The Green Marker

For whatever reason boredom, curiosity, or just being a Southern child left unattended too long, most of us did at least one thing growing up that earned us a whoopin’.

Mine involved one of those old green permanent markers.

Not the kind they make now with the “low odor” label for civilized people.

I’m talking about the old-school kind that could’ve gotten the neighbors high if the wind was blowing right. The Sanford’s Deluxe Edition!! That’s right!

The bad part is, I had to have been pretty young.

I can still remember what I wrote. It started with a giant backwards G, followed by something that looked less like the alphabet and more like Greek symbols. Apparently, I had no firm commitment to the English language yet.

And I didn’t just scribble one little mark and quit.

Oh no.

I was using that wall like a chalkboard.

In my mind, I was the teacher.

And class was in session.

My canvas just happened to be the north wall of our kitchen.

Now this was not some ordinary wall that could be painted over and forgotten. It was made of intentionally unfinished cypress planks.

Beautiful cypress planks.

Every piece hand-cut by my father and grandfather.

So this wasn’t childish mischief. This was me taking a green permanent marker to my daddy’s craftsmanship like I was preparing lesson plans.

And when I ran out of room at my eye level, I didn’t take that as a sign from the Lord to stop.

I dragged a dining room chair over to the wall, climbed up in it, and kept writing.

That tells you two things.

First, I was committed to education.

Second, I was absolutely unsupervised.

Now my brother was twelve at the time, which in those days made him the acting parent whether he wanted the promotion or not. He was supposed to be babysitting me. He did not write on the wall. He may not have even known I had the marker. Didn’t matter.

He took the hardest of the licks because, in a Southern household, being the oldest child on duty made you legally responsible for whatever idiotic thing your younger sibling dreamed up.

Kids today have washable markers.

We had permanent markers and permanent consequences.

Nobody sat me down to ask what I was trying to express.

Nobody praised my imagination.

Daddy took one look at that backwards G and those mysterious hieroglyphics stretched across his hand-cut cedar wall and knew exactly what I was expressing.

That if I was capable of teaching, then I was capable of learning a lesson.

Looking back, I still feel a little bad for my brother.

Because while I was apparently busy running a one-room schoolhouse on the kitchen wall, he was learning one of life’s hardest lessons:

Sometimes you don’t even have to commit the crime.

Sometimes all you have to do is be twelve years old and related to the criminal.