit the market about three years ago. (I’m not a parent or a teacher. I don’t always keep up.) Colors of the World is an expansion on the set of eight “Multicultural” Crayolas released in 1992. Which was itself an improvement on the days when there was just one skin-toned Crayola labeled FLESH.

Yeah, I’m old enough to remember that. A crayon that came real close to matching my Anglo-American skin. One I could use to color arms, legs and faces of the people in my pictures.

We hear a lot about systemic racism and unconscious bias. I see that FLESH Crayola as a classic example. I really don’t think the folks at Crayola were looking for ways to make black, brown and other-colored kids feel left out. I think they just didn’t see those kids. Crayola sold its first box of colors in 1903. For the first half-century or so, the company was no doubt dominated by white people. I’ll bet they were mostly decent people, dreaming up art supplies to brighten children’s lives. When they imagined little hands holding those crayons, they saw the pale hands of their own kids.

Before I tell the rest of this story, I should explain that I learned to read at an early age, well before I was old enough to go to school. I impressed Mom and Dad by reading street signs, Little Golden Books, the backs of cereal boxes. I read the labels on my Crayola wrappers. (BLUE VIOLET looked a lot like VIOLET BLUE until you got it on the page.) So I have a distinct memory of the day I reached for a FLESH Crayola and found it inexplicably labeled PEACH.

Hmmm, I thought. Must’ve grabbed the wrong crayon. I sifted through the set. FLESH was nowhere to be found, but this PEACH sure did look like the same color. As a devotee of the printed word, I was puzzled. FLESH and PEACH each had five letters; both ended in “H”. Had I just been imagining FLESH all along?

I hadn’t, of course. An article in Huffpost tells how a social researcher wrote to Crayola in 1962. The letter pointed out what should have been obvious: humans come in different shades, and some kids in their social experiments picked on other kids who weren’t colored “FLESH.” Not long after, the company changed that label from FLESH to PEACH.

I would have been six, going on seven, in 1962. I may have been older when I noticed the change; it’s not as if I got a new box of Crayolas every year. At that age, I knew perfectly well that people came in different colors. Still, it hadn’t seemed strange to me that the FLESH Crayola just happened to match my skin. Systemic racism. It’s all around us.

Change happens, but can be awfully slow. Thirty years elapsed between the renaming of FLESH and release of the Multicultural Crayolas. More than two decades later, we get Colors of the World. Those who follow such trends mostly see it as a positive change, but Crayola’s CEO took some heat for what he said in the 2020 news release:

“With the world growing more diverse than ever before, Crayola hopes our new
Colors of the World crayons will increase representation…”

“We have always been here,” groused one Twitter pundit. “It says a lot that the CEO of Crayola has only just now started to see us.”

Change comes slowly, and sometimes it seems to run backward. Looking over what I’ve just written, I’m thinking maybe I should have kept my thoughts to myself. What if some red-state politician reads this, decides Crayolas are too “woke,” and bans their use in public schools?

Mammogram

Here I am at The Breast Center at St. David’s, waiting for my annual mammogram.

I’ve been coming here for several years. In some ways, it’s nicer than the general imaging center where I used to get my exams. Instead of those awkward hospital gowns, we get real bathrobes with tie belts and pockets. We wait in a Women’s Lounge furnished with comfortable chairs. A round-faced woman with a brown ponytail is here ahead of me, sitting quietly. We nod, but don’t speak.

There are two changing rooms. I enter one and exchange my shirt and bra for a robe. Deposit personal belongings in locker #10 as assigned. Last time I was here, they gave me a wristband with a key. Now the locks are electronic; I have to punch a code on a keypad. It takes two tries to get the locker open.

This lounge used to have free tea and coffee, along with magazines to take a patient’s mind off the impending procedure. All that went away with COVID-19. There’s a TV mounted high on one wall, but it isn’t on today.

There are worse places to sit and wait. But I don’t like being here. I don’t suppose anyone does.

A technician comes for the round-faced woman. Other patients come and go, changing into robes or back into street clothes. A stocky woman with short gray hair. A tall, lanky gal in runner’s sandals. A classy blonde wearing a watch and multiple bracelets. We come in different sizes and shapes, but we’re all here for the same reason.

When my turn comes, they’ll take me to an examining room and ask me to slip off one sleeve of my robe. The technician will introduce herself so that she won’t be a complete stranger when she grabs my tit with both hands and positions it on the imaging plate. She’ll manipulate my shoulder and armpit, putting them where they won’t block the view, and then lower the compression plate until my breast is smashed between two hard surfaces. We’ll set up for two sets of pictures – one horizontal, one vertical – then repeat the whole process on the other side.

None of this is exactly fun, but it isn’t the main reason I hate this exam. The real reason is this: Every time I walk into this building, I face the possibility of having my life turned upside down.

It happens. On several occasions in the past 25 years, I’ve been called back for additional imaging. Twice, I’ve been sent for biopsies. I have a titanium clip to mark the spot where a suspicious calcium deposit was excised in 2008; an inch-long scar where a benign lump was removed several years before that.

None of those glitches turned out to be anything life-threatening. I’m lucky; I know it, and I have no right to whine. Who wouldn’t prefer a false alarm to a confirmed case of cancer?

Still, a false alarm doesn’t make for a happy day. When you get the call that says, “We need to take a closer look” … when they send you to a different waiting room because the radiologist wants to talk to you … when you’re at home biting your nails and awaiting biopsy results, you don’t yet know it’s a false alarm. And I always imagine the worst.

So I’m here today at the Breast Center, wishing all this would just go away. I remind myself that there’s no history of breast cancer in my family, that my last four mammograms came back normal. That even the ones that weren’t quite normal turned out to be nothing serious in the end.

Thoughts like this can help settle my nerves, but they aren’t helping now.

Let’s face it: if I knew for sure there was nothing to worry about, I wouldn’t be here, would I?

The Melendy Quartet - by Elizabeth Enright

My Favorite Childhood Reads

With memories of this fictional family dancing in my mind, I Google “Melendy” and see that this series of books is still out there. In multiple printings, plus an audio version that parents can play in the car on long road trips with their kids.

I’m pleased to know that. I was maybe in third grade when I found The Saturdays at my town library. The kids in the Melendy family (Mona, Rush, Randy and Oliver) get bored at home on weekends, so they form a kind of mutual association. Each Saturday, they’ll pool their allowances and give the money to one sibling to spend as s/he chooses. In the 1940s, when these books were written, a couple of bucks would have been enough to get somewhere – especially if you lived in a big city with public transportation, as the Melendys did. The chapters of the book describe their individual adventures. When six-year-old Oliver’s turn comes, nobody really expects him to board a bus and head off by himself -- but he does, with interesting results.

In the next book, the family moves to the country. They live with their father, who's a fairly cool guy, and a housekeeper/nanny named Cuffy, in a house that’s old and peculiar enough to harbor interesting secrets (The Four-Story Mistake.) One of the kids gets to know a teenager named Mark, who appears to be alone in the world. The family eventually adopts him (Then There Were Five). The older kids grow up and get on with their lives. In the last book, Spiderweb for Two, Randy and Oliver are the only ones left at home.

In some ways, this series reminds me of the Narnia Chronicles. Two brothers, two sisters, and a string of adventures that progresses over time. But the Melendys’ lives happen in the everyday world. Sure, it was a world different from mine. My small Texas town didn’t have city buses, subways or art museums. We didn’t have the seasonal changes that the characters experienced in their country home (it was here, I think, that I first heard of “Indian summer.”) But the house, the woods that surrounded it, and the characters that graced the pages were vividly drawn. I felt like I knew this family. I was always thrilled to find the next volume at the library, to know the story wasn't over yet.

The Wind Call - by Rosalie K. Fry

My Favorite Childhood Reads

This book, with its worn hardback cover, has been with me perhaps longer than any other. Mom and Dad would read me chapters at bedtime before I learned to read on my own. The author shares our family name. I’ve often wondered if that’s why my parents (or grandparents?) bought the book.

It’s the story of a tiny boy, a child of the Little People, who arrives unexpectedly in an English garden. An assortment of birds is checking out a strange new plant, something the gardener brought home from a recent holiday in the tropics, when they find the dark-eyed infant sleeping in a flower. The kid is obviously far from home with no one to take care of him. So a pair of songbirds takes him to their nest in a hawthorn tree, and he grows up with three newly hatched chicks.

The “wind call” in the title is that subtle change in the air that marks the approach of fall, telling migratory birds that it’s time to fly south. Father Blackcap sings the little ones to sleep every night with a song about the great flight and their sunny winter home by the Mediterranean Sea.

When his adopted brothers are ready for their first flying lesson, the boy, Pierello, is old enough to climb out of the nest and make his way to the ground. He spends an idyllic summer learning to fend for himself in the woods: picking wild berries, sliding down little waterfalls in the burbling stream, consorting with glow-worms, butterflies, dormice, and all types of birds. There are line drawings of Pierello and his friends, and a half-dozen color pictures printed on special paper. Behind all these happy adventures looms the novel’s Big Question: will this wingless child find a way to go south with his family when the Wind Call comes?

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Looking back, I wonder if my love of nature began with this fairy tale. Many of its creatures were (and still are) unfamiliar to a kid growing up in Texas, but I’ve always suspected the portrayals were accurate. Today, thanks to the Internet, it’s not hard to check. I did some surfing and found that yes, male and female blackcaps do share chick-rearing duties. Nightjars really do fly silently and lay their camouflaged eggs on bare ground.

And what about the author and illustrator, Rosalie K. Fry? I didn't think I'd ever heard of her, aside from this book. But it turns out she wrote several others, and one became the basis for the indie film The Secret of Roan Inish. Wow. Who knew?