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sunshine jen: Olive Green
This morning, I smashed a large jar of olives in the garage while searching in a storage cabinet for dog food. Ooops! I was shifting a plastic crate to see what was behind it and down went the jar of olives all over the concrete floor.
Have you ever accidentally dropped a glass jar and felt time slow down as it floated to the floor? It might only take a half second to fall, but in that half second, your brain said, ‘oh that’s gonna be a mess and watch for broken glass’.
Like other dropped glass jar messes, this one was a pretty routine clean-up although those olives rolled all over the place. Also, they were well camouflaged on the concrete floor. I guess the color ‘olive green’ makes for good camouflage.
Thinking about olive green the color, I remembered something that happened to me back in Seventh Grade in Catholic School Land.
My seventh grade teacher, a Mrs not a Sr, was in the hospital for a long period of time. Maybe it was only a month in the spring, but in the seventh grade, a month was a very long time.
We had a substitute teacher who was an older lady (also not a nun) who just did not have a clue. She was obsessed with teaching us music but I think she was tone deaf. I remember we had to do a chanting and clapping song over and over again. As a kid, I was a pretty patient person who could put up with a lot of bullshit, but even my limit was tested by Miss Substitute.
I remember one day she played ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’ on the record player and had us draw pictures of our impression of the music. Guess what most of the class drew? Bees! I think I drew a sandstorm. I took my beige crayon and drew circles of sand flying in the air. Even back then, I had a streak of the avant garde in me.
One day, we were given an ‘art’ project where we had to draw a graph of squares over a picture. Then we had to reproduce the picture in a graph on a blank sheet of paper. Some kids sacrificed their Garfield folders and incarcerated Garfield in a cage of graphic lines. Some kids used photographs from magazines and had some very strange results. I used the cover of my spelling book.
The cover of our seventh grade spelling book had various shades of green with the letters A, B, C in a graphic design that was sorta neat in that early eighties kind of way. I decided to do the letter B (or was it C, I forget). So I made my little graph over the letter and made a little graph on my white paper.
I had one small problem. There were three shades of green on the cover, and I only had two shades of green in my crayon box. The drawing needed three shades of green. Otherwise the whole balance of the composition would be off.
Okay, I wasn’t thinking that at the time, but I knew I needed a third green. Instead of asking Mary Ann Biltmore behind me if she had a third green, I decided to just combine my brown crayon with my green crayon to make a new color.
I drew and traced and colored everything in carefully. I was pleased with the results. Next to the spelling book color, my drawing was not an exact replica of the cover graphic, but you could see how one became the other. I even liked my new shade of green.
The substitute teacher was walking around the classroom from desk to desk as she commented and praised people’s work. The Garfields were a hit. When she got to me, I showed her the spelling book and my reinterpretation of the spelling book. I felt pretty good. Nobody else had done the spelling book cover. I explained that I only had two greens and had to make up a third green.
The substitute teacher was quiet for a moment and then exclaimed:
THAT’S DISGUSTING!
But it’s just brown and green. I said. The substitute teacher just shook her head, gave me back my drawing, and continued to the next student down the row.
I was in shock. Disgusting? What was disgusting about it? It was just a color. Okay, maybe it did look a little like vomit, but wasn’t vomit. It was crayon. Disgusting? My picture? Huh?
I was kind of bummed. I did like praise---even from people I despised. And at that moment, I realized that my view of the world and Miss Substitute’s view of the world were completely different. I wouldn’t openly defy her. I would do little things, little acts of terrorism to upset her two-green world. I soon realized that I was not the only one. Our entire seventh grade class became a sleeper cell ready to erupt against the substitute.
Fortunately, our real seventh grade teacher came back. I remember we were overjoyed to see her. She was a really good listener, and on her first day back, we told her all our stories about the substitute from hell.
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