Burnt Sienna

Since we’re on the subject of color, whatever happened to the big box of crayons you got under the Christmas tree as a kid, the one with the cool flip-top box, wrapped awkwardly in translucent red or green tissue paper together with three coloring books and a bunch of word-find puzzles? Or two weeks before the start of 4th grade, holding your Mom’s hand while standing in line at Woolworth’s with a cart full of school supplies, and the promise of a root-beer float afterwards at the nearby soda fountain with its club sandwiches and limp pickle spears and mounds of cottage cheese sitting alongside like perfect snowballs.

You remember the one; it had 64 colors and a built-in sharpener? You opened it up and the crayons stood in neatly tiered rows, like soldiers at attention, ready to color like fiends but still stay in the lines. Maybe those boxes of crayons are still around, but they surely now have two or three times as many colors, and most of them not found in nature, with names like Neon Carrot and Purple Pizzazz and Mango Tango. But what kid would even would want an old-fashioned crayon today, when instead he can have metallic colored Twistables? No sharpening needed, just give ’em a twist and you’re off. How can an ordinary box of crayons compete with that?

But I’ll take the old crayons any day. You can sharpen them up to a wickedly dangerous point, suitable for fencing or stabbing your best friend in the neck when he has his back turned. You can melt them down and forge them into weird shapes that you’ll find years later sitting on the windowsill, coated in dust. By removing their paper sleeves, you can rub them against the paper the long way to quickly highlight an entire page. And when they’re nearly used up, they make lethal darts for a cardboard coat-hanger tube blowgun. Most magical of all, they are fairly digestible, and don’t taste half-bad besides. My favorite is Goldenrod.

Just try to do all that with one of these newfangled coloring sticks. Why can’t we just stick with what works?