A Rhino and A Tomato

Lest we offend Mother with our art projects, she always made sure we had a “kit”.  A kit is a lunchbox filled with art supplies.  Oh, how I adored my kits!  Mother is very, very smart.  Scary smart.  Dad is no slouch either, but he always made a point of admiring Mother’s intellect, and we followed suit.  Of course she has no common sense, but that is another matter. 

Mother started making kits for me sometime before I started attending school.  What a smart move!  They were filled with school supplies as well.  When school started, the smell and feel of a sharp pencil was a fine thing for me.  A 64 box of crayons with the sharpener in the box was pregnant with possibility, so long as there was paper in sight.  And I had just learned to plunge cut with safety scissors.  Paste was mint scented, so a little taste never hurt anyone if you licked it off your fingers.   I could write my name, address and telephone number, the alphabet, and short words to make a sentence or two to form short stories, sans punctuation.  I liked to draw on the hallway wall, so mother taped a roll of butcher paper up each day along the length of the hallway, and I covered it with my art.

Every year after that, we would go to the store and buy school supplies, and we would buy extras for our “kit”.  I felt so special having a kit of my own.

I know exactly how Joe Fox felt in the movie You’ve Got Mail when he said, “Don't you love New York in the fall? It makes me wanna buy school supplies. I would send you a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils if I knew your name and address.”

I buy extra school supplies for the inner city children whose parents cannot afford them.  I donate them every Labor Day weekend.  I always throw in extra crayons and markers, secretly wishing and hoping the children will get them just so they can take them home and be creative.  In my heart of hearts, I know some school administrator is taking them to the classroom.  But hope, they say, springs eternal.

Then I buy my daughter extra markers, and crayons, colored paper, glue, glitter, stickers, clay, paints, ink, stamps, ballons, and buttons and ribbon and pipe cleaners, and I make her a “kit”.  We paint rocks.  We cut stuff out.  We talk.  We make snowflakes and hearts, jewelry, hats, bugs, papier mache and anything else we can imagine.  Some of them are not quite right.  No matter.

One year, I found her a giant marker set.  It is bigger than anything I ever had.  She just had to have it!  It was better than a rainbow.  It was the 64 box of crayon in markers!  So I bought it.  I showed it to her.  And wide eyed, she opened it and announced, “I am going to draw a mouse”.  She withdrew a gray marker and started on the blank page, the marker moving, she described each part as she went.  “First the head, then the ears, next the body, then the tail.  IDIOT!” suddenly she shrieked. 

“Eilene,” I said, “that is not a nice word, “We don’t say idiot in this house.  What is wrong with your picture?”

“Oh, it’s a rhinoceros,” she said.  She glared at the marker and tossed it to the floor.

“Try again,” I said. 

She chose a new marker in quite an unfamiliar color.  “What color is it?” she said.

“Rust”, said I.  “It is a reddish brown color.  You’ll like it.”

And so she began drawing.   “I’ll do a mouse this time for sure.  First the head, then the body, then the… IDIOT!”, she screamed, marker quivering next to her face; a wild look in her eyes.

 I put my hand on her shoulder immediately and said, “I told you about that word.  What has happened?”

My daughter leveled me with a weepy look and said, “It’s a tomato.”

We still play with our kits, just not those markers.  Perhaps some markers are just possessed.