Crayons

Brian Kennelly spoke with a Dublin accent, played the trumpet and excelled at golf. He had a vivacious mother who was friendly with my own. She called the politicians 'crooks' in a loud voice in Dunnes Stores once and I remember her red lips and very black hair and the bagpackers behind her and liked her because my mother liked her. When we met in the College of Music (which has since been renamed the 'conservatory') some Saturday mornings she said to me 'Brian tells me you're never in trouble in school'. Brian was right. I was squeaky clean. Brian wasn't sqeaky clean. He had a Dublin accent and wasn't good at spellings and didn't pay much attention.

I have not seen Brian Kennelly since I left primary school at age 12. Somebody told somebody and somebody told me that he left school and dabbled in drug-dealing. Unlike many in the class of 2000, we seem to have avoided making mutual friends in the ever-expanding south county Dublin circles of young adult scoiety. He had a Dublin accent and he might be a drug dealer.

Yet Brian Kennelly is on my mind because I believe he provides me with my earliest memory of experiencing complex emotion. One day, in first grade (I was six) my gaze drifted as the class was engaged in some activity of illustration. There were boxes of markers and crayons, packets of pencils and most of us had our own set in our pencil cases. I looked over at Brian Kennelly. He was absorbed. He was bent over a silver tin trying to get out a crayon. It came out and he began to colour, lower lip protruding slightly and his eyes firmly, intensely on the page. I cannot describe in words what happened inside of me in that flash of perception but to say that I felt a sudden, overwhelming sympathy for him. It came from nowhere but the sight of him completely, innocently absorbed in a task. I remember, vividly being overcome by the sense of his powerlessness and of his Dublin accent. Of course, I was six - it was a flash of insight and a splash of relevant neurotransmitters and a feeling that I identified conceptually years later, though I don't know when. It had something to do with my opinion that crayons were inferior to markers and pencils. It was something to do with that connotation of 'class' which every six-year old is conscious of but cannot name.