While poking around the basement the other day, I unearthed a treasure that I hadn’t seen in decades- a well-worn wooden box of Cray-Pas from my childhood.

As I carefully opened up the cedar-colored case, the familiar, slightly waxy odor wafted out from the assortment of oil pastels. Seeing the 60-year-old test scribblings on the box cover along with the colorful sticks of paper-covered pastels I used to draw with from the time I was 5, immediately transported me back to my life as Pierre.

It became my own Proustian moment.

As many of you know when I was a little girl I was a little boy. From the age of three until about seven, I was known in my family as “Pierre the Artist” who lived in Paris.

For years Paris figured prominently in my suburban Walter Mitty-esque, mid-century childhood

As a child in the late 50s living in the cookie-cutter post-war suburbs of New York, I was an artist from a young age. Resisting the pull to be a June Cleaver in training, by age 3 I insisted others address me as Pierre the Artist from Paris. Donning a requisite woolen beret, a striped French sailor shirt and a clip-on brown mustache to authenticate my Parisienne look, Pierre affected an accent that was a cross between Pepi Le Pew and Maurice Chevalier.

The roots of my feminism were improbably seeded early. While neighborhood girls invited me to play house with their dainty melamine toy tea sets, I much preferred to play alone, fancying myself a struggling artist holed up in a cold-water flat in Paris reeking of linseed oil and turpentine. In a mid-century suburban world of Mallomars and Ding Dongs, any resemblances to Proustian madeleines existed purely in my imagination.

Once transformed, I was an expatriate without ever leaving the comfortable confines of my Long Island home. Something inside me wanted to break the norms even without having the language to express it.

The fact that I had never been to Paris as a child, or quite frankly, traveled only as far as any road built by Robert Moses would take me, didn’t matter.

The Beat of the Back Yard Barbecue

Initially, the Paris of my childhood was informed purely by pop culture, until the summer of 1960 when I met my soon-to-be aunt, Evelyn. More than any children’s book or movie,  it was my Uncle Jay’s fiancé who burnished my Parisian dreams.

The very definition of avant-garde, Evelyn had been to Paris.

She made her first appearance for me at a family barbecue for my mother’s Bastille Birthday in the summer of 1960.

Although invitations to meet the family on Long Island had been offered, this was the first one to be accepted.

A die-hard city woman, Evelyn shunned the sub-division world of the suburbs as if they were Kryptonite and would sap her of her vital life force. Now under the hot glare of the summer sun, she had ventured into the cold war world of carpools, cookouts, and cream of mushroom casseroles.

Her close-cropped Jean Seberg-inspired pixie-cut contrasted with the sea of beehives and bouffants, like a smooth buoy bobbing in a sea of teased waves. The disparity between the beach club burnished tans of most of the girls and her own pale pallor caused her to stick out like crabgrass on a well-manicured suburban lawn.

In her cultivated voice – which still had traces of Bronx in it when agitated – she spoke in whole paragraphs without a pause, her words complex and unfamiliar and she uttered the largest word I had ever heard – existentialism.

Her spindly arms gestured these exotic words that just tumbled out in long gracious sentences so far removed from the snappy patter of Madison Avenue or the mundane suburban dialogue I was used to.

At the barbecue, while Mom’s cousins grew more animated debating the well-worn topic of “ring around the collar” and exchanged the latest busy day Jello recipes, Evelyn mindlessly contemplated a Dipsy Doodle cautiously examining it turning it in her finger slowly before putting it in her mouth.

Wearing her world-weary angst like a Jules Feifer character, she viewed this family get-together as a suburban “L’Avventura,” coolly describing the “scenes’ to friends as though discussing Michelangelo Antonioni’s film dissection of the boredom that gripped contemporary Italy’s empty middle class.

Spying an empty lawn chair she demurely sat down next to me. The ash of her French cigarette glowed from the end of a long black cigarette holder and I got goosebumps just looking at her.

Respectfully addressing me as Pierre, she placed a rectangular wrapped present on my lap.

Tearing off the fancy wrapping paper carefully revealed something that looked much like one of my father’s  Old Dutch Masters wooden cigar boxes, but in fact the present had more to do with the famous Rembrandt painting on that box than the stinky cigars the box contained.

Inside this cedar-smelling box were the most exotic crayons I had ever seen.

As I held the strange, round brown paper-wrapped sticks they left my fingers smudged with a rich luminous color so unlike the squeaky-clean no-fuss no-muss waxy Crayolas I was used to.

Evelyn leaned in closely the warm smell of sandalwood filling the space between us and explained how a little birdie had told her I was an artist and how these Cray-Pas were developed in Japan many years ago to encourage creativity in children through free expression. They were very popular with French children, she assured me.

Out of her straw handbag, she unfolded another gift, a beautifully illustrated map of Paris, that would look just lovely on my bulletin board.

That thoughtfulness was something I thought of whenever I smelled patchouli or picked up one of those amazing amalgams of crayons and pastels.

© Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2025. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.