The color purple…

Purple. What do you relate to the color purple? What words describe the color purple to you? The most common answer is royalty, wealth, or majesty. Other descriptives are warmth, wisdom, gentleness, and power. In Roman culture, only the emperor and highest dignitaries could wear purple. This was because purple dyes were very rare and hard to obtain, which made purple garments expensive and the perfect color to set apart someone of importance.  In American culture, purple is seen as a sign of valor and sacrifice since members of our armed forces are awarded the Purple Heart if they receive wounds in service of the country.

So why all this talk of purple and its descriptions? Well, as it stands currently, the purple summer reading team is last in minutes and has yet to crack the thousand minute reading mark. At the time of this post, Green team leads with 2,045 minutes, Yellow follows with 1,640, Blue has 1040, and Purple has logged 360 minutes. Since its only the first week of the reading program, purple doesn’t have to be extremely concerned, but the other teams have more than doubled purple’s total. My hope is that Friday and Saturday will bring a change and there are purple readers out there hoarding their first week minutes. However, if that isn’t true, then I’m afraid purple’s long standing tradition as a color of royalty, wisdom, valor, and dignity will be tarnished. Perhaps green will have to be the new purple or even yellow. I guess we’ll see what the future brings.

By the way, the Summer Reading Program is off to a decent start – it’s Thursday and almost 85 hours have been logged. Yet, the pace will need to be quickened in order to reach our goal of 8,000 total hours. So keep up the good work and read hard! The library staff is excited to watch the minutes accumulate and some of us have even picked our favorites to win. In spite of poking fun of purple, it would be exciting to see the team pull ahead and make a match of it. We’ll keep you posted on each team’s minutes and current standings.