Catechism

Last time I discussed why black is one of my favorite colors. As I noted, my other favorite color is purple and why it's one of my favorite colors is a much lighter narrative that begins when I was eight years old and discovered John Steed and Mrs. Emma Peel.

At the time I was living in Washington, Missouri, and I had two close friends, Steve and Jimmy, who were both really into comic books. Whenever we tired of playing in the rowdy manner in which most boys play, they would bring outside a tall stack of comics, and we would sit under a shade tree and read and comment on them. I had a few comic books of my own, but my parents, especially my mother, had issues with my reading comic books. They would rather I read a "real" book--as they would put--like the Hardy Boys or the Three Investigators. But when I was little, they didn’t mind purchasing for me the occasional DC comic book that caught my eye, but they didn't do that very often.

When I got older, though, they became much stricter when approving what I wanted to read. They didn’t mind my plowing through the books they had on the living room bookshelves, be it my father’s collection of original James Bond novels or my mother's collection of Pearl S. Buck novels, but "Comic books aren't worth the money they're printed on" I was told. "And they're for children, and you should be reading grown-up books." Ironically, on one occasion my mother did pull a copy of a real grown-up book, Fear of Flying, out of my hands, telling me that I was too young to read it. (What she didn’t know was that I had already read the passage about the “zipless fuck.”) But I digress.

But when I was eight years old, they didn’t mind my reading comic books, so they didn't have any objections to my reading comic books with Steve and Jimmy. Because I didn’t purchase comics very often, I preferred DC comics because in the early ’70’s, Marvel comic books told long, serialized stories, which I couldn't keep up with, while DC stories were typically “done-in-one” tales. But Steve and Jimmy, whose parents always purchased comics for their sons preferred Marvel, and so when I was with them I would read their Marvel comics since I could read several chapters of a story in one sitting.

One of my favorite Marvel comics of that era was The Avengers. It was so cool watching all those great Marvel super-heroes gather to fight a single foe or a group of powerful foes.

I need to digress again to mention that Steve and Jimmy typically weren't able to play until about 10:00 when they would have completed their morning chores. Since I was typically up, dressed, and breakfasted by 9:00, I had an hour to kill, which I usually spent reading one of those books approved of by my parents.

Sometimes I would watch television, and at 9:00 aired one of the coolest shows I had ever seen, Mission:Impossible. Watching the IMF unfold their intricate plans to stop some bad guy was so exciting to my 8-year-old imagination. Then one morning, an announcement aired during a commercial break that Mission:Impossible would starting next week not be airing Monday through Friday, but on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays and that on Tuesdays and Thursdays the station would broadcast The Avengers. Wow! A TV show about "Earth's Mightiest Heroes"! The titlecard that accompanied the announcement had a dapper British gentleman and a woman in a tight fitting catsuit. Wow! Jarvis and the Black Widow! I couldn't wait!

So the next Tuesday, my sister and I sat down in front of the television in the living room and watched this weird show about two British spies showing up in a small seaside village, dealing with a group of enemy soldiers hiding out in the town's deserted schoolhouse. What was this, I wondered. Where were The Avengers?

Even though neither Jarvis nor the Black Widow showed up, my sister and I found that episode both thrilling and funny, and so every Tuesday and Thursday morning at 9:00, we sat down in front of the TV and watched the exploits of “John Steed, top professional, and his partner, Emma Peel, talented amateur, otherwise known as ‘The Avengers.’” I especially enjoyed the opening titles of the color episodes in which Steed would pull a foil out of his umbrella, knick a pink carnation from a vase of flowers, and fling it to Mrs. Peel, who would break off the stem and put the blossom in the button hole of his lapel.

I also loved the lavish lifestyle lived by these two agents and wished I could live as they did. But I mostly fell in love with the pink carnations. They became my favorite flower. When in grad school I moved into my own apartment, I would occasionally purchase a dozen pink carnations, trim the stems, and put them in a vase of water on the dining room/kitchen table. Women I dated noted this, and sometimes they gave me carnations, either on the stem or in a vase, as a gift.

When I was old enough to purchase my own clothes, I often bought pink shirts which often led to my being rebuked because “girls wear pink, and boys wear blue.” But I liked the way pink looked on me and when pastel shirts for men became fashionable during the “yuppie” fashion movement, I wore my pink proudly.

The yuppie movement also coincided with those aforementioned difficult years in high school, a time during which I tried to reconcile my interest in boys with my interest in girls. Many years later, I would see a cover of Newsweek with the word “Bisexual” emblazoned across it. Reading the cover article in that magazine began a decades-long struggle to discern my identity. I learned along the way that the bisexual pride flag consists of a purple stripe bordered by a pink stripe, meaning an interest in girls, and a blue stripe, an interest in boys. As I came out to myself, I replaced my love of pink with a love of purple, a color that cemented who I knew I was after years of denial and personal struggle.

These days, I don't often purchase purple flowers unless they are purple tulips for my wife since her favorite flower is the tulip. But I have replaced most of my pink shirts with purple and lavender ones. And no one says anything critical about my wearing lavender, so I guess those days of "boys don't wear pastels" are far behind me.

I do have one other reason for why black and purple are my favorite colors, and this reason is rooted in my Roman Catholic upbringing and practice, but I'll discuss that next time.