Mark's Pages

May 26, 2003:

As a child I was mesmerized by colors.

I remember vividly how personal and alive the colors of fingerpaints seemed as I smudged them around the paper, as if you could talk to the blue, or climb inside the red.

Kids often respond to color with the same immediacy. Watch kids at work with crayons, or watercolors, or play-dough. They can't get close enough, leaning forward and forward, as though color were a blanket they could wrap themselves with.

Some of my most strongly visual childhood memories are of my mother and I painting our apartment. It was a two-story yellow building on Yale Street in La Mesa, California, a block from University Avenue, across the street from a dentist's office. About 1962. I'm about four. She chose a shade of milky green that was both festive and soothing at the same time, and I became deeply taken with the difference in consistency between that paint, the pretty paint, shiny enamel for the doors and wood trim, and the watery tan we rollered onto the walls and ceiling. At the paint store a machine shook the cans containing the perfect green mix my mother had chosen herself. It was thick like cake mix, lovely beyond words.

Football, Helix High, La Mesa CA. Simple wooden benches in concrete stands. Bright electric lights on towers overhead, so bright they hide the stars. The crowd is parents and friends. It's a championship game, the stands are packed. The crowd is excited and emotional.

A neighbor girl, sometimes your babysitter, has taken you. You're about five. You have no understanding of the game, yet you become swept up in the people's excitement as the players run and the ball flies and the huddles move from left to right and back again, up and down the playing field.

Under the artificial light the colors of the uniforms are mesmerizing, shining like jewel. The visiting team is crimson and gold. Crimson pants with gold sidestripes. Golden jerseys with crimson numbers. Crimson helmets with golden numbers. Colors so bright they look like fireworks.

But it's the Helix team that fascinates. Green, gray and white. White pants with green sidestripes bordered with gray. Green jerseys with white numbers bordered in gray. Green helmets with white numbers and a gray stripe up the center. Through the rest of your childhood that shade of green is your "favorite color", the color with the most power to hold your attention to the exclusion of other things. Later in life, even into middle age, that combination of green, gray and white can sometimes stop you in your tracks.

A running play. A star athlete breaks free, tears downfield pursued by two or three opponents in crimson. The local heroes win. Pandemonium in the stands, adrenaline, voices hoarse from cheering. And one little boy who's happy for the happy people, but far more interested in the shining colors running brightlit under the black night's sky.

Some time later she bought new furniture for my room, and we painted it a combination of that same green with a deeper milky blue which nowadays I'd be tempted to label "rustic". There was a small chest of drawers that I remember well. We painted the alternating drawers green and blue, and we varnished the rest in clear varnish that smelled like fingernail polish. I loved that chest, in large part because I'd helped paint it. To me it was the prettiest thing in the world.