The Most Significant Challenge You Have Faced

again with the superlatives

When my kids were little, they loved Daniel Pinkwater’s picture book The Big Orange Splot. The Big Orange Splot is about a man named Mr. Plumbean who lives on a neat street where all the houses look the same—until one day, a seagull carrying a can of bright orange paint flies over Mr. Plumbean’s neat street and drops the can (no one knows why) right over Mr. Plumbean’s house.

Poor Mr. Plumbean, say the neighbors. He will have to paint his house so it can look like all the other houses on their neat street. But Mr. Plumbean is in no hurry to paint his house, until one day—or rather, one night, because it’s cooler—he does. He gets some blue paint and some white paint and some red and yellow and green and purple paint. In the morning, the neighbors awaken to discover that Mr. Plumbean’s house looks like a rainbow. A jungle. An explosion.

The neighbors are aghast. In addition to the original orange splot, Mr. Plumbean has added little orange splots, stripes, picture of elephants, lions, pre…