Neil Young was singing about Alberta and strong winds, and I was getting into a relaxed mood, maybe a bit down, when Russ said, “I had no idea that’s where that goes.”
“It doesn’t go there,” I said.
“Oh.”
“Put it there. With that.”
We were cleaning up my mess. I had been trying to make sense of the disorder of my collected stuff. At the least, I wanted to put things away in places where I wouldn’t keep tripping over them. I have crap everywhere.
Words like mess and things and stuff and crap are vague, but when all I have is seen as one, what is seen is disunity and it’s all just stuff. Crap. Things.
I wanted it all in boxes—individual, isolated units. I wanted to impose government on the anarchy of accumulated life, which was spread out over the floor.
So why, Russ wondered, did I put a blue crayon in a box that had balloons? And I had a lot of balloons—bags and bags of them. And why did I put every other crayon in another box that, as anyone could see, was for crayons?
For that matter, why did I have crayons? Or balloons?
It was a memory box, of course. Blue crayons and balloons. But Russ had no way of knowing this.
“Why did you put that there? That crayon with the balloons?”
I considered the question then said, “Her name was Sherrie. The first time I met her she was with her daughter. Her daughter’s name was Erin.”
“No one’s named Sherrie now.”
“No. You just don’t meet them anymore. I wonder what happened to all the Sherries?”
“I don’t know. I guess people got tired of them.”
“I never did,” I said.
It’s peculiar the way names come and go. For a while it seems there are oodles of people with certain names. And then they’re gone and you can’t find anyone named that anymore. I wonder why that is?
“Sherrie used to say if you see something in blue, or with a blue background like sky or water, then it was like, whatever it was, it was okay. Because there was blue and you can’t be sad or angry or frustrated or anything except kinda happy when you had some blue.”
Russ looked at me in a funny way as if he wasn’t convinced but would go along to be agreeable.
“I guess that explains your place,” he said.
He was talking about my house. There’s a lot of blue. Russ even calls it my Little Blue House. Curtains, pillows, towels—all shades of blue. I like to have a lot of it around.
Who doesn’t want to be happy?
Sherrie explained it when I saw her that day with Erin. They were colouring. Both were kneeling over, working on a picture. Erin had a bunch of balloons floating up behind her, bouncing lazily together, all on a string that was tied about her waist. When I asked why all the blue Sherrie said, “Because blue is our happy colour. Right Erin?”
Erin kept colouring, very intently, but I saw her head nod. The balloons waved in the air above her with the movement.
“Some people think blue’s sad,” Sherrie said. “But it’s not. I suppose it can be, but I can’t see how. I mean, if you’re singing the blues, the blues aren’t really blue. Not if you sing them right. If you do, you probably feel pretty good because…well, you’re singing the blues. But blues, as in something sad, aren’t blue. They’re black.”
It sounded convoluted enough to be true.
I had met them at a folk festival. They were having a fine time colouring under a tree while someone up on the stage was singing about a tragic love that involved liquor and knives and a woman named Betty who had loved “too well, too long.”
Erin and Sherrie weren’t listening. They were drawing and colouring. All their crayons were blue.
So I asked why and that’s when Sherrie told me about blue and later I told her my name and after that things progressed.
Later, things kind of went to pieces. I’m not really sure why or how. But when it did a space came into my life and I only knew about Sherrie third hand from what friends of friends may have said.
I should have another box, one for things I’ve never understood, though I’m not sure the house would be big enough to contain it.
A knock sounded at my door one day. It was some time after Russ and I had tried to impose a sense of order to my place. I opened the door and a young woman stood there. She was dishevelled in a fashionable way. For a moment, neither of us spoke. Then she said, “I’m Erin.”
“I know,” I replied.
And I did know. I would have recognized her anywhere even though I hadn’t seen her in about fourteen years. She was a young woman now with a keen though wary intelligence in her eyes.
There was another long pause during which she looked past me into the house. From a distance, she was studying it. Learning it. Finally, she said, “That’s a lotta blue.”
“Yep,” I agreed. “I like it. Blue that is.”
She turned to me and looked directly in my eyes in the challenging way young people can have.
“It wasn’t the blue, you know. It was Mom.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I know. But blue is all I have.”
She nodded. “Crayons. For me it was crayons.”
Reaching into her pocket, she pulled out a handful of them. They were all blue.
July 1993