The Departed

Color is a powerful tool that can brighten up a room as well as give life to a piece of writing. Pick an unusual color from your Crayola box and bring it to life.

Where have you gone?

Blue Gray, Lemon Yellow, Orange Red, Orange-Yellow, Violet Blue, Green Blue, Magic Mint, Teal Blue, Blizzard Blue, Mulberry, Maize and Raw Umber.

Where do the colors go after they have ceased to exist in the official canon of spectral variety. After the Lords of Crayola have decreed that they are Chomata Non Grata. Is there an iridescent afterlife to which they can aspire? And if a color is discontinued from the Crayola spectrum, does it vanish from the rainbow?

Such would seem to be the case for the aforementioned colors. Who but the most eidetically gifted among us can even recall the relative hue of Raw Umber. Brownish? Kinda. And Mulberry could fall anywhere in a range from ROY to BIV, though I know it's probably not a green. Though, it's no wonder that five of the fallen twelve are shades of blue, as there are more shades of blue than any other in the line, four of the retired shades were sent packing all in the same year, 2003. The horror.

But the remaining five...These are the colors of my childhood, or a fair representation, thereof. Lemon Yellow and Magic Mint are practically the official colors of the 1970's, and Orange Red was always the shortest crayon in the box, 'cos it was used on such a regular basis. But Maize...Oh, Maize. What your people call corn, my people call a wondrous color that nourishes and heals. But alas, thanks to Crayola, generations of children will grow up, drawing unnaturally bright stalks of irradiated corn that bears little resemblance to real life. Must be all those GMO's.

Oh, colors, how I miss you so...

R.I.P.
Ice T - Colors