Kaleidoscope

It’s A Technicolor World I Live In, Misses Pat

My life has always been about colour. I even dream in exploding hot diggity-dog technicolour. I ask you.

My mother always kept shaddup suckers in the glove compartment of my father’s car. Shaddup suckers were exactly that. To get me to shut up when we were driving, especially on long distance trips, to visit our family ‘up north’. I tended to (alright then, I still do) yak a lot.

Well understand this, whilst I had an elder brother and sister, they were already out of the house so to speak when I was born. My sister just going on sixteen, my brother even older. So to all intents and purposes, I was an only child.

Thus I had to keep myself company on those long trips. I think my chatting and singing and poetry recitals drove my parents scats. So I would be given a shaddup sucker almost as soon as we set off, gears grinding, shock absorbers groaning with the weight of the luggage piled high, not forgetting the padkos my Mom had packed.

Shaddup suckers were cellophane wrapped strips of lollipops that came in robot colours. Red, orange and green. I didn't care for the orange ones and often had to do an eenie meenie minie mo between the red and green ones. Of course the red ones were my favourites. I would make sure there was loads of juicy spit in my mouth, picking up the red colour of the lollipop, which I would then rub all over my lips with my tongue. Well, a gal needs her lipstick doesn't she? And green lipstick wasn't fashionable back in the 60’s.

If you ask me, I think red was my favourite colour as a young person.

My first bicycle was red. So was my first motorbike, and my first car was red too, come to think of it. Um, every car I’ve bought myself has been red. Does that tell you something? Psychiatrists and the like – put away your diagnoses and just go with the flow here please.

Whenever I give directions, I use colour as a reference. Like, turn left at the house with the turquoise garage doors. Heaven help us if the owners repaint their doors another colour without me knowing. Thank goodness for Google maps now. And GPS’s... I’ve just found a BlackBerry app which is easy to use, gives directions in an English accent which I can understand. And yes, the screen is in... You guessed it... colour.

When my boys were young, their clothes were colour coded. New clothes, before they were even so much as put near a body, were run through the sewing machine with colour thread zigzagged on the inside labels. Red for Dane, green for Justyn, Wade loved blue and hello! (yellow) for Gregory, the little shit. That way we never had arguments about who owned what.

Peter will still to this day shout up the staircase "where’d you keep the roll of string?" and I'll reply “in the blue Tupperware box with the orange lid in the cupboard where the red tea-towels are kept”. Colour again.

I am not, and have never been, scared of colour. Even my language, particularly when I'm miffed, becomes exceptionally colourful. The air can turn twelve different shades of blue when I lose the plot. That's when the kids and the cats feel the electricity in the air and they all run away.

As a child I loved getting Crayola as gifts. My Aunty Doreen, who was a real lady, was always the one to buy me the biggest set at Christmas time. I think the largest set I ever received was about 64 pieces – plus there were metallic bronze, silver and gold crayons in a separate bonus box. Those three would be savoured for the most splendid of pictures, usually adding bling (which did I mention I love?) to my artistic masterpieces. I would take the crayons out of their boxes, lay them out in their shades, from darkest to lightest, and would more often than not draw something which would include a rainbow or two. With the pot ‘o gold coloured in, in metallic gold Crayola, right where it belonged. At the bottom of the rainbow.

Even today, with my machine embroidery, I have a chest of drawers holding many different colours of threads, all neatly arranged into shades, from darkest to light, and in the format of a rainbow. Purples and pinks to reds, oranges and yellows, blues to greens not forgetting blacks, greys, whites, and metallics.

I love rainbows. All those colours together make my heart very happy. Fact, if I could get to the pot o’ gold at the bottom of the rainbow I'd be even happier. Wouldn't we all. That a rainbow is formed because of various phenomena like refraction and reflection to produce a magical arc over my head is, in my mind, never short of a miracle.

And best of all... I live in a Rainbow Nation. How cool is that!