Orange

Sister Miriam knew me long before I was born. She was my mom’s best friend in high school. When I was a baby, she and Sister Alacoque gave me a tour of the forbidden parts of the Villa Marie Claire. I remember that. I remember the refectory and the beautiful chapel. They knew my parents and knew me.

When I went to kindergarten, Sister Miriam was my teacher. She gave us a coloring page to do. Each table got a box of crayons. In those days there was a crayon called “flesh.” The page was a family scene with a mom in it. Unable to wrest the “flesh” crayon from my tablemates and frustrated, I used the orange crayon to color the mom.

Sister Miriam went ballistic! “I know your mother! She is not orange!” OMG! What had I done? I was just trying to finish in time as best I could! I was five. I can remember like it was yesterday. I hadn’t pressed hard. I used light strokes to suggest a color that I didn’t have.

It was true. My mom was not orange. I didn’t cry, but I felt like I failed the coloring test somehow. I guess I was just not aggressive enough in trying to get that “flesh” crayon.

What would have happened if I had colored the mom brown? I don’t know. That crayon was available. All of my tablemates were white. It never occurred to me to just leave the mom white and uncolored. But I think I thought I would have lost points somehow for not completing the assignment.

My mom was a “Dorothy” like Hillary Clinton’s mom. She was like Dorothy Howell Rodham. Her mom died in childbirth when my mom was six. The nuns saw something in her and rescued her from servitude at her aunt’s house by giving her a high school scholarship with room and board at the Villa Marie Claire in Saddle River, NJ. Even in the 20th century, orphans and godchildren lived in the United States a life like the little Reste-Aveks in Haiti do today.

My mom was valedictorian of her graduating class. My dad and his twin graduated with her. They were not high school sweethearts. They connected years later. The nuns were delighted.

My dad’s family is very mixed. We’ve been here a long time. English, Irish, French escaping religious persecution in Europe in the 17th century, so I was shocked when doing genealogical research to learn that we had so many Protestants on my dad’s side. My grandma was Irish, very Catholic, and she ruled.

Since the Irish nuns had partially raised my Hungarian-American mom and she was married to an Irish guy, my sister and I learned to do an Irish jig. Mom made green outfits for us to wear when our school uniforms were “at the cleaners” on St. Patrick’s Day.

We learned never to wear orange on St. Patrick’s Day and, years later I felt hurt (controlled outrage) when a friend of mine did. Those were the days of Maggie Thatcher, Bobby Sands, and my friend was Texana, so WTF was the issue?

Maybe a year ago orange was the new black. We have had an orange speaker of the house. He is gone. Now we have an orange candidate for POTUS. Sister Miriam really could not fault me if I grabbed that crayon to color him in, but then I probably would have been left with the “flesh” one. All of my tablemates would have grabbed the orange.

Is it a testament to our discipline that we never descended to breaking up that one ‘flesh’ crayon so that everyone who needed it could use it? Or is it a condemnation of our lack of imagination?