WHO DECIDED WHAT COLOR PENCILS SHOULD BE?

When you work in an elementary school classroom, the one thing you can guarantee is that there are always pencils that need to be sharpened. And if you don't want your jaw to rattle all day with the sound of the electric sharpener (a noise akin to that of a dentist's drill, to my ears), you might sharpen them yourself with one of those 50-cent sharpeners that gather the shavings in a self-contained holder. There are 24 students in the second-grade classroom to which I'm currently assigned, and between their wanton destruction of the pencil population and their heavy hands when it comes to putting pencil to paper, pencils need to be sharpened at about the rate of six per minute.

As I was sharpening the latest batch this week, it occurred to me to wonder why pencils are usually yellow. Not just yellow, but the orangey-yellow of Velveeta cheese. I know you can buy pencils in every color of the rainbow nowadays, and with any picture or words, glitter, velvet, and other embellishments you can imagine, but if you go to the store to buy cheap pencils in bulk, they are going to remind you of Kraft macaroni and cheese. Why? Who decided that was the color pencils should be?

Furthermore, why are erasers always pink? Pink erasers and orangey-yellow pencils don't even match, but if you look up clip-art of pencils, nine times out of ten, they'll be yellow pencils with pink erasers.

There are a lot of these unspoken rules about what we agree things should look like. My daughter says that all pizza should be pepperoni. As proof, she points out the fact that whenever you see an illustration of a slice of pizza, it is invariably topped with little reddish-brown circles of what is clearly pepperoni.

All babies have blue eyes. Well, Caucasian babies. Except mine, who were all born with murky gray eyes that were clearly destined to darken and never had a hint of blue in them, regardless of the myriad blue-eyed relatives on both sides of the family tree.

I listened to a teacher berate a child who had colored leaves purple, saying that was not a color that occurs in leaves. In fact, it is. I don't know the name of the plant, but I have seen it for sale at Walmart and its leaves are purple. (I know this doesn't support my topic, but it's kind of the inverse of my point, so I left it in.)

Who eats eggs sunnyside up? I'm an over-easy gal myself. (Hmm, maybe that's not the best way to put that.) Pictures of eggs? Sunnyside up.

How about cupcakes? Cupcakes always have pink frosting. The weird thing is, a lot of the time they have cherries on top, but I've never had a cupcake with a cherry on top. Of course, sundaes are always shown with hot fudge, and cookies are always chocolate chip. Maybe chocolate trumps everything else.

Apples are always red. We know that apples can be green or yellow or even pink, but when we draw apples, we always color them red.

Don't you feel bad for oranges? They don't even get their own name; they have to share it with their color. Why don't we call lemons yellows or limes greens? Could it be that oranges are just that unique that the color was named for them rather than they being named for the color?

Why are school buses yellow? Why are tractors red (when they're not John Deere green)? When did car manufacturers agree that they could paint cars in colors other than black?

Look at any picture drawn by an elementary school child and notice that the sun is always angled across one of the top corners of the paper, with huge spiky rays extending from it. Have we ever actually seen the sun look like that? I doubt it, but we've all drawn the sun that way. Furthermore, we most often draw the moon as a crescent, even though it only appears that way about a fourth of the time. Is it to distinguish it from the sun?

I guess it boils down to a form of shorthand. We portray things the way we most often see them, and then we know exactly what we're talking about. When we see an egg sunnyside up, there's no doubt we're talking about an egg. If we see an oval, it could be an egg, but there's always that tiny shred of a chance that it might be something else. If it's yellow, it must be a pencil.

THE JANE MOFFAT PROJECT

My imagination is quite child-like, and it manifests itself in strange and unusual ways. From the time I was quite small, I would come up with games and routines that would stave off boredom, or that were inspired by books or movies. The fact that I can be somewhat OCD simply intensifies those tendencies. These games I play with myself are mostly private, weird little things that I've rarely if ever shared with anyone else.

When I was a kid and would play house with other girls, I would create detailed backstories in my head, usually centering on great poverty as evinced in books by Louisa May Alcott, Kate Douglas Wiggin, and Sara Crewe's ordeals in A Little Princess. My "children" and I would carefully gather wood for heat and cooking; we would be poor but honorable, doing whatever we must to survive hardship and deprivation. I'm still drawn to stories like that: a recent read was Prayers for Sale by Sandra Dallas.

The game that has had the most lasting effect on my life, however, is one I like to call The Jane Moffat Project. In one of the Moffat books by Eleanor Estes, Jane decides to read all the books in the library, so she starts with A and begins to read her way through. Even as a kid, this idea appealed to me, and every so often, I would take a stab at The Jane Moffat Project. I never got very far, because I would be seduced away from the books I "should" read by the books I "wanted" to read. Eventually I would have to admit that I had gone off the wagon, and for a while I would put the project out of my mind.

The most recent iteration of the JMP began this year when I decided I would attempt to read all the books in the library at the school where I work. I didn't get very far at all. Well, maybe I did, because I took a multi-pronged approach to the project. In addition to starting at the A section of the chapter books, I started at the first shelf of non-fiction, and would also read a few picture/story books with whatever classes I subbed or aided in. And of course, after so many years of reading, I had already read many of the books in the school's collection.

I'll never know whether I could have done it, because I've been informed that I'm being transferred to another school in the county. I am deeply saddened by this, because I have grown to love where I've been and have come to feel that I've been an asset to the school. I just don't know if I have the heart to go through the process yet again of getting to know my co-workers and creating a niche for myself. People have tried to console me by reminding me that I'm lucky I still have a job at all. Well, yeah, I know that, but it doesn't make it easier to reconcile myself to reality after I've come to know most of the students by name and made some friends. I don't know if I can put myself out there again.

On the other hand, there are two local libraries (one on-post, one off) nearby. Perhaps Jane Moffat will lead me to another tilt at this particular windmill. Reading has always gotten me through tough times. I will tuck my Nook, well-stocked as it is with nearly 700 books, into my purse and rely on it to ease the transition. I could do a mini-Moffatt simply by reading all the books I've downloaded. Alternatively, there's always graduate school.