Purple Medicine
How appropriate that purple would turn up for April! Purple, the color of tulips, myrtle blossoms, and lilacs, the color of Easter eggs and Easter basket ribbons, the color that certain old ladies wear who no longer care what anyone thinks. In Appalachia, oddly, purple is the color of redbud. I wonder why redbud instead of purple bud? They’re clearly not red; anyone can see that. They’re not even close to red.
When I was a kid, purple was always one of the primary colors in the little travel-size crayon box, but it never seemed like a staple color. Never an entrée, purple always felt more like a dessert treat. You didn’t start with purple. You used it to dress up the greens and browns and blues and blacks. Purple felt like it had more of an attitude than the other colors in the box. Like orange, purple was the innovative thinker, the class clown, the show-off, the attention seeker. Why did I think that, I wonder? Probably because I was stranded in Catholic school among the sea of Navy blue pants and clip-on ties, drilled to be obedient, follow the rules, quietly lower the kneelers, color inside the lines. Nothing large in my life was purple. The church was white. The school was gray. The book mobile, parked across the street, was blue. Our house was green. Even red seemed somehow more acceptable. Red was on stop signs and stop lights and the good old red, white and blue. Superman wore red, not purple.
In Minnesota, the Vikings sported purple, and for a time when their defense was particularly nasty, they called themselves the Purple People Eaters. Good name! What little boy wouldn’t want to root for the Purple People Eaters? Of course, they never won the Super Bowl. They came close a bunch of times—a distressingly large bunch of times—but never claimed the prize. I think it had something to do with their uniforms. Purple just doesn’t want to go there. The Olympics don’t hand out purple with their golds, silvers and bronzes. Oh, but what about the Lakers, you say. The Lakers have purple uniforms and they’ve won a bunch of championships. But the Laker uniforms are primarily yellow with purple as an accent. Besides, they’re from California and purple doesn’t even register out there among all those outside-the-line colorers. And why are they even still the Lakers? What lakes are in Los Angeles? Their moniker is a holdover from when they were the Minneapolis Lakers long, long ago. Of course, back to Minnesota and the Purple People Eaters. What’s up with Minnesota and purple? It is the cold? Is it the long, long, long winters that last from Labor Day to well past Easter? You can’t make it through that kind of cold without a little purple medicine.
In our family, purple medicine is the children’s liquid cold medicine we take to dry up our sinuses during the flu and cold season. If I were to go down to our basement and root through the toddler clothes my wife still has socked away, I’d find footie pajamas with little purple stains around the neck line. We still use the purple medicine, even though the kids have long since left our residence. It does the job without making you feel all loopy. By this point, I don’t even remember what it’s actually called. If I had to ask at the pharmacy, all I’d have to work with is “purple medicine?” At home, my wife doesn’t even flinch when I ask if we have any purple medicine. She knows what I’m talking about. And there again, nothing else in the drawer among the first aid salves, band aids, and ointments is purple. They’re all blue and white and red and maybe this sort of pinky tan color if you have poison ivy. But no purple, save the purple medicine.
When I started this, immediately upon typing the word purple my mind went to Prince and Purple Rain. I’m slightly embarrassed to admit that I’ve never really understood what he meant by that and have never been curious enough to look it up. My kids were little when Prince burst onto the scene. The only Purply Rainish music we were listening to in the house back then came from certain Sesame Street muppets and the dreaded Barney. Talk about needing some purple medicine! Does this come in pints? And there again, Prince was a Minnesota boy. He would have been just a toddler when the Purple People Eaters were ravaging the countryside. Somehow that purple and the pain of all those Viking Super Bowl losses leached into his subconscious, and by the time he came online as a young adult, “I never meant to cause you … any sorrow.”