Backstory: at my last Jaycees meeting, we spent some time
prepping for an upcoming essay competition against Jaycees all over the state
(and then the country, and then… world, I guess?). Anyway, to whet our appetite
and encourage us to enter, our president gave us a prompt that we’ve have about
five minutes to write about. Our topic: what is your favorite color, and why?
I get “you think too much” from a lot of people in my
life, and they’re right. But one consequence of spending way too much time thinking
through pretty much everything in my life is that, when someone asks me what I
think about X, I can usually tell them. At length. With sources.
I could get on my soapbox about the disparity of reaction
when people see, say, a 13-year-old softball phenom who pitches 200 balls a day
(“Wow, she’s so dedicated!) vs. an adult who reads a lot (“Nerd.”). But that’s
for another time.
Anyway, here’s what I wrote. Paper, pen, five minutes,
what’s your favorite color and why? Go:
The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda once wrote [You can groan, it’s okay. I groaned a little
myself. I had five minutes, what do you want?] that green was the “color of
hope.” I wish I could say that I picked green as my favorite color because of
this quote… but the truth is that a few years ago I decided that it just looked
good on me. Maybe it’s my eyes, I don’t know.
I love green in all its many shades. Forest, emerald,
Kelly (which are TOTALLY not the same, by the way), lime, celery. Green can be
sophisticated or funky, refined or “street.” My 14-year-old nephew would remind
me that green is also the color worn by our favorite driver, Dale Earnhardt
Jr., which makes it even more awesome.
But it’s more than aesthetic. Which brings me back to
Pablo Neruda. He wrote in green ink because, as I said, it was the “color of
hope.” I think looking at green just made him happy. I had a dream once where I
got married wearing green shoes. In my dream, they were pretty – but mostly,
looking at them just made me happy.
…
So, if I could find a job where I got paid to write about
random things for five minutes at a time, I’d be a bazillionaire.
No comments:
Post a Comment