Burning Down Suburbia

—an Ode to Bob Ross When I was younger, I watched the world blend on PBS. The painter with the Jewfro hypnotized me. With a thumb hooked through the palette, he painted forward from the base coat like a god might use a blueprint. Behind the image is always the word: light. On top came tiny crisscross strokes of phthalo blue. A rapturous pinwheel of words unveiled sky. Two sharp strokes of titanium white slashed with gray from the master's knife became wings, gulls taking flight. I begged for nothing but paints that summer. Already equipped -with an afro, I sat before the paper and the cakes of color and tried to figure out the path to cerulean, the wrist twist to evergreens and the motion for clouds. The oversaturated paper dried and cracked with the fine lines of lightning. The worlds he reproduced might as well have been Asgard or Olympus. How I longed for a visit. Might he come armed with a fan brush and dressed in a button down? To be soothed by his voice and taken, lured from the dining-room table and shown the suburb's majesty. Look son, he might say, at the pile of autumn leaves, the shade on that forest-green trash bag. Using his two-inch brush he'd blend the prefab homes on the hill until they seemed mysterious, folded hues of Prussian blue, Van Dyke brown, and a blaze of alizarin crimson.