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A Brief Story Interlude (Blue Bobby)

Bobby was in most ways a typical ten year old boy with two wishes he hoped would come true. His first was a simple one a lot of boys Bobby’s age (and sometimes much older) pray for: to be important and get noticed. His second was rather different though. In fact, it was very different from what a ten year old boy might normally wish for:

Bobby wanted to be blue — as in the color, the tincture, the hue. Bobby wanted to be the color blue.

Blue was Bobby’s favorite color, the first color he grabbed when using his crayons, the only color — other than black and white — he ever dreamt in, the color of the berries in his favorite pie. But that’s not why he wanted to be blue. Blue was also the sky above and the sea far away and his mother’s eyes when she tucked him into bed at night, and as she woke him for breakfast the next morning. But that’s not why he wanted to be blue, either.

Bobby guessed, and perhaps rightly so, that if he was a color other than what people normally were, down and up, outside and inside, between each strand of hair and under each fingernail, this would be a good way to be important and get noticed. The color didn’t really matter. Still he chose blue, because it was his favorite, and because it was such a very different color for a person to be, other than what they already were.

Bobby thought and looked and tried different things, and yet he couldn’t find a good way to make himself blue. Paint washed off easily, or when it stayed on it felt fake. He wanted his body to be blue, not covered in it.

Bobby found a dye that colors hair blue. He tested it on a few parts of his skin, finding it stung a bit. Worse, when his mother discovered what he’d done, she used a scrub brush and some liquid from her makeup table to remove it. When it came off, all Bobby had for his troubles was raw skin and week’s punishment: no granola bars. Yet Bobby kept ever watchful for something that could make him blue so he could be important and get noticed. After a time he felt he had found it.

Bobby’s parents told him they regularly took a drug called colloidal silver to improve their health. They’d also use it whenever he had a cut or infection because, they’d say, it was a powerful antibiotic too. And they were always complaining that the medical establishment unfairly criticized alternative medicines, like colloidal silver or yam extract. But Bobby learned on his own one thing about colloidal silver his parents never mentioned: a side effect of large doses of colloidal silver turns your skin blue.

So every day Bobby began to sneak sips of colloidal silver from the dark glass bottle his parents kept it in. At first he wasn’t certain how much would be enough, so he secretly watched his mother and father when they used it, and started with twice as much as their doses. When a week went by and he looked no different, he doubled the amount, and a few days later doubled that as well.

It wasn’t long before Bobby’s parents realized there was ever less colloidal silver then what they were taking. They asked Bobby if he was to blame. Bobby, who could never lie to his parents, admitted he was. His parents asked him why. “Because I want to be blue,” Bobby told them, and explained how he wanted to be important and get noticed, and felt the only good way for a ten year old boy to do that was to become a color other than what people normally were. His parents asked him why he wanted to be blue, and he said it was an excellent color for that.

Bobby’s parents were angry, and told him his regular color was the best one for him to be. Then they became concerned about the amount of colloidal silver he had taken. After they read their pharmacological books and learned he would be fine, they began to laugh. Bobby asked why, and his Mother explained that if he’d taken enough colloidal silver to change the color of his skin, he would not have turned blue, but more of a bluish-grey color. He would have been more grey than blue.

“You would look like the bottom of the fireplace,” she said with a smile.

Bobby thought about that for a moment, then said “that’s not a good color to be important with. And it’s certainly a bad one to get noticed for.”

“That’s very true,” his Father agreed.

Bobby’s parents quickly told his family. Soon the neighbors, his friends at school, the mail carrier, the people at the grocery store, the teenage ushers at the movie theater, and the man that cut his hair at the barbershop, knew all about what he had done. Within a week, almost everyone Bobby came into contact with knew how he wanted to be important and get noticed, and the unusual way he tried to do that.

Bobby quickly came to regret what he’d done. He no longer wanted to be important, and wished no one would notice him. But most of all, he hated that wherever he went, he was known as “Blue Bobby”.