Roberta McReynolds Writes: My Rainbow Has 64 Colors
Childhood joys are often simple things. One of my favorites was crayons. There were few things that elicited a more delightful response from me that receiving a brand-new box of crayons. The Crayola brand was my favorite, by far; the waxy sticks of crayons produced the best coverage when scribbling between the lines of a coloring book page.
Boxes of crayons typically came in several standard sizes. The minimum pack of 8 colors covered only the very basics: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, brown, and black. The boxes of 16, 32, and 48 included hues in increasing varieties. Oh, but it was the box of 64 crayons that I coveted; the delightful collection of every color available when I was young.
Not a Christmas went by without the hope of discovering a brand-new box of 64 crayons to unwrap. Opening the lid released that unforgettable whiff of waxy pigments, and revealed the first glimpse of rows of those perfect tips on display that had never yet touched paper.
The body of each stick was double wrapped in paper to lessen the chance of breakage. Those little paper shrouds bore the official name of each color. It was necessary to peel back the paper as the crayons wore down with usage. As I picked at the edge of the stiff paper it would inevitably slip under my short fingernails and stab the tender quick. Tearing back the paper in uneven strips ruined the perfect appearance in my eyes. One time I removed the entire paper from every single crayon to make them all uniform, and soon discovered how difficult it was to discern the differences in the darker colors. I regretted the disaster I’d created and immediately began longing for my next new box of crayons.
The marvelous box of 64 was introduced in 1958 and came with a new feature; a sharpener was built into the box. Now children could restore the points to their crayons after they became blunt from hours of coloring. The results weren’t nearly as pristine as the original tip, but it was a welcomed device for youngsters. Parents saw the gimmicky sharpener in a totally different light. My mother was very vocal about how Crayola had diabolically invented a way to hasten the need to replace crayons that had been quickly, and needlessly, reduced by overzealous sharpening. Whenever she caught me sticking a crayon into sharpener, she scolded that I was wasting the crayon away until nothing would be left. For the record, I don’t believe I ever managed to cause a single crayon to disappear through the act of repeated twisting in the patented Crayola sharpener.
I didn’t get a new box of crayons every year, but they were tucked under the Christmas tree more often than not. There were times when Mom just flat out refused, rightly making her case by pointing out all the partially used boxes I still possessed. I couldn’t bear to throw out any of my beloved crayons; hence I learned to hide the extra boxes so there wouldn’t be any evidence that could be used against me in the parental courtroom where my mother was the judge, prosecutor, and jury.
Occasionally my mother gave me a box for my birthday, which caught me by surprise. While I was delighted to have them, I was a bit disappointed to already know I wouldn’t get any for Christmas. Maybe I’d get some new coloring books instead ….
I don’t remember how the conversation got started, but my husband and I were reminiscing about past Christmases and birthdays during one of our early morning walks early in the summer of 2022. We were both describing the gifts we remembered; the best and worst our parents picked out over the years. As we traveled our route through the neighborhood, I shared my nostalgic memories of yearning for a new box of 64-crayons every year.
I explained to Mike that before the sun set on Christmas day, I would dump all the new crayons out of the box and begin arranging them in sequence before putting them back into the box in what I considered the proper arrangement, instead of the random way they came from the factory. As a child, I thought of this as ‘rainbow order’. Fundamentally, it was taking a traditional color wheel and making it linear. I can recall carrying out this obsessive arranging as young as the age of five. Throughout my life, most of my art supplies have been subjected to this treatment.
More Articles
- Julia Sneden: Niggly Things
- An Update To: "There's No Crying In Baseball"* ... Oh, Yes, There Is ... "Don't you know how hard this all is?**"
- A Baseball Story You Might Not Have Heard About an American Catcher and Spy for the OSS
- Christmas Presence: Jewelry, a Musical Powder Box, a Bike, See's Candy and Double Acrostics
- Jealousy, The Green-Eyed Monster As Constant Companion
- Elaine Soloway's Rookie Widow and Transplant Series: Public Transit, Treasure Hunt and Coin-Operated Laundry
- The Bosky Dell: "Mid Beechy Umbrage, Bosky Dell 'Tis There the Ringdove Loves to Dwell"*
- Building Character; A Lesson From Six Children
- Teacups and Friendship, Witnessing Friendship and Life Across the Table From My Elders
- Missing Persons: I look at our grown-up sons and realize those little boys are never really very far away