I learned to color when I was in high school. An eight-year old taught me.
Of course, I’d been using crayons since I was little, but coloring well never meant anything more than staying inside the lines and applying the color evenly.
I was babysitting a little girl with two straight, black pigtails and a toothy grin. We were sitting on the couch, each with our own coloring book, when I glanced at her picture, which blew mine out of the water.
Her mermaid jumped off the page, my turtle wore flat blocks of green and brown.
It had never occurred to me to apply color unevenly to achieve depth, or to layer colors to pull more out of my palette of eight crayons.
It’s one of many things I’ve learned in unexpected places.
This morning, as I got out of the shower, the first thing I did was dry my face with a towel. I learned to do that from Richard Dawson and Family Feud.
As a kid, I had a hard time transitioning from baths to showers. In a bath tub, I could stand in the warm water when drying off, which kept me from getting cold.
With a shower, the warmth stopped abruptly, and left me grumpy and shivering as I tried wrapping everything in a towel to stave off the cold.
Until I found myself watching Family Feud one day, and the question was, “What do people dry first when they get out of the shower?”
Survey says? Face.
What had I been drying first? Back. And anything I could wrap up in a towel.
After my next shower, I tried drying my face first, and the heavens opened and rainbows appeared. Without the discomfort of water on my face, I could somehow tolerate the cold.
Sometimes I think about Richard Dawson when I’m drying my face. Sometimes I think about that eight-year old when I’m coloring.
Sometimes I think about my childhood friend Rachel when I’m flipping pancakes. After a sleepover at her house, she showed me that when the bubbles have all popped, they’re ready to flip.
Sometimes when I put a leash on my dog, I’m reminded of Sierra, my favorite of all the dogs who boarded at the vet clinic where I worked. Her owner taught me the right way to use a slip lead: “If you’re walking on the left, it should look like a ‘P’ when you’re putting it over her head.”
Sometimes when I’m stuffing a pillow into a pillow case, I think about a woman I knew in college, who taught me the key to fitting a sleeping bag into a tiny stuff sack: you’ve got to want it to fit.
I read a book this week that said that every child in the world learns to walk differently. It is a process of trial and error, and every single person who learns to walk experiences the process in their own way.
Every single person on Earth has a different experience, different stories. Every single person on Earth is a kaleidoscope of habits we learned from others, from encounters both unexpected and mundane.
What a beautiful thing to contemplate. We are each a work of art.
