The Color of Life

She wore green the way I wear blue—quirkily, comically, compulsively.

Her bedroom closet was stuffed with lime green button-down shirts, emerald green turtlenecks, pea green sweaters, Kelly Green polyester pants—all grouped according to their hue and hanging neatly on molded plastic white hangars. Sometimes she paired these shades with pinks and purples, but mostly she wore her greens monochromatically—light with dark, dark with light, giving her a checkerboard effect, as if she were a walking display of every wavelength along the green color spectrum. Her grandchildren, who called her by her childhood nickname, Gigi, made up a special color just for her: Gigi Green.

If you asked why she loved green—and even her puffy down parka from L.L. Bean was chartreuse, as was her malachite-colored raincoat, rain hat, and matching umbrella, making her look like some bloated, aging Elmo whenever she bundled herself up for a trip to the Piggly Wiggly, and she never went anywhere, even in the heat of Florida, without bundling herself up—she would tell you that green was the color of life. She would not talk about Greenpeace or Green buildings or “greening your routine” because these things were as foreign and newfangled as e-mail and I-pods. But she would tell you that her father was Professor Emeritus of Forestry at the University of Michigan and that he was “way ahead of his time,” and that one tree—and she was good with the names of trees, could point out evergreens, firs, blue spruces, silver beeches and sugar maples—one tree could produce more cooling air than ten air conditioners running 20 hours a day. She would have made a face if anyone had called her a tree hugger, and yet she often said that trees were like people, and that cutting one down—even though it was rotting and sick with Dutch Elm disease, like one very old moss-covered Elm in our back yard that she kept going long past its time--was like killing someone.

When she moved into a condo in the retirement community near my sister in New Hampshire during the last year of her life, she was asked to fill out a form, giving information about herself that would be published in the monthly newsletter. She had to include where she was born, where she went to college, what her profession had been, how many children and grandchildren she had. Proudly, she listed her graduation from Smith College in 1948, as well as the names of four other family members--her aunt, two cousins, and niece—who had graduated from Smith.

“But what do I put down for profession?” she asked. The other residents included retired doctors and college presidents, and she was worried about not making the grade, about making a fool of herself. “The only job I ever had,” she said, “was when I worked as a model at the J. Conover Agency in New York before I married your father, but if I put that, they’ll think I’m a birdbrain, a lightweight.”

“Just put housewife,” my sister advised, and Mom agreed, adding that it was the truth, and there was no shame in that.

A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Waste, yelled the message on a billboard that I passed riding the bus to school every day. It was for the United Negro College Fund, and the child pictured was an inner-city kid with a tear rolling down his cheek and huge, bright eyes, who was poor and couldn’t learn all the things I was learning, such as how to spell chlorophyll and why it made plants green. But whenever I passed the billboard’s screaming message, all I could think of was Mom, and how she was home alone with the shades pulled in her upstairs bedroom, sunk beneath a burial mound of Hudson’s Bay green-and-white blankets. Downstairs, Mrs. V. did the laundry and the cooking and the cleaning, and sometimes she and Mom chatted when Mom padded down in the middle of the day to boil an egg or eat a bag of potato chips, but mostly Mom stayed upstairs in the dark room, getting over a bug.

The bug was her depression, which no one had ever named, and which would not be diagnosed until many years later. Mom was a Christian Scientist, and so she rarely went to doctors. She had her Christian Science practitioners, to whom she talked for hours on the telephone, but they gently instructed her to think of herself as a perfect child of God: If she imagined herself to be such an emanation of Divine Love, then the illness would disappear, just as if she’d taken a course of powerful antibiotics. The practitioners said that Mary Baker Eddy herself had suffered from many ailments before discovering Christian Science. Mrs. Eddy had injured her spine after falling on an icy sidewalk in Lynn, Massachusetts in 1866, and was briefly hospitalized. But once she discovered the Truth, the practitioners reported breathlessly, which was that all sickness was an illusion, the manifestation of error, once she had written Science and Health and founded the Mother Church (“And did you know,” they would marvel, “that she was 87 when she founded The Christian Science Monitor?”), why she went on to live a long, healthy and productive life. Mom could be healed too, they promised, if only she knew the truth.

Mom tried to know the truth, or ‘k the t’ as she quaintly put it, her whole life—seeking help from practitioners through her divorce, her moves from Massachusetts to Connecticut, Florida, Virginia, and New Hampshire, her trips north every summer to Canada. As she grew older, she finally supplemented her CS treatments with doctors’ visits (Mrs. Eddy said that Christian Scientists could seek medical help in certain extraordinary circumstances). In her early sixties, Mom discovered that she had Type II Diabetes as well as high blood pressure and depression. Her doctors prescribed Sinequan, Ambien, and Glucovance; they also advised her to lose twenty pounds and start exercising, advice which she largely ignored, though she did purchase a three-speed English bike, along with a fluorescent green Avanti bike helmet, both of which she stored in the attic of her summer cottage in Canada.

But even though Mom took her medications, she never respected doctors of medicine the way she did her non-degreed CS practitioners. The Latinate, multi-syllabllic, oft-repeated abstractions of Science and Health gave Mom comfort, the way mantras pacify students of transcendental meditation. Mary Baker Eddy permitted Mom to tell the story of her life not in psychological, medical or sociological terms—Mom’s mother, a housewife and amateur artist, had suffered from depression and neglected her two girls, much the way Mom neglected my sister and me, passing on the legacy of depression—but in the high-minded, neo-philosophic language of 19th century American Transcendentalists, giving Mom’s all-too-female, multi-generational tale of underachievement and blight a gravity and purpose that was as fictional as any bodice-ripper.

After she died, my sister and I went through Mom’s closets and gave away all the green turtlenecks, sweaters and pants to the local hospice shop. But I kept the fluorescent green Avanti helmet, which was in excellent condition, mostly because it had rarely been used. At first, I stored it on an upper shelf in the closet, thinking superstitiously that it might be bad luck to wear it (having inherited her depressive illness, I have always been afraid of becoming like her). But after I lost my blue helmet last summer (in a typical Attention-Deficit-Disorder lapse, I left it beside a computer in the library), I started wearing the green Avanti Helmet.

And here’s the big surprise: I get compliments about it all the time. Just last month, as I was pedaling furiously along Elm Street in Northampton, late again for my writers’ group, a man started honking. I assumed that he was angry because I had failed to use a hand signal when turning into the oncoming traffic. Imagine my chagrin when he rolled down his window and shouted, “Cool helmet, Dude!” and then gave me a thumbs-up. And just last Monday, which would have been Mom’s 84th birthday, I was unlocking my bike from a rack on Green Street near the campus of Smith College, when a spry, elderly woman walked past.

“My dear girl,” she said, “Where on earth did you get that helmet?”

“It was my mom’s,” I said, “She always said green was the color of life.”

The Blue Eagle & Edward Hopper

Ever since I first started learning about clinical depression, I’ve always thought it curious that we use the same word to describe a protracted economic downturn and the neurochemically based mood disorder. But perhaps there are deeper connections that beg to be elucidated. In both states, people have lost their livelihood, their confidence, that animating spark that lights up their brain, that propels them through the world. In both conditions, they feel isolated, locked inside the prison of self, struggling to connect. Every depressive state, the British psychoanalyst D,W. Winnicott once observed, has within itself “the germ of its own recovery,” and yet the nature of the depressive and the person who has lost his job or his home is that he feels down with no way out. Traveling in the wrong direction down a one-way street, and regardless of whether he turns around or keeps going, he feels a sense of dread.

In the middle of the Great Depression, FDR created the National Industrial Recovery Act, which was designed to do something that had never been done before: regulate the marketplace. NIRA, which was also called the National Recovery Act, set wages, production quotas, and price controls, measures that were called “communistic” and even “Hitler-like” by Republicans. Its symbol was a blue eagle (technically a thunderbird but that bird was not as emblematically patriotic). With its wings outspread, its right talon clasping a sprocket wheel, its left resting upon a thunderbolt, the creature was a force not to be trifled with. Above its head blazed the word, member, in blue letters; the red letters of the acronym NRA filled the top of the poster, and the slogan ‘We do our part’ blazed at the bottom. The bird was blue because of a practice originating in World War I where soldiers wore a bright blue badge on their shoulders to prevent being fired upon by other American soldiers. Like that impossible-to-miss blue insignia, the Blue Eagle would signal to others—the jobless, the broke, the hungry--that they were not alone, that someone was looking after them.

When the Blue Eagle flew in shop windows and factories across the country in the summer of 1933, Edward Hopper was in his early fifties, having finally achieved financial as well as critical recognition. The classic “Early Sunday Morning,” of sunlight falling on a deserted brick storefront on Seventh Avenue in Greenwich Village, was purchased by the Whitney Museum a few months after it was completed, proof that Hopper, who had eked out a living as a commercial illustrator, had finally arrived. But this good fortune was sadly no protection against Hopper’s continuing periods of despair and a lethargy so great that he often could not work. Hopper once said that all he really wanted to do was paint “sunlight on the side of a house.” But when Hopper couldn’t generate the focus and passion to paint, his existence felt random as a hobo’s all-night ride on a boxcar, other people as untrustworthy as the figures hunched over their coffee in the diner of “Nighthawks.”

In 1935, the U.S. Supreme Court declared the Blue Eagle and its hundreds of bureaucratic codes unconstitutional (there were 765 codes that regulated even the production and sale of dog food). enH The mighty thunderbird, which Henry Ford had derisively called Roosevelt’s ‘buzzard’, was banished to the dust-heap of history. But FDR was a fighter; he was not about to abandon the battle to end the Depression. (He once observed that after not being able to wiggle his toes for a month--he had contracted polio in 1921 at the age of 39--everything else was easy.) FDR continued to create jobs for the unemployed through programs like the CCC, the CCV, and the WPA. In 1935, he also signed into law the historic Social Security Act, guaranteeing an income to older Americans. Under FDR’s watch, child labor laws were instituted, and the work-week was reduced from six days to five days.

Edward Hopper, like FDR, was a problem-solver. (Oddly enough, Hopper did not approve of the WPA program, which employed many out-of-work artists, as he felt it encouraged mediocrity. No doubt Hopper would have felt differently if he had needed the money or the work.) Hopper was flush enough in the Depression years to purchase an automobile as well as build a summer home and studio on Cape Cod. A change of scene helped the artist’s dark moods, as did frequent automobile trips out West and to Mexico. Hopper also filled his unproductive hours with reading and movie-going.

Throughout all these restless changes of scenes and activities, his marriage to fellow artist Jo Nivison was often tense, no doubt worsening his depression as much as alleviating it. Husband and wife were together constantly in New York, in Truro, and on their car trips. So much closeness drove them crazy; they fought over everything from Jo’s devotion to her cat, Arthur, to Hopper’s lukewarm support of Jo’s work as an artist (he said she possessed a “pleasing little talent”). In her diary, Jo confided: “if I’m on the point of being very happy, he sees to it that I’m not.” Once, according to Hopper’s biographer, Gail Levin, Jo got so mad, she bit her husband’s hand to the bone.

And yet Jo Nivison, who acted as artist’s model for nearly all of her husband’s paintings that included human figures, remained devoted to her mate, claimed that he was the center of her universe and often spoke of Hopper’s paintings as their “children” (the Hoppers had married in their forties and were childless). When Hopper died in 1967 at the age of 84, Jo donated all his works to the Whitney Museum. Ten months later, she passed away herself. “We don’t know what she died of,” says Barbara Novak, one of a very small number of their close friends, “I think she died for lack of him. And he would have died for lack of her. It really was a folie a deux.”

One of Hopper’s most famous works, “The Long Leg,” was painted in 1935 and is done almost entirely in blue. It features a solitary, wooden sailboat racing against the wind across Cape Cod Bay, its wooden hull leaning into the water, its crew obscured by the full sails. In the distance Long Point Lighthouse perches in solitary grandeur at the foot of a headland, surrounded by dunes. What dominates the painting, which is absent of human beings, is water and sky—the blue of the sea a few shades darker than the sky, which is washed pale with clouds. But unlike other Hopper landscapes, where the absence of people evokes a quiet gloom, here one feels only the presence of energy and possibility, as if we could sit for an afternoon in the cockpit of that boat, we could sail away from all that was petty and contrary within ourselves.

“The Long Leg,” was recently chosen as a stamp for the U.S. Postage system (it will be available later this summer), and it’s easy to see why. In this era of job losses, home foreclosures and government bailouts, Hopper’s lone boat sailing effortlessly in the bay suggests that we need look no further than nature itself for the answer to our anomie. The blue of water and sky will heal us, if only we take in their presence--like sails filling with wind.