Ma Vie en Rose

When I was a little boy I loved wearing my cowboy handkerchief tied around my chin like a grandma so I could play Little Red Riding Hood.  I used to tie my cute little bathrobe on, and then let my top half slip out of the sleeves so I could recreate Cinderella’s skirt.  And my favorite color was shining, happy, uncompromising pink. 

My favorite things were all pink, and my Mom knew it.  She used it in some instances for her advantage.  When I hated all the boy clothes with the rough Tuff Skin pants and the tee-shirt with the picture of the guys riding three-wheelers on it, my mom pointed out that the sunset behind the three-wheelers had blazing pink hues in it, and suddenly I was on board with wearing it.  The Easter Bunny brought me pink rabbits for my basket.  And the Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs cake my mom made for my fifth birthday was dyed pink because mom refused to make boxed strawberry cake mix. 

When I went to kindergarten, my mom had to make sure I wasn’t going to get beat up on the very first day, so she pulled me aside and asked if I knew how the cool kids talked about colors.  I responded that I didn’t know how they spoke about colors.

“Well,” my mom said, slyly, “when cool kids have a favorite color, the cool way to say their favorite color is to say what makes the colors.  Like if their favorite color was green, they would say their favorite color was blue and yellow.  And since your favorite color is pink, you would say red and white.” 

“Oh,” I said, now in the know.  “I gotcha.” 

And wouldn’t you know it, that first day in kindergarten our favorite colors did come up.  When they got to me, I said very loudly, proudly, and more than a little pompously, “My favorite color is red and white.”  Then I looked around to see who understood, who was cool enough to speak the cool color code.  It looked like a couple of kids knew, maybe.  And when we lined up in our favorite color groups, I stood in the red section and looked at all the girls in the pink section and knew they were un-cool suckers.  They didn’t know the code. 

This little trick worked for two years, until second grade when I understood that when you said red  in school, you got red.  So I was back saying I loved pink, because pink was about honesty.  And the honest truth was I loved pink.  So for my birthday party in school, I wore a crown in my favorite color, pink!  My mom brought in cupcakes, and mine had a pink plastic mermaid on top of it. 

And now, everything is coming up roses in my yard.  There is a large, beautiful bush of roses next to the porch.  This bush puts out blossoms that should be on the cover of magazines.  And in a green plastic pot next to our steps, there grows a bush of roses that my Gram dug up from her own large bush.  These roses are the best.  They not only have huge, over-blown blossoms, they also smell like heaven.  They smell like roses are meant to smell.  And you can smell them across the yard.  The best part, ever since I was a kid, I knew that these roses were the best shade of pink in the world.  And now they’re blossoming right next to my front door.  Paradise in a plastic pot!