My favourite colour used to be blue. I don’t know why. It just was. The first four cars I owned were blue. All my clothes are blue – jeans, shirts, pyjamas, suits, jackets, coats – you name it. I own a blue house and this winter I painted the inside – blue. Bought a sofa and loveseat. Five shades of blue. My bike is blue.
When I go into a clothing store, I try on a green shirt, a red and a yellow and then come home with a blue one. I even have blue eyes.
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So, in light of all this, it shouldn’t come as a great shock that I would be intrigued the first time I saw blue water in a toilet. Upon inquiry, I found out blue cleansing liquid comes in a dispenser that fits into a toilet’s water tank and keeps the bowl clean and colourful. I realize the height of affluence is being able to afford to buy this stuff, but if you’re going to be decadent you may as well go all the way. So I bought some and had a good time watching the cascade of blue in my bowl after every flush. That first night, I flushed it two or three times in a row, just to watch this. Amazing.
As you can imagine, I couldn’t have been a whole lot happier, now that I’d harnessed this latest household marvel and added even more blue to my home. But, it bothered me when, after only three short weeks, the blue cleanser dispenser was empty and the water became transparent again. Like batteries in a clock, I guess I expected each container to last a year or so. At this rate, it was going to be expensive and a bit of a pain changing dispensers so often. But now that I was used to blue water, I knew it wouldn’t be easy to give it up.
I stood in the supermarket aisle for a long time while children riding in their mothers’ shopping carts HEY MUMMYed their way past me. Which brand to buy? Tidy Tank, the kind I’d bought the first time, was priced at $1.69 for 500 millilitres. But another brand, Beauty Bowl, was on special for $2.19 for 750 millilitres. Not only would the second kind ease my fears about cost, it would last longer. I’ll take it.
As soon as I got home, I took the Beauty Bowl into the bathroom. Removing the lid from the back of the toilet, I took out the empty Tidy Tank container and put it in a plastic shopping bag. I took the top off the Beauty Bowl and turned it upside down quickly which is what you have to do because these things begin to drip the minute you turn them over. To my dismay, this new, bigger container wouldn’t fit anywhere inside the tank. It was too large. I tried jamming it in everywhere it might possibly go, but it just wouldn’t fit.
I gave up and stuck the new container in the bag with the old one, but not before some blue had dripped out onto the wall and the floor. I rushed out to the kitchen sink and tried to salvage my $2.19 by filling the old dispenser with the liquid from the new one. I grabbed a plastic funnel from a kitchen drawer and attempted to make the transfer from the bigger container to the small one. But, at the rate the blue cleanser was dripping from the Beauty Bowl bottle, it was going to be about three weeks before the Tidy Tank dispenser bottle would be filled up.
With all this going on, I hadn’t noticed that the blue stuff was gradually spreading, like mould on a loaf of bread. Before I knew it, I had Beauty Hands and Beauty Forearms.
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Finally, I grabbed a new green garbage bag and chucked the whole works in, rushing the entire mess out to the garage. Back at the sink, I scrubbed my hands with a sponge for 20 minutes before the blue came out. Then I had to clean up the Beauty Sink, the Beauty Counter Top, the Beauty Kitchen Floor and the Beauty Bathroom.
This all put me in a very blue mood but I was ecstatic compared to how I felt Monday night when I went to take out the garbage. The Beauty Bowl had leaked through the garbage bag and when I moved it, I realized I was now the owner of a Beauty Garage Floor. An area two feet square was blue.
And so was the air.
Today, my favourite colour is – clear.
©1987 Jim Hagarty
