By Abbie Goldberg
“And who remembers what comes after orange?” Mr. Jamie asks.
“Yellowgreenblueindigoviolet!” Shouts Hannah, bouncing up and down slightly on bended knees. Mr. Jamie gently shakes his head “I’m looking for quiet hands please.”
I’m assistant teaching at “Rainbow Camp,” a week-long session of a theater program, but since it’s with four and five-year-olds the “theater” mostly consists of making silly faces and running around pretending to be different iterations of unicorns (kittycorns, doggycorns, elephantacorns…). We’ve also gone over the colors of the rainbow, learned a dance to a verified banger from Pinkalicious: The Musical, and made a myriad of rainbow-related art projects, but a lot of the kids have something more pressing on their minds. I sit next to Carla, a wary girl who’s blonde bangs fall over wide-eyes and who has so far refused to take off her puffy pink winter jacket. She taps me on the shoulder and whispers in my ear with solemn urgency,
“Can we talk about the ghosts now?”
The ghost thing started because on the first day of camp a kid tried to go into a room they weren’t supposed to and Mr. Jamie said offhandedly, “We can’t go in, a ghost lives there.” And thus the floodgates of spooky were opened. “Where else do ghosts live? Are there more ghosts in here? Where is the ghost’s family?” Each morning we struggled to get through the rainbow curriculum, over-exaggerating our voices and movements in a desperate attempt to pull the wandering eyes away from the supposedly ghost-filled room. I decorated one child with a special (invisible) ghost protection amulet, armed another with non-toxic (invisible) ghost-repellent spray. But the group wasn’t afraid exactly, they just needed to know about the ghosts.
“Why do the ghosts eat leaves?” Carla asks me later that morning, eyes wide and solemn. I shrug, “I guess they’re vegetarian.” I never told her ghosts eat leaves so I’m not sure how she has come to this conclusion in the first place nor how I am to now explain it. “We can talk about it more at lunch, let’s focus on the story.” She reluctantly turns to the front of the room where Mr. Jamie is reading How The Crayons Saved The Rainbow. She stays quiet for the rest of the story but periodically makes furtive sideways glances toward the ghost room. She is utterly apathetic to the fate of the rainbow. Let it go unsaved, she wants to hear about the ghosts.
When I was young I was desperately afraid of death. Some of my earliest memories are of lying in bed trying to imagine nothingness. Waves of uneasy heat would run through my body as I struggled to reconcile my beingness with the thought of one day no longer being. In retrospect, these were probably panic attacks. I don’t think the kids at Rainbow Camp were necessarily associating ghosts as having anything to do with death at all. My own conception of death as a child was also somewhat muddled. I would shake and cry at night in bed, but I also wrote a letter to my Dad’s uncle when he passed. “Dear Uncle Arthur,” it read, “Sorry you died.”
More likely, the ghosts infiltrating Rainbow Camp were just another creature for the kids to world build around, the spooky side version of a unicorn, or kittycorn. Nonetheless, the fixation fascinated me. Perhaps this is a dark way to put it, but children are uniquely close to being not alive. That is to say, while old people and terminally ill folks may be close to death, children are close to the time before life. Maybe they can’t necessarily wrap their head around such an existential idea, but still, I wonder if they know things about life and not life that I’ve now forgotten.
After lunch, we walk to the playground. Each of the 12 kids holds a rainbow-colored loop on a neon green rope like they’re in an adorable child chain gang. Carla trips up the line by turning around towards me and sighing longingly, “I wish I were a skeleton.”
“Incredible news!” I tell her. “You are!”
“I am?” She’s incredulous.
“Yes, underneath all the skin and muscles and organs.” I’m never sure when to go for accuracy and when for simplicity, but after a second too long I catch myself. “But we’ll talk about this later, eyes forward when we’re walking, please.”