Trouble in Crayola City

The most successful part of the educational industrial complex is convincing us every September that we need new stuff. You can practically smell it in the air. Flyers for Staples and Office Depot haven’t been delivered to anywhere I’ve lived in more than a decade, yet August 20-something rolls around and the cheap, pulpy smell of dirty print rises as a sense memory. I spent a total of twenty-two years in school and that craving that sets in near the end of August was the same in year five as it was in year nineteen.

Give me the bright, new notebooks (College ruled, Mead ONLY); let me have the packages of pens and shiny new folders. I want all of the sticky tabs in all the colors and super cute designs even though I am not taking that Russian Lit class again this semester! I would drape myself across our cheap Formica kitchen counter ogling the multi-page spread of back to school supplies like a butcher at the county fair. Pencils sets in all the latest characters (Barbie, My Little Pony, G.I. Joe, Star Wars); Lisa Frank folders pulsing with psychedelic unicorns and rainbows like the backdrop of a Japanese game show; Scooby Doo and Strawberry Shortcake lunchboxes; sleek plastic pencil cases; scented erasers; and glue sticks (it’s Chapstick for goddamn GLUE that isn’t going to leak and squirt all over your first day of school dress! What kind of sorcery is this?!). And then there was the great leveler of school supply products, the dividing line between the kids who vacationed at Disney World and those of us who made do with boiled hotdogs, warm Hi-C, and a painfully non lubricated back yard Slip N’Slide. That school supply was: The Crayola 64.

Ladies and gentlemen, friends and neighbors, let me walk you through the features of this highly coveted, state of the art coloring system. Two rows, TWO, of crayons made from paraffin so silky, so smooth you will practically encourage your kid to give it a lick. Not to mention, these crayons go. the. distance. I’m talking an ocean scape, a jungle scene, an entire block of city apartment buildings and a black-as-coal night sky—Crayola will not let you down, will not give you streaks where none should be. No, sir! No, ma’am! (smattering of polite applause) And while we’re talking subjects—rocket ships and dragons and battles in the zombie apocalypse, which, I might add, any child psychologist will be PROUD to display on her “trouble board” thanks to those vibrant Crayola hues—well, I already said, didn’t I? We gotta talk COLOR! Ladies and gentlemen, friends and neighbors, we give you not 12, not 20, but 64 COLORS TO CHOOSE FROM! (audible Oohh, well now, hey, that’s something!)

I suppose orange and red and blue are good enough for the average kid, or, you know, those other kids, the cheats (gasp!), the drop-outs (dear!), or, I don’t know, the dope fiends! (Mercy! Not our Charlie! Our Evie would never!) Or you can make sure your kids colors with tangerine, with Tiffany blue, with AUBberGINE! THOSE COLORS ARE FOR WINNERS! FOR FUTURE SUPREME COURT JUSTICES AND GAME SHOW MODELS! AM I RIGHT? (loud applause, whistles here! here!) Okay! Okay! Ladies and gentleman, friends and neighbors, I think we can all agree by now that the Crayola 64 is a beautiful, finely-honed art product made with your best interests in mind. Perfection cannot be improved upon, right? Well. What if I told you it could?

(excited whispers, what did he say? No! I’d like to see this…)

You know that feeling you get when you’ve been coloring, say, a pumpkin patch. It’s Halloween and you’ve got this fine coloring page of a big, old pumpkin patch with, say, I don’t know, two dozen pumpkins and a spooky ole full moon and, maybe, a black cat sitting on one of those orange, orange pumpkins. And you’re coloring and coloring and well, before you’re barely even done, say, 10 of those suckers, your crayon is dull (concerned murmurs). It’s got no bite! It’s limp, practically nothing more than a sad little nub of wax. I hate that, don’t you? I mean, when it comes right down to it, it’s actually pretty embarrassing. In fact, just to finish that great pumpkin scene, the one that you’re going to give to Nana to put on her fridge, you might be forced to, well, break the crayon in half. (breathy sounds of disapproval, people shaking their heads, tongues clicking in disgust). I know. I know! Believe me. I’m a family man myself. I get it. And, hey, look, we all know that judging is wrong, of course. But kids can be cruel! Do you really want your child, your precious, smart, son or daughter, who is, probably, say, the next Picasso, trying to finish her lion drawing with a worn out, broke down, PATHETIC yellow crayon? (Shouts of NO! Good God, Man! Heavens!) No! YOU CAME TO THIS COUNTRY SO YOUR KIDS COULD HAVE A BETTER LIFE! And you know what? With the Crayola 64, you never have to worry about that again. Why? Ladies and gentlemen, friends and neighbors, I give you A BUILT IN SHARPENER IN THE BACK OF THE BOX!

(Gasps! Oooh! Ahh! Mercy! The lady in the third row faints)

Ladies and gentlemen, friends and neighbors, your duty is HERE, the time is NOW, do NOT delay in procuring the most IMPORTANT ITEM OF YOUR CHILD AND AMERICA’S FUTURE!!

(Brass band begins to play, crowd swarms the stage, carrying the crayon man out on their shoulders into the night. Fireworks over the town square)

Preccciioouuuusssssssss……….

Everyone knew the Crayola 64 was the Bugatti of school supply products. If you plunked that thing down on your desk on the first day of school you were automatically marked as cool and going places. I had an 8-pack of Color Stix! and a package of Brite Markerz!

Me and some school chums on the first day of second grade. Jessica (left), smartly dressed carrying a very stylish work satchel that she will wish she had held onto when she was 22 starting that hip internship in NYC. Julie (right), sporty, toting a backpack, which is appropriate. Me (middle), dressed for a round of golf at the club, carrying my paper sack probably full of Color Stix and a juice box

We weren’t strapped. My dad worked for IBM. We were a middish-middle-class family of four existing on my dad’s corporate salary. My parents made it all work. And when it came to school stuff they saved by having my dad “shop” in the office supply closet. I still don’t know what he actually did. It was something in the realm of management of sales or managing regional accounts or sales and managing manager salesmen selling sails. No one seemed to know anything more specific and, honestly, I never asked. At the age of seven I already knew that whatever went on at his office could not interest me less than watching moss form. It’s quite possible he was CIA or yakuza. He died when I was 18, so the pirate’s riddle of what he did all day in the bland offices of IBM (allegedly) stays with him.

But I do know that I didn’t have to buy a #2 pencil until I was in my late-20s. Same with pens. Our basement storeroom became the IBM “offsite” supply closet with boxes of pens and pencils stacked on the shelves. My brother and I grew up using the blank backs of these weird, inscrutable memo and sales form pads to draw and color and make paper airplanes and homemade holiday decorations. An office typewriter, probably on its last legs for admin work, appeared one day on an end table next to the desk in my parents’ bedroom. I typed my college essays and applications on that beast like Mad Men’s Peggy Olsen. Packages of ribbons joined the boxes of everyday office supplies downstairs. At one point there were so many of those I had to wonder if my father was thinking of trying to start his own newspaper. Need a three-ring binder for that science report? No problem! A crate on the floor of the closet, next to the bag of winter hats and mittens, always seemed to have five or six. There were two colors: navy blue and another the shade of potter’s slurry, both stenciled with the large IBM logo, which was nothing that a sheet of paper taped over the front couldn’t hide.

We were a make-do family. You acclimate to your sphere of normal until something comes along to disrupt that, like, for instance the Crayola 64 or a few years later, the equally “hot,” official Trapper Keeper. I still remember the week before that school year when my poor mother tried to convince me one of those IBM binders was, like, basically the same thing and couldn’t I just put a few of those Lisa Frank unicorn stickers on it? No, mom, I could not AND YOU DON’T EVEN GET ME!! The first skirmish in the Battle of Female Teenage Adolescence.

Of course, I loved the things that other kids had—the Care Bear pencil boxes, the scratch-n-sniff stickers, one of those Little Professor calculators that looked like Dumbledore. On some level I wished for them because, unfortunately, you unlock this tricky facet of human nature at a young age, but in most cases I don’t remember feeling like I was missing out. I had my cheap, blunt Color Stix and my Thanksgiving turkey drawn on the back of a quarterly expense report and eventually three advanced degrees. I think it worked out.

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Lens Zen!

I think everyone is still wandering around wondering what happened to July and figuring out if we can phone it in until the next long weekend. Just me? Okay then. Here’s a froozy smattering of rioting wild flowers looking like the concert just let out and Jagger is most definitely going to be making an appearance in 3….2….

Cannot be contained! ©SheilaMoeschenPhotography