Color

Struck by its whimsy and silliness, and eager to diversify my exercise routine with as many distractions as possible, I decided to sign up last minute for the Color Run.  The Color Run is a touring affair, much like the Rock and Roll marathons I think, that takes its buckets of watery “paint” and tinted corn starch “bombs” from city to city, dousing 5K runners in purple and orange, green and blue, as they jog a 3.1 mile course in rapidly rainbow-ing white shirts and neon glasses.  The glasses come in the race packet along with the bibs and safety pins.  We provided our own white shirts.

The boys accompanied me.  As we rode to the fairgrounds, my littlest asked if I was going on a run.  “Yes, Liam,” I said.  “Tin I doe wiff you?” he lisped, his face open and smiling.  “No babe, you cheer for me at the end!” was my perky reply, to which his smile broke, his face slowly crumbled, and a couple of enormous tears pooled in the corners of his tiny little black eyes.  “Bu- bu- but I wanna doe wiff you, Mama,” he said very sadly, quietly.  He was really heartbroken at the thought of me running off without him.  I suppose a 5K is just half an hour to me, but half an hour is kind of eternity to a kid.

So in the end, I told each boy that I’d take him for a part of the course.  The race map showed that it doubled back on itself several times, so I figured I’d take them each on a little leg of the run before finishing on my own.  Liam’s heart will sometimes have to break and I will have to live with it, but not this time.

Late, we inched our way in heinous traffic to the fairgrounds, and could see puffs of color rising like smoke from the grandstand set up at the Start and Finish lines.  The Professor did battle in the chaos of the poorly directed traffic in the grass overflow parking lot, while I took Jack’s hand and hustled him towards the Start, anxious that we would miss our starting time.  We threaded our way through a crowd which had gathered in front of the grand stand.  On stage a young radio DJ type guy with a microphone was hosting party games with the crowd of folks who’d already run the course and were enjoying the post-race festival atmosphere.  I pulled Jack towards the huge ballooning arch marked “Start,” along with all of the other people in still-white shirts.

You all are likely well acquainted with my biggest boy‘s sensory sensitivities – fading with time as he becomes more resilient and mature, but still there.  This event was an absolute nightmare for him.  I was expecting a freak out, and I knew he wouldn’t be cool with getting doused with colors, which is why I took him on the first leg of the course (I could easily avoid the first color station, where volunteers douse the stream of runners, and thereby avoid the stress on Jack). However, in the crowd at the start people everywhere were opening up little plastic packets of colored cornstarch and throwing them at each other – music blared – men carrying cans of colored water on their backs shot people with spray hoses – laughing teenagers frolicked and hustled and teased each other with color bombs, weaving through the crowds.  It was mayhem and silliness, and Jack was absolutely not having it.  He screamed as if being murdered, and took off running in terror more than once, desperate to get away from a bag of innocuous purple cornstarch.  I tried very hard not to be exasperated – I know that when this happens he is experiencing something different from me, and it causes him as much stress as I would feel if being chased by a lion or something.

Anyway, his dad was back in the parking lot, finding a spot and gathering up the stroller and snacks, so Jack was stuck with me.  Rather than go back through the crowds to the parking lot, I decided to pick him up – all going-on-60-pounds of him – and run with him away onto the course, which was less crowded and more predictable.  He chilled out a little, but still cried the whole time, begging me not to go through the “steam” (the color stations did indeed look like puffs of colored steam were rising in the air – I will be coughing up colored corn starch for weeks).  Although he enjoyed doing the 2K fun-run we signed him up for last month, he did not enjoy this little jaunt at all, and he was making me pretty miserable as well.

Anyway, I carried his scrambling, desperate little body for about a quarter mile til the first double-back point, at which time I saw his father and handed him over.  Transformed back into his normal self, Jack sat happily in the stroller and ate Goldfish crackers for the rest of the day.  And that was the end of Jack’s color run experience.  I promised not to make him do it again.

Liam was my next running buddy, and he gamely took my hand and jogged a good while.  Eventually I picked him up and carried him on my back, and we jogged a while more.  When we reached the second double-back point, where I’d planned to hand him over to his dad so I could finish alone, I discovered that a tall barbed wire fence separated me from the Professor (what is this, a prison?  It’s an empty fairgrounds for heaven’s sake!  What’s the barbed wire about?)  At that point I knew that Liam and I were in it together for the whole three point one.

He. Was. In. Heaven.  He ran sometimes and walked sometimes, but rode on my back most of the way, ordering me to “WUN!  WUN FASTER MOM!”  He kept saying “I wike you, Mom.  I wike you a wot,” checking his reflection in my sunglasses, giggling at the people around us being doused in color.  He wasn’t fully on board with being doused himself, until I told him he could wear my neon sunglasses (to keep corn starch out of his eyes) and hide his face in my shirt.  So, brave little soldier, he held the glasses onto his head with two fat chubby hands and buried his face in my neck and silently clenched his little body as we skittered through the first color station, where volunteers doused people with buckets of colored water and opened packets of puffing corn starch onto our heads.  After we made it through (the volunteers noticed he was nervous and sweetly avoided hitting him), I showed him that my white shirt was now green on the back, and he got a kick out of that.  At the next color station, he didn’t clench, and held his head up.

At one point, he told me to run slower because he was trying to sleep and I was “messing it up,” which I think was a joke.  He also loved to joke that he was sooooo tired, so I could say “You’re tired!  I’m carrying you, I should be tired!” and he would giggle with delight at the hilarity of this exchange.  Approximately seven gazillion people asked me if I’d give them a ride next, which Liam also found to be the height of comedy.  We held hands and ran sometimes.  Sometimes he nuzzled his head into my neck and made little sounds of pleasure, just happy to be close to me.

At the finish line, I plopped him in the stroller where he rested and enjoyed some restorative juice and Goldfish, and I ran through the last color station alone, getting doused in glorious red.  I collected a yellow color bomb and had The Professor shake it all over me – and I’m not kidding, Jack leapt out of his stroller and ran a mile to escape from the horror of it.  We headed over to the fringe of the crowd and danced to music.  The young MC on the stage did a countdown to a color release, and everyone in the crowd tore open their color bombs at once and the air above them swirled with purple, blue, yellow, green.  Jack asked me if we could go on the course again, so he could get colors on him like Liam had.  His father and I rolled our eyes at each other above his head.

I enjoyed the morning.  As we made our way back to the car, the Professor pointed out the run’s similarity to a color festival held in India this time of year, and I thought – what a glorious thing, for a whole country to devote a day to delighting in color.  We turned onto the pavement, and someone handed me a flyer, told me to wear sneakers to work on Monday in solidarity with Boston.  It occurred to me then, that I hadn’t once been afraid at this organized race, packed with people.  It occurred to me then, to think of us runners, our friends and family watching, cheering, a normal and ordinary and fabulously fun day.

Did you know I once had a brush with a bombing?  In London – the nail bombs of April 1999.  I was there for a month, and one night while I was watching Macbeth in a Soho theater with friends, a bomb went off a block or two away from me and killed a pregnant woman, severely injured her husband, killed two of their close friends, too.  (A homophobic neo-Nazi, not much older than me, turned out to be the murderer.)  We were locked down in the theater for a very long time while police swept the streets, looking for more explosives.  Eventually, in the wee hours, I was escorted out of the theater by a police guard, who took us in small groups of 2 or 3 and then surrounded our bodies with their own and rushed us across eerily empty London streets, until we reached a distance that they determined was far enough to be safe.  I can tell you, nowhere felt safe, nowhere felt far enough.  My friends and I walked for miles before stopping in a disco and getting as drunk as we dared.  My hands shook when I held the shot glass.

I don’t know why I appended this little memory to the bottom of my innocuous story about our Saturday morning activity.  It was not my intent to do so, when this post started out.  I suppose I wanted to tell you that, 14 years and thousands of miles away, I feel far enough away to be safe.  And I’m not, I know I’m not.  None of us are, right?  We walk through perilous days, all of us in the sniper’s sights, working to keep at bay the knowledge of our precarious life.  The knife is pressed to our throats, and still we keep running, laughing, gathering, playing, loving one another.  Gasping breaths of colored air, lungs drawing in clouds of blue and red.  A purple exhale.  A pile of sodden, colorful running gear in the laundry basket – a little boy in the shower, yellow and green swirling down the drain.  Under the guillotine, always, and doing my best to keep my eyes not on the blade above, but on the beautiful world around me.

It was a lovely Saturday morning.