When I was a kid, my parents said I had a yellow light deficiency. I grew up telling this to people, not really ever thinking about if it was true or not. Or if there was such a thing as a yellow light deficiency. All I knew was that I liked yellow. A lot. As a kid, I preferred yellow frilly dresses, summer squash, lightning bugs.
Even today, a yellow pair of shoes make me strangely giddy. I find I am a better teacher on such days. It wasn’t until I moved to the Northwest, where clouds and rain seize the winter months and choke the sunshine out of spring, that I started to realize—know it or not—that my parents were right—there is such a thing as a yellow light deficiency.
Which isn’t to say that my parents were often right. Perhaps right isn’t even the right word, because if my family were a cast of characters much like Faulkner’s Snopes we would be the amoral group. This again is maybe too harsh. It wasn’t that they didn’t know right from wrong. It wasn’t that they didn’t like right, but often, very often, they would choose wrong. Because it would get them somewhere. Because it was easier. Because—maybe just maybe—they really didn’t know any better.
As you might imagine, this was kind of confusing. Minus the yellow light deficiency, it wasn’t always clear which way I ought to go growing up. While some kids spent summers playing in their best friend’s backyards and collecting seashells, we were sneaking into the neighbor’s pool while they were on vacation, inventing fake fundraisers that we pitched door-to-door, and stealing candy from the local convenience store. It was a long time until I realized that any of this was the kind of thing a good person ought not to do. I knew it was wrong. But I didn’t know how to want to be right. That was still a long ways away.
But even back then I knew I wasn’t really alone. It wasn’t that I could really see a brightness that no one in the seeming God-forsaken-family could see, but more like I could feel it. In summer, when the visiting season was high and the cousins would flow in and out of the house like the tide, we prayed at night. Some religions have customs for praying. We’d been to church enough to know that one ought to pray, but we had no customs. So we made our own. At night—in an effort to tame the darkness and fool the grown-ups into thinking we’d fallen asleep for real—we’d begin our prayers. It’s helpful to imagine here something like Snow White and the 7 dwarves. There was no snow white among us but we liked to sleep with the beds all in the same room, pushed together, tight like sardines, eight of us packed together like homeless vagrants--even in summer. Epecially in summer. We’d call the prayers in order by telling everyone to be silent. Respect was a virtue we all understood. So silently we’d pray, no one speaking until all were finished.
Boop. Boop. Boop. These were the sounds you’d hear if you happened past our room. Somehow this was the signal we’d all agreed upon that called our personal prayers to close. So informal. So silly. But we didn’t think so. It might as well have been ohhmmmm…...ohhmmmm for all we knew. We never really knew what the others prayed. But I reached out my prayer to heaven like a homing signal—I called out “God, it’s me, Viki Payne. I live on earth. In the Northern Hemisphere, in North America to be exact. If you look on the globe, Lord, I am in the United States—keep going until you get to Georgia. Follow the star to Atlanta and go north. I live in Roswell, in the two-story beige house, with the mailbox with the painted flowers. But I’m not there tonight. Go across town to my grandmother’s house. Come inside and I am in the 2nd bedroom.” What else I prayed I do not know. But I was meticulous with telling God how to find me. Perhaps a first indication of the teacher I was to become. If God was going to find me, he needed proper instructions. As if He couldn’t do it on his own.
