finding color

(first: I was listening to this album while writing. Recommend it as an audio accompaniment)

I found this pen in the car.

I like it. It reminds me of childhood.

My mom always had really fun and interesting pens and markers around. Shaking the paint pen and then seeing the fat gold streaking lines that came out was so satisfying. And the way the tip pushed in and created huge glistening dots?! How novel when all I had in my day to day was a #2 pencil.

Perhaps I took the plethora of writing tools so readily available for granted. For me it felt normal. I was encouraged to not just write in black and white. In first grade I got a big blue plastic Crayola box with 100 different colors. It was built like a briefcase. Around the same time, my dad got a black leather briefcase. I think I had mine first and he was inspired; his didn’t have as many crayons.

Maybe being surrounded by all that color and all of those options prepared me for a life that doesn’t actually exist. Maybe the intention of the coloring and drawing was to just keep us busy in between the math problems and cursive practice.

I don’t want to believe that but sometimes (recently) I feel like I’m living in black and white. Where’s the color? Where are the special pens that make textured lines? Building dioramas out of shoe boxes was obviously not going to be a career path, but it feels like some of the imagination, creativity, and playfulness we spent so much time fostering are collecting cobwebs with the crayons at our parent’s house.

Did Donald Trump go to art class? Was there ever a time when he wrote and read a poem out loud? It seems like maybe he skipped the Crayola briefcase and just went straight to the leather one. I’m noticing that, to me, it feels like the color and magic is being sucked out of the world.

And, wow, I also love black and white. I love the way this black pen marks up this white paper. It feels nice. I like the scratching. The itching? The pen itches the paper, the paper that has been desperate to be itched since March when I admittedly last wrote.

And right now I’m itching for more color.

One of the things I love about New York City is that the possibility for rich and mind-blowing synchronicity is everywhere. For such a big city it can be quite small and intimate.

Yesterday on a sunny corner in the West Village I ran into two friends, and I saw and heard dashes of color. A brightness occurred.

On a corner in Brooklyn while walking home, I ran into another friend (an artist, literally surrounded by color) and we talked about life and the expectations we create for ourselves. We acknowledged a race (against what? Ourselves? Time?) We acknowledged the moving targets (many of which are self-created) and that, for better or worse, nobody really has it all figured out. As our friend Eviatar reminded us, “this is it.”

So what if we could, even just for a moment, set down those expectations? Change out of our running shoes and pause the race. Give the leather briefcase a break and dust off the blue plastic one. Pick out some colors and put down the pen.

with love and color,

c