Think pink ... or not

Most of us are terrified of something.

We have nightmares. We have things we avoid. We have people we avoid.

Since I'm afraid of heights, I have a strong reaction to photographs of people standing where falling would result in sure death.

You've seen some of those photos. They show a construction worker walking, with no safety harness of any kind, across a steel girder suspended over a skyscraper under construction.

It gives me the willies just to imagine it.

Both our sons take risks that, as parents, we are duty-bound to admonish. They have learned to tell us about their dangerous adventures after the fact.

Older son showed us a photo a few years ago of a visit he and a friend made to the north rim of the Grand Canyon. It shows older son standing on an outcropping that appears to levitate over the chasm below. Goodness knows where the photographer was standing.

Older son tries to put our minds at ease by saying he is the photographer, not the person standing on the outcropping.

Well, maybe ... .

After reading a story in Thursday's paper, I have a new terror.

Did you see the story about the Dallas County Detention Center in Buffalo, Mo.?

After prisoners vandalized the jail, it is being refurbished with, among other things, a new coat of paint.

Pink paint.

I'm not kidding.

I daresay I am not the only man who has a less-than-comfortable relationship with pink.

My wife has tried for years to get me to buy pink shirts. "You would look so good in pink."

Yes, but how would I feel?

It's bad enough that I have, in my haste to do a load of laundry, washed underwear with some red garment only to wind up with pink underwear.

Which, I hope, no one else will see. But it still gives me an uncomfortable feeling.

Perhaps the biggest insult to my aversion to pink occurred a few years ago when I accompanied my wife to a women's apparel store. She knows how uncomfortable I am being the only man in a store where women are buying clothes.

This store, like so many others, had thoughtfully provided a chair -- one chair -- for stray husbands. I was grateful for the foresight.

"Why don't you just sit in the chair over there while I try this on," says my wife.

That's when it hit me.

The chair is one of those wingback contraptions that look stately in a manor house. A chair of some substance. A strong, wide chair. A manly chair.

But who knew Naugahyde came in pink?

You have no idea how uncomfortable I was. Every woman laden with clothes to try on had to walk right past me on the way to the dressing rooms. They would look at me knowingly: "Poor man sitting in a pink chair. Wonder what he did to deserve this?"

Jail officials in Dallas County cited research showing that pink has a calming effect on prisoners. Did you know there is a specific shade of pink known as "drunk-tank pink"? It's supposed to soothe violent miscreants tossed into the pokey.

I beg to differ.

I can't imagine any circumstance, even if I was too drunk to stand upright, when being locked up in a pink cell would make me anything but ornery.

If, God forbid, I am ever arrested in Dallas County, you might want to watch the national news. There will be a report about violence in Buffalo involving half-crazed inmates wrecking the county jail.

Look for some old guy who might pass as a newspaper editor. I will be leading the insurrection.

R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.