By Alexander C. Kafka
Our son Julian was blue, and he couldn’t have been happier about it. Almost 3, he was passionate about color—not colors, mind you, but color. One color. Blue.
My wife and I were prepared for the boys-prefer-blue ethos. And it’s not that Julian was particularly macho. He got jealous of his twin sister Adrienne’s barrettes and would have loved a couple of his own, and he could push doll babies in strollers around his preschool classroom with the best of them. But he adored blue, with the intensity of religious fanaticism, political credo, and aesthetic manifesto all rolled up in one. The degree of his commitment to the hue was reflected in his pronunciation—a sensual, insatiable, delightful “buh-LUE.”
He didn’t just like to wear blue, he gravitated to everything blue. He spotted my Cool Blue Raspberry Gatorade one day and started asking regularly for “blue juice.” Because we wanted him to drink more milk than juice, I always told him that there was no blue juice open. Then when I asked him later if I could get him anything at the grocery store, he said he wanted “blue juice that opens.” Reforming the system from within.
He turned on the TV and clicked through the real channels to the blue default screen on a channel we didn’t get. Listening blissfully to the static and staring into the deep blue, he purred, “This is my favorite movie.”
When he finger-painted, he did so in blue. When he drew with crayons, he did so in blue. When he used sidewalk chalk, it was the blue one. The family was strolling one day, my wife Lauren and I were chatting, Adrienne was singing “A, B, C’s” and Julian stared upward, transfixed, at the clear sky. “Mommy, daddy, pahdon me!” he bellowed (we had taught them to say “pardon me” if they interrupted, but hadn’t conveyed that it was best done quietly). “Yes, Julian, what is it, honey?” I said. “The sky is buh-LUE?” he wished, in wonderment, to confirm. “Yes, it is.” He stared up, longingly, having discovered his place of origin.
Blue had such power for Julian that it was not just a color. It was an honorific. After his hernia surgery at Children’s, his first request in the recovery unit was for blue crackers, so hungry was he. He might have meant his favorite brand of saltines, which came in a blue box. Then again, he might really have meant blue crackers. With Julian, you never knew.
He referred to his two constant companions as his “blue people.” A stickler might note that the blue people were neither blue—they were black and white—nor were they people—they were a cow and a dog. What was clear was that Julian regarded them as his dearest companions and most vulnerable charges. If we tucked him in for naptime or night-night and failed to cover his blue people properly with the blanket, he protested, with the somber indignation of a paternalistic Latin American dictator, “I am cozy, but my people are not cozy.”
That which was good was blue. That which he wanted most was blue. It must have been, for why else would he want it? Thus a cozy fleece jacket was his “little blue jacket”; never mind that it was gray.
I know what you’re thinking: The boy simply didn’t know his colors. But he did, as long as they were in a book divorced of all daily associations. But in this three-dimensional world, blue was a status, a recommendation, an authority.
His yummy Flintstones chewables were blue—or else. “Is it blue, mommy?” he’d ask, holding a vitamin. “Actually, it’s orange.” “It IS blue!” he’d protest, verging on a tantrum. This was a ritual repeated daily.
Finally we arrived at the concept of “honorary blue” to describe that which should be blue and yet, due to some anomaly in the structure of the universe, does not appear so. Thus, we could say of favored vitamins, clothes, balls, skies, cars, and even some relatives, that they were, for example, “green, but honorary blue,” a determination Julian accepted with grudging equanimity, like a white-collar criminal learning of a fairly favorable settlement offer.
In such improvisatory ways, we weathered his stormy mood indigo.
