Do you remember when you were a kid and you bought a new pack of crayons? The waxy smell, bright colors, perfect tips, and untorn papers? Maybe that's just me, but I'm sure you remember wanting to open them up right away. Grabbing paper (Or, for some of us, just a clear space of wall. Sorry, Mama.) and drawing anything that came to mind. It was usually flowers for me.
I spent hours reorganizing my crayon boxes, too. Prioritizing them in order of most to least used (read: prettiest to ugliest). That weird green one that I never used because it was a "boy color" was always the last one to go in. Boys used it all the time because they drew lizards and dinosaurs or whatever they draw, but it was hardly a color any respectable flower stem would be.
The title of both this entry and my blog is from the second stanza of Gu Cheng's "Obstinate Child":
I want every moment to be
as gorgeous as crayons are
I want to draw pictures on lovely white sheets of paper
to paint clumsy freedom
to draw an eye that never weeps
a sky, a feather and a leaf pertaining to the sky
to paint green night and pale apple
I took this poem to mean the speaker wants to make beautiful memories. Vivid and with child-like enthusiasm. The last three stanzas take a turn for the depressing, but most of the poem is about beauty and love and travel, I think.
I want every moment to be as gorgeous as crayons are. I want to look back on my life and get the same feeling I did when I opened a new box of Crayola 64. So many beautiful memories, bright and colorful.
I have a good head start.
Apparently, I was never big on the "actually coloring" part of crayons. For whatever reason, I couldn't stand for my crayons to be in factory condition. Paper? Gone. Whole? Crack 'em in half. I didn't have a neatly organized box of crayons, I had a plastic silverware tray filled with unmarked nubs. This was normally fine, until I came to that is-it-blue-brown-purple-or-black moment. But that wasn't very often...because I was too busy breaking them in half :-P
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