The Aroma of Crayola

I could’ve driven the handful of miles to the auto dealer on Old Country Road in Riverhead to buy my new pearl white Honda CRV with the rearview camera and cool-looking dorsal fin-like antenna on its roof, but the thought of returning to a town I called home for 17 years and haven’t visited in six made me smile, so I jumped in my four-door gray Civic, threw on Billy Idol’s “Rebel Yell,” pressed repeat, repeat, repeat, and danced by myself the 85-mile trip west to Levittown, never imagining my sojourn would hurl me back to 1964, when an innocent, very blond-haired boy known as Frankie daydreamed of wearing #7 on his back and owning a 64-count orange-and-green box of perfectly aligned crayons with a built-in sharpener.

The other day, one of those dreams finally came true.

Debbie, the salesperson I’ve known since 1990, an attractive Suzanne Somers look-alike, was running late, so when I tried to fill my third bag of the dealership’s freshly air-popped movie-theater popcorn, the receptionist squawked, “Looks like we’re out,” and turned off the machine.

Returning to my seat, a huge red bull’s-eye abruptly beckoned me from the south side of Hempstead Turnpike, a road notorious for many an accident, rather many a deadly accident, so I placed my empty popcorn bag with a few unpopped kernels in Debbie’s peace-and-love-sticker-decorated trash pail and skipped through the sparkling Windexed glass doors, continuing my best Mark Sanchez scramble between screeching Camaros, Firebirds, and a very old lopsided Oldsmobile to enter a store filled with more red shirts than the Chinese Army.

Not certain which direction to take, I took Lee Strasberg’s method-acting advice and put myself in the Labyrinth Metal Ball Maze game and started rolling through aisle after aisle after aisle, hoping something, anything, would catch my eye — not even the Mossimo women’s mix-and-match, multicolored, floral-striped string bandeau swim top at “$17.99 one week only” made me stop, knowing my wife would never wear one. But then I saw it, an entire shelf filled with Crayola products: glue, window crayons, colored pencils, sidewalk paint, paintbrushes, and the item I wanted more than anything else in the world, a 64-count box of Crayola crayons with the built-in sharpener.

The car could wait.

The box on the third shelf from the bottom threw me straight back to Miss Allen’s second-grade class in P.S. 122, where my classmates flaunted their neatly positioned 64-count perfectly aligned rows and columns of Crayola crayons with the built-in sharpener while I cowered with an eight pack of John’s Bargain Store brand wannabe crayons. I envied them all as they proudly resharpened their maroon, teal, and forest green crayons while I struggled to piece together with clear tape my broken red, blue, and black crayons, praying one day to be the owner of a 64-count Crayola crayon box with the built-in sharpener.

Sitting to my left was Doreen, my first crush really, a girl always with a smile on her face and a pink bow forever in her long brown, Shirley Temple-curly, parted-in-the-middle hair, but she liked my best friend, Dan, the most handsome and most likely pitcher in all of Queens to make the New York Mets starting rotation alongside Seaver and Koosman.

“Would you like some of my crayons, Frankie?” she said with a bigger-than-her-entire-face smile, as she delicately placed three colored crayons with names I couldn’t pronounce on my desk engraved with Bic blue ink.

“I’m trying to invent new colors using only these eight,” I said as I picked up one of hers, took a deep whiff of its scent, and put it back on her desk.

I’ll never forget the aroma of Crayola.

Doreen and I went separate directions after sixth grade. Sadly, she was never to be seen again, while Dan and I played baseball together, he the pitcher and I his catcher, on many championship baseball teams all over Queens and Brooklyn. He had an amazing deuce — curveball, that is — dropping off a table from 12 o’clock straight down to 6 o’clock, mixed in with a fastball untouchable by hundreds of batters.

We continued running the wood courts on our junior high school basketball team — he was always the best player in any sport he participated in. Our friendship grew, as long as we were teammates, until one day at age 15 I ran into him in a candy store after a travel baseball game he surprisingly didn’t attend, and he stunk of airplane model glue. Perhaps it was the brown paper bag filled with a tube of the stuff pushed in his rear pants pocket.

We lost contact after that. He was picked up for armed robbery, spent time in Rikers, and I later learned he passed away from a drug buy gone bad in Brooklyn.

I’ll never forget the stench of model airplane glue.

With no red shirts in sight, I peeled open the box I cradled ever so close, leaned over, and took a whiff, a deep whiff, and savored the moment, like freshly cut grass, the spinning pink cotton candy at the circus, the English Leather cologne you wore on your first date. The aroma of Crayola is a scent you will never, and should never, forget, like the wooden sled Charles Foster Kane longed for, it reminds us all of our youth, when wearing #7 on your back and owning perfectly aligned colored wax crayons with peculiar names meant everything.

With my trip back to 1964 complete, I placed the box back in its rightful spot, smiled, and exited the sliding glass doors of the red bull’s-eye, turning back once with a nod.

And for those who travel to that Goliath store along Hempstead Turnpike and search the third row from the bottom for the opened 64-count orange-and-green box of perfectly aligned rows and columns of Crayola crayons with the built-in sharpener, feel free to take a deep whiff, but please leave the memories inside. They belong to me.

Frank Vespe is a regular "Guestwords" contributor who lives in Springs.