interlude: cabbages and kings

Interlude: Cabbages and Kings

6/ 25/ 14

Purple is my favorite color. I'll go ahead and make it official. It's not mandatory to have a favorite color or make it official unless you're pushing five and have yet to, you might as well have one ready for the girls who will pester you until you relent or "choose" one they have chosen for you and that will be your official color irrespective of the fact that your favorite color is red.

My first favorite color was red.  I am pretty sure this was a side-effect of trickle down fandom. I was born in Virginia. My grandfather's easy chair reclined in Virginia. My father attended UVA. For regional reasons, we were Redskins fans; and the girls at J. B. Watkins Elementary were licking their chops; notorious for doling out dookie browns and, worse than that, pinks, I offered them red. Red stood fast for years. Out fandom or habit or just to have a color loaded if required in the spur of the moment, it stood until high school.

There may have been trendy lapses along the way . . . a black, ensued by discussion on whether or not black was a even a color, with your pigmentists on one side and your fourth-grade physicists on the other . . .  something neon tangerine or pastel lymon maybe. But my third favorite color was blue. A virtual heresy. The color of the Dallas Cowboys. An attempted usurpation. The color had already been claimed my brother. But the the most egregious apostasy of all was admitting the input of girls. Known to grow-up faster than boys, by the time I got to high school the girls I knew had matured beyond the bathroom and their Barbie pinks and into a penchant for bringing boys into a fashionable light or palette,depending on your faction. It turns out my eyes are blue, almost preternaturally so, when matched with blue shirts; they bring out the color of my eyes -- a desirable effect, as it turns out. With no ado, my color was blue.

Next, naturally, given my teen Romanticism and subsequent brush with naturalism, my colors took their cues from our variegated earth. Mud red as of Alabama creek beds. Forest green as seen along  I-540 from Ft. Smith to Fayetteville. Fire-orange sunset streaking the Pacific between Lanai and Maui. And, closest to my heart, any autumn amalgam, but preferably on snaky routes between Cades Cove and the Peaks of Otter.

In the earth tone group, I should probably acknowledge the influence of grunge flannel as witnessed knotted around my waist, draped over the shoulders of a campfire damsel, or worn in defiance of Boy Band Cerulean.

But now purple. How, why, or when, I don't know and I can't afford a psychologist to not particularly know alongside of me. It certainly doesn't bring out my eyes, or flatter my skin tone.

I had probably always admired purple deep down. Perhaps for being braver than me. Perhaps for being richer than me. For being lovelier? More bathed in the milk of majesty? I certainly cannot remember ever being directly opposed to it. I had never been probed by purple aliens nor hurried-off a stage by juicily rotting eggplants. I don't think I ever noticed purple on my six as a tidal-wave of clover at my heels or suffered betel nut loogies jettisoned in ambush from a cabbage patch.

I think it was out of the blue. From thin air, let's say, to avoid confusion. A couple of years ago, I was in the market for a new suit of clothes -- specifically for my son's band banquet, consequentially to fluff-up my wardrobe.

Round and round Kohl's . . . nothing catches my eye, round and round JCP . . .  nothing jumps off the rack . . . until purple does . . . from a carousel of ugly ties. It was like at first sight, beyond admiration.
Leery of my grin, my wife tries to cauterize this fresh wound at first blood and leads on.  A purple shirt materializes in the clearance aisle. Do I have any fancy pants to go with this? We'll look when we get home. Home . . . away from my hideous tie, my out-of-style shirt. Too risky.

I arrived at the banquet proud in purple. Back then my sudden inspiration; meanwhile an incubating intrigue; now my favorite color.

Everything's coming up purple these days. It's as if my have eyes have gone Terminator, scanning the red-gray, the yellow-gray, the fireburst-gray, locking-in on purple. It seems that Kohl's and JCP stock it exclusively. If there are pansies, they are violets. I had never seen a purple car that wasn't trying too hard or being ironic until recently . . . these days every third or fourth one is rocking it amethyst or cruising on magenta.

It's bizarre but true. You'll just have to believe me. I wouldn't call it mystical, but I'd allow mysterious. You would think there is some reason why I point and call out "purple" whenever I see purple like a toddling talker from a grocery cart when helping to choose grapes or at a picnic when a dragonfly alights on the basket's handle. As fortune would have it, I currently talk like a toddler -- a blurting exultancy, ecstatically not-quite sure.

Not mystical but indeed mysterious why the auroras behind my eyelids morph from mustard to lavender.