How the pains of aging inflict pains on crayons.
As age extends on man, the social acceptableness of crayon withers away. Crayons are colored wax clumps utilized to scrawl messages, draw all the unimaginable, and are enslaved by greedy children to perform the quotidian drudgery of a typical writing utensil. With all taken into consideration, crayons appear to be the ideal scribbling implement in all the world over.
Then why is the market of crayons monopolized by children? Why does the sweltering passion one weeps for crayons march staunchly away as one outgrows their youth? Why do the cartons of crayons that beget such profound felicity at the start of one’s life breath dust and stale neglect in the back of one’s cupboard for the doleful remainder of their days?
“I don’t remember the last time I used a crayon,” says Isa Siller ‘25, confirming the aloofness of adolescents and adults towards crayons. “Maybe when I was five, I think. I don’t like to draw with them.”
Edwin Binney and C. Harold Smith, zealous innovators and cordial first-cousins as well, were the masterminds behind the classic Crayola crayon. In 1903, they concocted a sturdy, toxin-free coloring stick, a splendid mountain view in juxtaposition to the shoddy, wheezing bits of chalk that refused to remain on slips of paper as the paraffin wax of crayons did so readily.
Mr. Binney’s wife, a lady called Alice, painted the title of “Crayola” out of pigments made from the French word ‘Craie’, or chalk, and from the word ‘Oleaginous,’ or oily. Even then, the crayon was marketed towards children.
Since the striking birth of the Crayola crayon, 170 crayon colors have colored the world, though some of which are solemnly unavailable (see paragraph below). A visualization researcher called Stephen Von Worley and his partner concluded that the average growth rate of Crayola crayon colors is 2.56% each year, which is to say that every 28 years the number of colors double.
Indeed, there is a cruel side to Crayola as well, with colors deceased in sundry amounts. In 1990, eight weary colors were slain, and their spirits can be viewed in the Crayola Hall of Fame.
In 2003, in a spooky observance of Crayola’s one hundred year anniversary, five colors were chosen to undergo an excrutiating execution, although the public, in growling indignance, clamored for a voice in the matter at hand.
As a product of such rumblings, Burnt Sienna, a rather disappointing color in the first place, was saved, with the more aesthetically-pleasing colors chosen along with it (Blizzard Blue, Magic Mint, Mulberry, and Teal Blue), wallowing away in the mists of indifference, dead. And in 2017, Dandelion was sent along on a retirement tour to gaze upon the world for a final time.
In addition to possessing a sterling talent in the art of marking paper, crayons are notably scrumptious snacks. Says Dan McNickle, Executive Director of Summer Programs & Extended Care, Community Relations and Barstow Fund Manager, “I used to eat them when I was a kid.” Although many partake in the consumption of such crayons, most, as they progress in age, go on various diets that prefer their participants to renounce crayon consumption as a whole.
With the topic of colorful cuisines strewn to the side, age remains a stoic partition between those that refrain and those that to whom crayons pertain.
“[I last used a crayon] when I was in kindergarten. They’re not useful.” Emory Pan ‘26, having long outgrown her crayons, says. “I prefer to use a pen or a pencil.”
As children are wont to take delight in scribbling away the wangdoodles of their imaginations whilst grown-ups scurry along to their income taxes and politics and professional sports, the reasoning behind the crayon conundrum of age seems dubious at most.
It very well could be that adults, who tend to fear the overhanging possibility of muddling up their creations and tripping into a puddle of shame, kindly abstain from crayoning away, while children, no persnickety care in their heads, cheer themselves away with the splendor of crayons.
Even those that retain their compassion for artistic endeavors, however, turn coldly away from these sensitive friends. “I realized that colored pencils were better,” Ella Josey ‘26 says.
The gradual abandonment of crayons could also be an innuendo toward the loss of childhood naivete and glorious youthful wonder that one squanders away to a beige, plain world. Be it the thrill of mounting a flying, cushioned tube midair or a puppet show, adults tend to find the extraordinary rather ordinary, so perhaps it is this attitude depriving crayons of their rightful admiration and love.
Or it could merely be the grave fact that adults don’t color. Taking the recent upsurge of adult coloring books into consideration, this in all likelihood is not the case.
So whichever is the cause, it is massacring our world as we know it. “I don’t remember [when I last used a crayon],” Dr. Jonathan Root, Upper School History teacher and Batman enthusiast says. “I use pencils and pens.”
Evidently, pens and pencils have usurped the throne of the crayon, basking in the rays of corrupt glee as the crayons of the world tremble in the shadows of oblivion, preserved solely by the laughing youth who, successively, grow and forget as their parents before them as they fulfill their role as fantasist manqué.
So whether this phenomenon of buried hopes is due to the loss of childhood innocence or that of the dreadful fright-inspiring error, it has struck our society severely, especially those of our society who identify as cylindrical waxen twigs. Thus, to all who heed goodness and honor in a bitterly shuddersome world, assure yourselves of expressing just and loving behavior to the sullen and neglected crayons.
