When Harold doesn’t use his crayon to draw, the pages of his book are nothing but stark whiteness. If you haven’t had the good fortune to read it, Johnson’s book tells the story of Harold, a boy who is always alone with his crayon. Suddenly, reading that book to Max felt like I had unearthed a sacred text, written by an ancestor, with important messages about these very issues. In both fields, I’ve been preoccupied with questions about play and originality in our lives, and, on the opposing side, conformity and psychological emptiness. I’m trained as a psychotherapist, but my Ph.D. What stuck, instead, were the ideas in the book. So, I’m a little embarrassed to admit that it wasn’t the father-son intimacy of that moment that has so deeply affected my memory of reading Harold that night. Beneath the cheery primary colors of works like Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Sandra Boynton’s Hippos Go Berserk! and Margaret Wise Brown’s classic Goodnight Moon, there it was, distinguished by its more subtle pallet, a monochromatic scene of magenta, purple and deep, dark scarlet on its cover. I spotted it buried in a pile of books on his shelf, a jumble of mostly hand-me-downs from Max’s brother and sister.

And yet I can vividly recall the night I first read Crockett Johnson’s celebrated children’s book Harold and the Purple Crayon to my three-year-old son, Max.

For some frustrating reason, I’ve lost a lot of specific memories from my time as a young father that period is now like a home from my past that I yearn to visit, but is always out of reach.

Harold and the purple crayon