I bought a box of crayons today. One hundred and twenty different colors. ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY. Wow. One hundred and twenty DIFFERENT colors.

We were at Walmart today, and while Andy hunted down cat food, I meandered into the back-to-school section. Crayons. The smell of them is pretty much as good as it can get. Ranks right up there with new text books, clean baby, and cinnabuns. I stared at the boxes and boxes of crayons and remembered, as I always remember when looking at new crayons, how cool it was in elementary school to get a new box at the start of the year. Back then getting a box of 48 was pretty much the cat’s meow. A box of 64…well, I don’t think I got a box of 64 more than a few times. When I saw that box of 120 crayons (each a different color, I checked), I gave a little yelp of glee.

And I knew I had to have them.

One cool thing about being a grown up is that if you want a $7 box of crayons, you can buy them. I bought them.

120.

What good are crayons, though, without coloring books? I don’t understand why the coloring books are not in the same place as the crayons. At the grocery store, there is often a banana display rack in the cereal aisle. At the hardware store, the paint brushes are always near the paint. Coloring books, though, are in the toy section while the crayons are far far away in school supplies.

I’m picky about coloring books. I don’t like those pesky mixed books…with coloring pictures and silly activities. I don’t like to be distracted by goofy crosswords or lame-o connect-the-dots. I just want pictures. I also prefer simple pictures with heavy black lines. Some coloring books have pictures with such high level of detail, the crayons don’t fit between the lines. Maybe those are good for colored pencils or even skinny markers, but for crayons? Nope. I’m also not real keen on books about cartoon characters like Dora or Cinderella. Even with this stringent criteria, I managed to find half a dozen books (strangely, three were about cats). With Andy’s help, I narrowed the stack down to three: baby animals and two of the cat books.

When we got home, I took out my crayons…peeled off the plastic…and took in all the glory of those wonderful colors. Only one problem. The (120) crayons were stuck in the boxes (two 48 boxes and one 24) all random! How can you know which green you really want when the greens are spread out over three boxes? How do you know the purple you picked is THE purple you need?

I dumped all the crayons out on the floor and spent the next hour putting them in order.

I found out why the crayon people put the crayons in randomly. It’s tough putting them in order. Does this green-blue crayon go with greens or blues? Should I put all the fruit-named crayons together? Must Caribbean Sea go next to Pacific Blue? Where does white go? It sticks out no matter where it is. Do the colors of the paper wrappers mean something? Should all the crayons with the same color wrappers go together? But if so, why does a crayon that is surely a yellow have the same color wrapper as a crayon that is surely a red?

I broke the crayons down into six groups: reds, blues, greens, yellows, purples, and earthy colors. The earthy colors managed to fig quite nicely in the 24 box. I spent quite a while trying to figure out how to box up the others…I could put the blues, greens, and yellows in one box but was left four short. If I put the reds, blues, and yellows together I had one too many. Should I break the blues between boxes? If so, which few blues were most un-blue? Andy kept looking at me funny this entire time…asking me if I sorted my legos when I was a kid. (No, I didn’t. I remember being more concerned about the number of bumps on the lego blocks than the color (2, 4, 8?). After all, color isn’t quite as important when you are building as size and shape of the block.) After I got things broken into boxes, the arranging went fairly quickly. Some crayons really didn’t fit the progression from light to dark I was working for in each color group, but I just stuck them in where they seemed to go best.

Now they are all tucked in happily. All one hundred and twenty colors. Time to color.

I started writing this about a week ago but didn’t finish it. I’ve since found out another reason the crayon people didn’t bother to organize the crayons. Once you get them where you want them, it’s tough to keep them that way. When you take one crayon out, the others wiggle around to fill in the gap and things get all wonky.