Beijing. Mom drawing with daughter.
Mom and daughter draw a picture. They color it in. Mom starts to color the sky blue. Daughter says, “Mom, you’re coloring the sky the wrong color!” Mom replies, “Really? What color should it be?” Daughter says, “It’s not blue, it’s grey!” At this point, Mom realizes that the years of growing up in Beijing, one of the most polluted cities in the world where the skies are this sickly white/grey EVERY day, that her child thinks that skies are NORMALLY a white/grey and not blue.
Flashback to my childhood. I used to run around Poughkeepsie with my friends. There was this favorite playground where there were two ponds. These ponds were great. They were filled with bass, sunfish, and a school of goldfish which people dumped in there when they didn’t want them. It was also filled with painted turtles, snapper turtles, tadpoles and frogs of all sorts. Fishing there was a blast. Sneaking up to frogs and grabbing them out of the water was a constant favorite distraction.
Then after my freshman year in college, I came back only to find a crew of bulldozers levelling the whole playground. I ran in there and all those fish, snapper turtles, frogs were hopping about on the newly turned earth which had filled in the ponds. I gazed upon the dirt and realized for the first time that years from now, the world will be a different place than when I grew up.
From white/grey skies to ponds turned houses, the world is changing rapidly, and some of it for the worse. Humans are changing the environment and those joys as a child I had are either changing or disappearing completely. Will my child be able to run freely through fields and playgrounds as I did when I was younger, or will they grow up under Bladerunner-esque skies and never see the beautiful blue that it can be when not polluted?
I think about this now more than ever as the global warming initiatives finally take hold, and I for one and glad to know that maybe we have a chance for our children to experience a world of the future as well as those joys of our past.
Sunday June 17:
Arrival to LAX. As I walk off the plane, I marvel at the blue skies and am ecstatic to be back under them. Never let your kids forget the sky is blue.