Neil Young was singing about prairie winds and Canada geese and I was getting into a relaxed, perhaps melancholy mood, when Russ said, “I had no idea that’s where that goes.”
“It doesn’t go there,” I said
“Oh.”
“Put it there. With that.”
We were cleaning up my mess. Trying to make sense of things. Or at least put them someplace where I wouldn’t keep tripping over my crap.
I was trying to put everything in a box, an individual, isolated place separate from the anarchy of collected things, which was what I spread had out over the floor.
So why, Russ wondered (I could tell) did I put a blue crayon in a box that had balloons? (And I had a lot of balloons – bags and bags of them.) Why did I put every other crayon in another box that, as anyone could see, was for crayons?
It was, of course, a memory box. Blue crayons and balloons. But Russ had no way of knowing this.
“Why did you put that there? That crayon with the balloons?”
I considered the question, then said, “Her name was Sherrie. When I met her the first time she was with her daughter. Her daughter’s name was Erin.”
“No one’s named Sherrie now.”
“No. You just don’t meet them anymore. I wonder what happened to all the Sherries?”
“I don’t know. I guess people got tired of them.”
“I never did,” I said.
It is peculiar, you know, the way names come and go. For a while it seems there are oodles of people with certain names. And then they’re gone and you can’t find anyone named that anymore. I wonder why that is?
“Sherrie use to say if you see something in blue or with a blue background, like sky or water, then it was like, whatever it was, it was okay. Because there was blue and you can’t be sad or angry or frustrated or anything except kinda happy when you had some blue.”
Russ looked at me in sort of a funny way, like he wasn’t convinced but would go along with it just to be agreeable.
“I guess that explains your place,” he said.
He was talking about my house. There’s a lot of blue. Russ even called it my Little Blue House. Walls, couch, towels – all shades of blue. I like to have a lot of it around.
Who doesn’t want to be happy?
Sherrie explained it when I saw her that day with Erin and they were colouring. Both were kneeling over, colouring. Erin had a bunch of balloons floating up behind her, bouncing lazily together, all on a string that was tied about her waist. When I asked why all the blue Sherrie said, “Because blue is our happy colour. Right Erin?”
Erin kept colouring, very intently, but I saw her head nod. The balloons waved in the air above her with the movement.
“Some people think blue is sad,” Sherrie said. “But it’s not. I suppose it can be but I can’t see how. I mean, if you’re singing the blues, the blues aren’t really blue. Not if you sing them right. If you do you probably feel pretty good because … well, you’re singing the blues. But blues, as in something sad, aren’t blue. They’re black.”
It sounded convoluted enough to be true.
I had met them at a folk festival. They were having a fine time colouring under a tree while someone up on the stage, I don’t remember who, was singing about a tragic love that involved liquor and knives and a woman named Betty who had loved “too well, too long.”
Erin and Sherrie weren’t listening. They were drawing and colouring. And all their crayons were blue.
So I asked why and that’s when Sherrie told me about blue and afterwards I told her my name and after that, well, things progressed.
Later, things kind of went to pieces. I’m not really sure why or how.
* * *
There was a knock at the door. I opened it and saw a young woman standing there. She was dishevelled in a fashionable way.
We shared what the novels would call a pregnant pause, then she said, “I’m Erin.”
“I know,” I said.
And I did know. I would have recognized her anywhere even though I hadn’t seen her in roughly twelve years. She was a budding young woman now with a keen, if wary, intelligence behind her eyes.
There was another long pause during which she looked past me into the house. From a distance, she was studying it. Learning it. Finally, she said, “That’s a lotta blue.”
“Yup,” I agreed. “I like it. Blue that is.”
She turned to me and looked directly in my eyes in the challenging way some young people can have.
“It wasn’t the blue, you know. It was Mom.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I know. But blue is all I have.”
She nodded. “Crayons. For me it was crayons.”
Reaching into her pocket she pulled out a handful of them. They were all blue.
(Originally publishd in Crazy Ass Planet, Sunday October 2, 2005.)
