I hid it in my closet. I promised myself I wouldn’t look at it anymore. 

My memory is such now that I can’t even say for certain that it even existed and I wouldn’t even know where to begin with a Google search for proof of it actually being a real thing. I’m pretty sure my brother wouldn’t remember it so that’s a dead end too. In reality it doesn’t matter if it ever existed anyway, memories serve the purpose of informing future choices, and nothing- even a revelation that it was an item I simply imagined- could undo the idea of it. This is the kind of thing that comes to mind when it is idle, or at the precipice of sleep, times when the mire of the subconscious rises and floods over manufactured ideations of the self. This is fundamental now, it’s veracity is no longer relevant.

It was a coloring book, a cheaply produced and easily purchased means of keeping the kids tied up, even for a few fleeting moments so that my mother could have a second to attend to the other pressing matters of keeping the home. The book had a high gloss, color cover and ragged newsprint interior, the perfect vector for the broken assembly of crayons we kept in a snap-lid tupperware container. This book was a Huey, Dewey, and Louie theme, and it haunted my young life.

Crayons were a big part of my youth, and remain a medium that interests me. I love the chaos they bring to the table, and their versatility. These are especially valuable when you’re young because they’re cheap and don’t require much to keep them in use. One might use the plastic sharpener affixed to the large collections, the ones with the coveted metallic hues, but most of us didn’t have that did we? Upkeep requires only that you peel the paper sleeve back if they get too short, and some of us would remove those entirely. I’m pretty sure that the kids that removed the paper all the way are among those most likely to have sociopathic tendencies, or the types who buy cases of single use plastic water bottles, the ones full of water stolen from municipal sources and redistributed to wealthy. The removal of the paper was at times unavoidable, but to willfully do so (without intention of broadside fill applications of course) seemed sinful to me. Many of the cheap crayons I used would slide from their paper in their own rebellion, and this always caused me some dismay. I would make an effort to ensure that they remained paired, which was often impossible, as they would again escape the sleeve in the jostling of their container.

Melting crayons on a hot lightbulb was a whole other matter. Yes it was wasteful, but it was 1 part science and 2 parts art to my brother and I. The act was taboo in the Conrad house, but we couldn’t stop. The evidence was impossible to obscure, between the smells and the dripping stains left on the bulbs, we always got caught. I don’t recall any heroic efforts made by my parents to prevent such actions, but we must have been dressed down a time or two for our indiscretions, I simply cannot remember those reprisals.

  We had filled out a number of the pages, my brother being a couple years my senior, was able to stay in the lines and even incorporate advanced shading techniques. I emulated his touch, but often in an effort to complete the piece I would leave streaks of darkness where I had applied too much pressure, run fills of the wrong color on elements, and of course find my crayon dancing its way outside of the line art in ways that revealed my lack of fine motor skills. My mother was always supportive, and was bold enough to let me know that when I colored I could use any color palate I desired, and to remind me that the lines were mostly a suggestion. She was very kind, and while we weren’t exactly the “hang it on the fridge and give this boy a bow” kind of family, her support of the arts was as genuine as a tired mother of 2 (soon to be 3) could muster. 

I made a discovery though, one day, one that would require me to hide this book away and hope to never see it again.

I have been called many things in my now 40 years of life to shame me for my empathy. New England remains a bastion for machismo and gender bias, and while it wasn’t the hot topic then that it has become in today’s world, this too was something that my mother protected me from. She had her reductive moments, but when I would cry she would console me. When the other kids called me a “cry baby” or take shots at my sensitive nature, she would always remind me that the world needs more heart, and that I should never be ashamed to express my sadness.

Even with my mothers support I kept some of these expressions to myself. I knew that understanding had limits and that there were going to be times in life I had to march forward with the stoic knowledge that our existence is defined by pain and suffering. I was 5 years old and already learning unavoidable truths that stood like monoliths in my developing world view. I had become aware of death. I knew that when a baby was born there would be blood, and pain, and tears of both the mother and her child. I knew that this would be reflected in the end, having seen hardened adults weep at the loss of a loved one. I was beginning to see that while tragedy and sadness at times summoned tears, sometimes we cry for reasons mysterious to the world, and these tears often called for explanation.

I had to hide the book because it had made me cry and I didn’t believe that my expression of grief would be understood or accepted. I had to tuck it away under winter clothes and sundry storage items because I knew I would be unable to find the words to validate my cry baby showing. The book was hidden now and I would never have to look at it again.

But something strange happened and I did look again. In fact it became a bit of a preoccupation to sneak off to the bedroom, pop open the closet, dig deep for it and look at it, but only when I was alone and wouldn’t have to explain why I was crying. I didn’t enjoy the crying, and I’m not entirely sure what it was all about or why I insisted on revisiting this private pain, sometimes multiple times in a day. At times it felt like a compulsion, but it wasn’t as if I feared some malady if I didn’t look, or felt incomplete if I didn’t conduct the ritual. I think I was trying to make sense of what I was seeing and trying to conquer the empathy, or at the very least define it.

I guess I liken it to pulling out love letters from a former partner, or gazing at a picture of a departed loved one. Aside from rolling around in memories for comfort, this process seems to me a brave act of confronting pain rather that keeping it tucked away in the folds of a wounded heart. I have never been the kind of person who indulges in such activities routinely, but this situation with the Huey, Dewey, and Louie coloring book might have been my young version of such an act.

The cover was hard for me to look at.

We must have had that particular book for awhile before I noticed it, but when I did it bothered me in an exquisite way that I hadn’t felt in my short life prior to that. You see, we were a poor family, my mother would later tell me that we were not poor, we were just “upper-lower-middle class” which in a town of straight up middle-upper class folks felt poor. She was a writer, so her language was well honed and able to reframe our economic status in a way that felt less dire, but we were poor. We ate, we went to the doctors (sometimes) and were clothed and housed, but otherwise the struggle was there. We lived on a fixed budget, even food was, at times a commodity that proved limited toward the end of the week as my father awaited his paycheck. It was tight enough that I remember my brother getting chewed out for hiding a few slices of salami under his pillow- this stuff was for lunch, but he was hungry and only the mealy apples were to be used for snacking. We eventually got put on the free lunch voucher system at school to the ignorant ridicule of our peers, which only added to our hunger. We often opted not to use the vouchers for fear of harassment from our schoolmates who knew no better. It may have been this economic limitation that was contributing to my tears, but I suspect I was too young to understand all that. I just understood toys. If a toy became broken or lost it would be gone forever, there would be no replacement- maybe the tears were about death after all?

The cover showed the duck brothers playing with Matchbox cars. Having launched the cars off of a ramp two of the cars had collided, resulting in one becoming broken in the process. Two of the brothers laughed and smiled while the third Dewey(?) looked on in dismay at the destruction of his toy. He had a single tear squirting from his avian eye, a look and a tear that informed me that he would be left out as the other boys continued to play with their cars. That’s all. Was I crying over the idea of the loss of a material thing, something that in my adult life I have made an effort to not place too much stock in? Was I somehow preparing myself for the loss of my material goods? Feeling left out? Poverty? Death? Empathy? Sadness over the great truth that while some suffer others continue to laugh a play? Cruelty? The end? Lack of control? Why did I keep returning to this  painful meditation on losing something you love?

In a way it now feels silly to confess. While I say I was poor, I was taken care of. I wasn’t being raised in a dirty field under a corrugated tin roof, drinking befouled water from the creases left behind by a machine of war. I wasn’t watching friends and family get erased from existence by explosions and gunfire, or diseases long thought conquered by the developed world. I wasn’t scrabbling for government cheese, wearing shirts printed for the losing team of the Super Bowl. I was upper-lower-middle class, white, American, male, I had it easy by almost every metric of comparison, maybe I just didn’t know that yet. I had a coloring book hidden in my closet.

NOTE- So I did it with remarkable ease. I found the book in question in a single Google search and was surprised to find that Dewey(?) is in fact, not crying. I wonder now if that was an addition that my brother made, or worse, I may have been the one to do so. I could have added that and felt shame over what I did, which would only add to the bizarre quality of the whole situation. It’s entirely possible that over the years I tagged it on in my remembrance to give some context to my interpretation of what was going on with that cover to explain to myself why the book lingers on in my thoughts some 35 years on. 35 years of remembering SOMETHING, some pain I have never fully identified and reconciled. 35 years of self pity, or sympathy, or guilt, or fear. 

I don’t know what ever happened to the book. I suspect in time I grew tired of the routine, or my mother tossed it when the seasons changed and the winter clothes were moved to our drawers. Most likely it was trashed when my little brother was born and I moved to the basement, room was needed for the new member of the family and that seems to make sense to me.

When my brother was born I was 5, around the time of the coloring book and my secret crying sessions. I remember being woken early in the morning, night really, and being taken to my parents friends house not far from where my mother would go into labor. I barely remember the events of that morning, but I do remember speaking to my mother on the phone when my father came back to tell us that we had a new brother. I was able to call her before visiting the hospital later that day. I asked her if her tummy hurt. A picture once existed of me in my pyjamas, standing in some strange kitchen on a hardline phone holding my stomach as I spoke to her. She told me she was ok. She told me my brother was ok. I don’t remember ever seeing that book again after we all came home later that day.