“Was the sky blue?” asked a seven-year-old boy. He was curious and seeking an honest answer to a problem he had discovered.
We had been talking about how different my childhood was from his. He was amazed to learn that I was once a child, just like him, small, young, still with lots to grow and learn. “Yeah, things were different back when I was a kid. We didn’t have cell phones and tablets.”
He added that everything was black and grey. I corrected him and said, “Yes, our televisions were black and white.”
“So, was the sky blue?” he wondered.
This was a fantastic insight into his mind as he tried to figure out the world, his place in it, and this weird concept that things had happened long before he was born.
When I had children as young as this student on my bus, I tried to convince my kids of many things. Purple cows that come out at night (so the kids won’t go outside at nighttime), that it was bedtime, whenever we saw the moon, even in the middle of the day, their older brother David, whom they never met because he didn’t listen to me and ran off when we were at the zoo and now he has to work there for the rest of his life, and I even tried to convince my kids that colour was a new invention.
They have seen pictures of my parents and myself in grainy black and white photos. As I got older, the number of colour pictures increased to when all the images of the young version of me were in colour. I told the kids that the government did not invent colour until after I was born. All our TV shows were in black and white, the clouds were white on a grey sky, and all our clothes and food were some shade of grey. Then, colour was first brought to the cities. This explained why some pictures of me were in colour, and others were in black and white, and eventually, colour was everywhere. It was a long process and even expensive. Only then did everyone know that grass was green, apples were red, and the sky was blue.
I found myself staring at the young boy, asking about the colour of the sky. Should I play the mischievous father figure and warp his mind into thinking colour is a new invention? After all, I am pretty good at convincing children into believing untrue things, like my youngest, who proudly exclaimed that she came from Walmart or my niece believing in freezer lizards and not to go in my freezer in case they escape.
Sadly, time was not on my side. He was stepping off the bus, and I did not have the time to go into great detail about the government program to colourize the world. I chickened out and said, yes, the sky was blue in my childhood, but we lacked the technology to take a proper picture of it.
I missed an excellent opportunity to tell someone a tall tale, to weave a yard, to take someone on a flight of fancy, on a far-fetched adventure.
Oh well.
Next time.
