The Blue Color
It was a small thing, but a link to another world.
By Noelle Oxenhandler from Reader’s Digest
「What did you do today?」 my husband asked me one evening when I was sitting at the dinner table, stuck and silent, like a pillar of salt.
「Nothing,」 I said. It had been one of those days that dissolve in a whir of unsuccessful errands, unreturned phone calls, malfunctioning machinery, piles of junk mail.
But our daughter, Ariel. six at the time, looked at me across the table as if she』d caught me in a big lie. 「That’s not true!」 she said. 「You did a lot today.」
「Like what?」 I asked, surprised.
「You mixed that color of blue paint that I wanted for my clay necklace. You crawled under my bed and found that shoe I was looking for. And you went to the store and bought four tapioca puddings.」
That moment for me was a bit like those duck-rabbit drawings that when you stare at them, transform into a completely different shape.
Without hesitating, Ariel had reeled off my day’s achievements—yet her list had nothing to do with the one I had made that morning. I made me aware that normally I look at myself through such a narrow lens that when I tally up at the end of the day, much of what I』ve done doesn’t even make it onto my list. Finish book review, workshop calls, cat medicine might appear. But the color blue? Never.
Still, while I might never consider the purchase of four tapioca puddings as the lion’s share of a day well spent, there was something about Ariel’s list that came through like the sound of a small bell in fog. In the wake of that conversation, whenever I felt myself wither in my own harsh stare, I would try to bask in her more forgiving gaze.
If we are, in a poet’s phrase, 「small gods」 to our children, they are, in their own way, small gods to us. They devour our time, but they also lavish upon us their own brand of infinity, the infinity of the unhurried present moment.
Though Ariel is now 13, she still possesses an uncanny ability to throw me off course. The other night I dreamed that I was late for all my meetings and had brought all the wrong papers. I awoke feeling tight with anxiety and staggered into the kitchen to make coffee. Ariel, already up, followed me and said, 「Wait.」
「What?」 I snapped.
「 I want to put this tattoo on you,」 she said. She made me stand there a full minute as she pressed a paper tattoo against the side of my face with a mildewy-smelling sponge. I wanted to scream. But I didn’t. And for the rest of the day, whenever I glanced in the mirror, I was surprised to see a small blue squirrel next to my eye. I resisted the impulse to wash it off. After all, I reminded myself, soon my daughter will be caught in the same time vise as I, and then where will I turn for those utterly unexpected moments of release from my own agenda?
Isn’t this one of the reasons we wanted children in the first place—to rearrange the rigid shapes of our lives, take our ducks-in-a-row and in a sudden shimmer, turn them into rabbits and back again?
One day, when Ariel was three and I was at my desk working hard, she sat at my feet in deep concentration. One by one she removed the long punched-hole edges of computer paper that I had thrown in the wastebasket, and bit by bit she stuffed them into a red sock. It was a large sock, and it took her small hands a long time to fill it.
Since that time I』ve never been able to part with that sock. I look back at that scene, and this is what I see: a mother, frantic under deadline, sits hunched at her desk. At her feet is her daughter, linking her mother to another world. In this world there are no deadlines. Work is play, and there’s all the time in the world to do it. In this world an orphaned red sock is filled to overflowing with what a mother has cast out. In this world 「you mixed the color blue」 can be a fitting epitaph—not just for a day, but for a life.