Of purple cows

Source: a blog by Seth Godin, author of a book The
Purple Cow, http://inneke3.wordpress.com/2010/04/09
/book-review-purple-cow-by-seth-godin/

I'm not sure how else to begin this reflection on visiting Iowa City with my parents any other way than this. Iowa City is probably not a town that many people visit unless they're considering college at the University of Iowa. My parents themselves have not been back here since 1973, and although I spent two weeks in 2003, attending workshops through the Iowa Summer Writers Festival, I, too, have only the tiniest thread of connectivity to this Midwestern city.

But the tiniest threads can be the most tenuous. For that reason, when my mother mentioned -- with a tone of mock exasperation in her voice -- that my father wanted to combine a trip to Chicago with a reunion visit to Cedar Falls and Iowa City, I immediately insisted that we do the trip and that I tag along.

Cedar Falls was the American hamlet that my parents first settled in when they emigrated from India fifty-one years ago. Iowa City was the nearby town where my father completed his doctorate and where I was born. They were foreign students living in a financially tight situation and  in an area that was almost the complete cultural antithesis to their own. They left in 1965 after my father completed his doctorate, settling eventually in Muncie, Indiana, the place that for most of their lives they have called home.

But fond memories of Cedar Falls and Iowa City linger, and many of the friends they made in their brief years there remained good friends throughout their lives. My first stuffed toys -- a brown bear and tiny lamb -- were given as birth gifts by these friends, and have traveled with me from Iowa, to Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Texas, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Washington, Hawai'i, and now New York. They smell musty, are tinged slightly green with mold, and have lost much of their manufactured fuzz. But they remain with me, alongside whatever shards of memory of my birthplace I have managed to recoup.

So does the Purple Cow, a place I sort of think I remember but am not really sure if my memories are based on my personal experience or my parents recountings.

It is, or was, a real place. It was an ice cream place in Coralville, which was then a rural town abutting Iowa City. It sported a park full of life-size stone painted animals that kids could climb on. I'm not sure whether a purple cow was among the animals, but it was something -- my parents told me -- that always brought a shine into my eyes and a smile to my face. As cash strapped foreign students, there was little available for treats. But once in awhile a trip to Coralville to the Purple Cow was possible.

As a result, we began talking about the Purple Cow soon after crossing the border in Iowa, and decided that we would try and find it, and have dinner there. I had been told when I was in Iowa City in 2003 that it still existed, that it was more than an ice cream place and actually was a full-fledged restaurant. An Iowa City born participant in the summer writers festival described a purple Barney-like dinosaur as being among the attractions. Unfortunately, it required a car to get there, and I was in Iowa City for two weeks without one.

We asked at the front desk of the hotel where we were staying. The attendant -- like virtually everyone else we have encountered since we pulled into the city earlier this afternoon -- was extremely helpful and very friendly. He knew the area quite well but had not heard of the Purple Cow. I jumped on the Internet, and found Purple Cows in Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and Arkansas. I also e-mailed a Facebook friend who lives in Iowa and asked if he knew anything of the restaurant's whereabouts. He got to work researching, and discovered at about the same time that I did, that the restaurant closed in 2008, the same year that floods devastated the University of Iowa campus, creating damage that we learned today is still being dealt with and forcing art students to relocate their classroom and studio space to an old Menard's store.

I don't think my parents or I felt the loss too keenly. How could we when it existed mainly in our memories? I did, however, enjoy the things that I learned about the Purple Cow in the course of searching for its whereabouts: an onion rings recipe bequeathed to a former employee who for years created purple candies in the shape of cows to adorn the restaurant's fountain drinks; a reminisce about the spot as a rural Iowan dairy treat; and a poem by Gelett Burgess entitled "The Purple Cow." Because it's widely Google-able, I will quote it here:


I never saw a Purple Cow,
I never hope to see one,
But I can tell you, anyhow,
I'd rather see than be one!


A discussion of the poem on a Yahoo web site describes the purple cow as a metaphor for the un-ordinary, the remarkable, and proposes that a societal urge to conform to the status quo makes most shy away from being one.

I am happy to trust my parents' memories of how I reacted as a toddler to the Purple Cow, and perhaps in holding the memory alongside other shards of childhood in my heart, I can continue to become one.