It was a surprising request. My fiancée isn’t usually eager for art supplies. But when she said she really wished we had a greater variety of colored felt tip pens, I ordered a set for her. A few weeks later, I found out why.
It was my birthday weekend, and we were headed to a yet-unknown-to-me destination. On the train platform, my partner handed me a yellow envelope. “The Amazing Race,” it read, just like the scavenger-hunt-around-the-world TV show we like watching together. “Ohhh boy!” I said. “Here we go!!”
On the show, the two-person teams consistently receive clues about where they are headed next, how to get there, and which challenges they must complete before arriving at the “pit stop” of that leg of the journey. Each of these clues came in a yellow envelope with bold black letters, a homemade version of which I was now holding in my hand.
I opened it, and out came a hand-drawn clue. Same colors, same style, same layout as on the show—except all drawn in felt-tip pens. It was beautiful. “Route Info,” it read. The clue was in a vertical layout with a blue box at the top. Symbols indicated the different modes of transportation, and then, beneath them, there was the description. “So this one will tell me where we’ll go, huh?” “Board the train towards Mittenwald. Decipher the word scramble to figure out your final stop.”
I later received another clue on the train, and, for a few hours, we truly felt as if we were on the show. The tables on the train even came with a map we could explore, which was like free hot chocolate on top.
The sweet gift reminded me of my childhood. When we were younger, my sister and I used to do this all the time. If we saw a show or game on TV we wanted to be a part of, we simply remade the ingredients. We drew our own cards, imitated as best as we could, and even added our own rules where we felt like it. Most of the time this was more than good enough. Probably, it was more fun than being on the actual show would have been. As it turns out, 25 years later, the same recipe still works.
Time has its ways of gnawing at us. Don’t let it dull your imagination. Reinvent your dreams on a small scale, and make time for more make-believe—especially if all it takes is a set of colored felt-tip pens.
