Different and Weird and Wonderful Meet Their Match

Benny saw his first comic book the night before. He was well into the second grade, so he could read it beyond the pictures. It was a superhero comic, and it dealt with people on other planets. How different they were! How weird they were! How wonderful they were! For the first time he ran into interpreting the predictable unpredictably--redesigning reality according to different rules. Living according to different physical laws meant adventure. It was a ride more thrilling than the Zephyr rollercoaster at the amusement park.

What if he could fly--not as anything special, but as the way it was just normal to do? What if he could snap his fingers to adjust the clouds in the sky that no longer looked like just clouds in the sky anymore? What if apples were blue--a really beautiful blue.

Benny arrived at school with all of these aberrations on his mind. He was walking the path of different ideations now, and life would never be the same. He was no longer content to follow the path of least resistance according to the way things just were; now he would have the best time forging a road less traveled, even never traveled.

His first class after homeroom was art. Mrs. Orbis plopped a shiny red apple on her desk and barked, “Draw this. Make it pretty.”

Benny did just that--made it pretty. He colored it in a dazzling blue. How different it was! How weird it was! How wonderful it was!

It was a moment before Benny noticed Mrs. Orbis standing over his shoulder, watching him as he wielded his blue crayon. When he looked up, he was dismayed to see her frowning and shaking her head.

“What’s the matter, Mrs. Orbis?” he asked.

“What’s the matter!” she responded, loud enough to get the whole class to drop what they were doing and fixate on them. “Blue? Your apple’s blue, Benny? Apples aren’t blue! That’s kind of ridiculous, don’t you thing?”

The class laughed. Mrs. Orbis laughed.

Benny reconsidered his sense of wonder and the pleasures a child’s stroll through the uncanny valley could render. His imagination became tentative that day. Recessive.

Mrs. Orbis went on to think about her bills, her weight, her pills, her pain, and her life, for which there were no blue apples; Benny went on to struggle against every different, weird, and wonderful idea, fighting to emerge, for the rest of his life, where a blue apple would always be just one Mrs. Orbis away.