Coloring Book Critics

MORNING OF APRIL 2, 2008

I was in some sort of department store, possibly a Target, and I saw Richard and Jessica. We stood around chatting for a bit. Their daughter, Cailey (3), was not with them, and I just assumed that they had left her with someone and not brought her to the store.

But then Cailey came running down the aisle, crying. She jumped into her mom's arms saying, "I did a bad thing! I did a bad thing!" We were all baffled and alarmed. We finally got her to tell us the "bad thing", which was simply that she had bumped into a little boy and knocked him down. No harm done, but for some reason it had really freaked her out.

Then we took Cailey back to where she had been when this happened. It turns out that in the back of this Target there was a storage room where a lady was keeping watch over several young children. It looked more or less like a kindergarten class. Apparently this was an area where parents could leave their kids while they shopped or something. The "teacher" or "babysitter" (or whatever she was) explained further to us what had happened, and that it was all an accident and no one was hurt.

Then I remember being in the checkout line. Instead of tabloid magazines, the checkout was stocked with a variety of coloring books. As we waited in line, Richard and I were looking through them to pass the time.

One of them had a "Little Red Riding Hood" theme. The cover featured very atrocious, amateurish artwork. The image featured Riding Hood in the foreground, and in the woods behind her two wolves were fighting.

Richard pointed to the wolves and sarcastically observed, "That is the best artwork you will ever see of two wolves fighting."

I agreed with equal mock enthusiasm. Then Richard picked up the book and flipped through it. Shocked, he soon said, "But this on the other hand really does look pretty cool!"

He handed me the coloring book, and the interior art was definitely much more skilled than that on the cover. But the picture he pointed out to me was of a wolf eating rabbits, and it was kind of creepy to me that it would be in a child's coloring book.