By Vanesa Brashier, owner and publisher of Bluebonnet News
When I was a small child, I believed I brought color into the world. After all, I had evidence.
My parents kept family photographs in albums, and the pictures of my older sister as a baby were all black and white. Then I came along, and suddenly the pictures were in color.
In my defense, I studied all the available facts and reached what seemed to me to be the only reasonable conclusion. The world had been black and white before I was born.
Apparently, my poor older sister Angie had spent the first years of her life living without color, and then I arrived and took care of that little problem for her. In my defense, I was very young.
I also grew up in the 1970s, when children could remain confidently wrong about something for quite a while. There was no Google to immediately destroy a perfectly good theory, and parents occasionally found it more entertaining to play along than to set the record straight.
Color was not the only subject about which I had some interesting ideas. I was enamored with the movie True Grit and particularly with Mattie, the young girl who hires Rooster Cogburn, played by John Wayne, to help track down the man who murdered her father.
Mattie was tough. She could ride a horse across a river, stand her ground and hold her own with grown men. Most importantly to me, she proved that being a girl was apparently no obstacle to riding the range with John Wayne.
For a period of my childhood when I was around 9 years old, I ate cold beans and other foods straight from the can. If I was going to ride the range someday, I needed to learn how to survive without all the comforts of home. Apparently, sitting inside my parents’ house eating cold food from a can was my version of roughing it.
I also occasionally lied to my mother about taking a bath, but she had to know, right? I realize plenty of children have probably claimed to have taken a bath when the evidence suggested otherwise. I, however, had a reason.
I had to be tough. Nobody was going to draw me a nice hot bath every night out on the trail. No wimps are allowed on the range. I am not sure my parents fully appreciated the amount of preparation going into my future career, but they humored me.
Looking back, what makes me laugh is how certain I was about all of this. I did not merely pretend I might ride with John Wayne. In my mind, there was apparently a reasonable possibility that this could happen, and I intended to be ready. Mattie had done it. Why couldn’t I?
It did not seem particularly important that True Grit was a movie, Rooster Cogburn was fictional, or John Wayne might not have any need for a little girl from Southeast Texas whose qualifications consisted mainly of riding horses, skipping baths and eating cold beans.
Sadly, that dream came to an end when John Wayne died in June 1979. I was 13 years old by then, but I was devastated. I stayed in bed all day and cried. By then, I was certainly old enough to understand that I was never actually going to ride the range with Rooster Cogburn, but John Wayne had occupied a pretty big place in my childhood imagination.
Years later, when I became a mother, I got to see childhood logic from the other side. I may also have taken advantage of it.
For reasons I cannot adequately defend, I spent years telling my youngest daughter, Alexia, that I was 30 years old, and she believed me.
It was wonderful while it lasted. There are several years between Alexia and her two older sisters, Sierra and Jayda, so apparently she had never stopped to consider whether the numbers actually worked.
Then one day, when Alexia was about 6 or 7, we were driving home after celebrating Sierra’s 15th birthday. Without warning, the wheels in her head started turning.
“Mom, were you 15 when Sierra was born?” she asked.
I was driving, but I looked up and caught Sierra’s mischievous eyes in the rearview mirror. She knew. My secret was up. She could have helped me but chose violence.
Instead, Sierra told her little sister, “Now do the math for Jayda.”
There was a brief pause, then alarm in Alexia’s voice.
“Mom! You were 12 when Jayda was born? Tell me the truth!” she said.
Of course, I had not been 12 when Jayda was born, but I was not quite ready to surrender my claim to being 30.
So, I very calmly told Alexia something that bore absolutely no resemblance to the truth.
“Alexia, the truth is your sisters were adopted and I am 30,” I told her. I did not expect she would go along with it, but she did.
Sierra kept a straight face and went along with it also. For the next few months, we had Alexia convinced that both of her older sisters were adopted.
Eventually, she learned the truth, and my time as a permanently 30-year-old woman came to an end. It is now one of those funny family stories we laugh about. In Alexia’s defense, her reasoning was perfectly sound. She had simply been given bad data.
I suppose that is what makes childhood logic so funny. Children take whatever information they have, fill in the gaps and come up with an explanation that makes perfect sense to them.
Sometimes the adults in their lives are responsible for making the information considerably worse. I cannot really criticize Alexia. At least she did the math.
I looked at a photo album and somehow gave myself credit for color. I also spent part of my childhood preparing for a future on the range with John Wayne by eating cold beans and avoiding unnecessary bathing.
Clearly, one of us showed questionable judgment there, and I am not sure it was the 6-year-old.
In her defense, she was working with the information she had been given. So was I when I decided the world had been black and white before I arrived and when I began preparing for my future adventures with John Wayne.
The difference is that Alexia eventually stopped believing I was 30 years old. I eventually stopped believing most of my childhood theories, too.
I now know that John Wayne was never going to show up and invite me to ride the range, cold beans are not a necessary part of cowboy training, and skipping a bath does not make a person tougher.
We all survive having some of our childhood illusions shattered. And yes, I also know that I did not bring color into the world when I was born, but I have seen the photo albums. The timing is awfully suspicious.