Earlier this afternoon, I came to the conclusion that my mother elevated "beige" to an artform.
As I was whacking away at weeds and bushes in the yard, I was remembering moments from my childhood, and on my mother's life since then till she passed away, and the entire experience seems to have been defined by the color beige.
What lies around the bend...
When I was little, we had beige food. It even tasted beige. Beige chicken and beige mashed potatoes with beige gravy, and vegetables that had been overcooked into a state of beigeness.
Life was beige. I had beige clothes, beige shoes. I lived in a room with beige carpet and beige drapes. My teddy bear was of a pale hue that came pretty damned close to "faux beige." If you really put your imagination to work, he was brown.
I don't think my father was beige — in fact, he seemed quite dark and colorful — but he wasn't really there often enough to materially alter the beige-ness of the dominant colorscape, except for the very brief periods when his explosive temper would add fireworks in a myriad hues of crimson, orange, yellow, black and purple. Ironically enough, on those occasions, beige became the desirable condition.
I remember visiting my mom in Phoenix, sometime in my mid-30's. She was proudly showing off her and my stepdad's new house. She called the carpet "champagne," the kitchen cabinets "natural" and the linoleum floor "sand," and the walls "desert." She called dinner "Chicken a-la King," and it was served with natural pale brown rice. But everything was — pretty much — a cornucopia of beige. Although dinner did have a few small green and red specks....
I asked her — in an authentic effort to understand — why she liked everything so colorless (understand, in case any of you are beige fans, that it seemed colorless to ME). Between various ways of being told that it was "utter nonsense" that her house was colorless, I gleaned that (a) she liked a "light and airy look" and (b) she wanted her eyes "to be able to find a resting place" in her surroundings.
The thing about beige is that it's a so-called "neutral." It's not really defined by being a color, so much as by representing the absence of color.
People in our modern over-therapeuterized, over-syndromed world are quick to blame their parents for most of their ills. As hard as I have tried, I cannot really tell that I suffered any "ills" as a result of excessive exposure to the color beige. It was more a case of 18 years marked by (like the color beige) "an absence of." Like having "beige experiences," and "beige dreams," if you will.
The slightly sad thing is that sometimes I have to conclude that perhaps I remember so little of my childhood because it was so mindnumbingly "beige." Uneventful. Marked by what didn't happen. What I didn't experience. Attempts at finding buried memories through hypnotherapy have revealed.... nothing.
Yet, on some level, everything I have just written above is pure bullshit... perhaps evidence of the fact that our perceptions of a thing/events and the reality of it don't always match up.
I had lived in a dozen countries on three continents by age 18. That's hardly "beige," right? I went to more than a dozen schools during that time. Hardly "beige," right? My global education allowed me to basically sleepwalk through four years of college and still graduate in the top 1% of my class. Hardly "beige," right?
But, as much as we moved around, and as much as I learned, no one day seemed to stand out from any other day. "If it's Tuesday, it must be France, and France is a lovely shade of BEIGE, today..."
I am not sure why this line of thinking was poking at the back of my mind, like a tiny pebble in my shoe. Maybe because I am continuously understanding that I emerged into "the world OUT THERE" at age 18, as (figuratively speaking) an immaculately beige carpet that had never had so much as a tiny stain spilled on it.
And with that, a minor epiphany — in understanding why it is that I seem to relate more easily to people 10-15 years younger than me or people 20-25 years older than me (my "trained" age, in childhood), but less so to my chronological peers.
This is a strange post, but then I'm in a strange mood at the moment. Maybe this post isn't about "beige-ness" at all, but a reflection of some kind of journey through the ghosts in my closet. Then again, maybe I was abducted by aliens at birth, and am just missing 18 years of life.
And that, folks, would definitely not be beige!
Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend!
How about YOU? Ever end up having really odd ways of framing your life experience... perhaps when you're feeling a bit bored or off-center? Comments, feedback and other interaction is invited and welcomed! Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!
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Created at 20210501 00:15 PDT
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