Blue Christmas Past

“Cheer up! The worst is yet to come!” screams the blocky black letters on a refrigerator magnet that my sister gave me for Christmas six years ago. The jokey rescripting of Browning’s “Grow old along with me/the best is yet to be,” never failed to make me laugh, and yet its message was too bleak to face every time I fetched milk for my morning coffee.

Tucked away on an upper shelf beside other miscellaneous objects that can neither be given away nor used—a jumbo Santa mug, a beeswax angel candle--the four-inch-square magnet summons up, intense as Proust’s Madeline, my mother’s last Christmas.

My mother was 79 then, what gerontologists call the “young old” as opposed to the “old old.” Even though there was every reason to think she would see several more Christmases, she was overweight, suffering from high blood pressure as well as Type II Diabetes. She had also started to experience memory slips, calling me from the roadside motel near our Vermont home and asking how long she would be staying and when I would be picking her up for dinner, details we had gone over minutes before, when I had dropped her off.

Such confusion was more typical of my mother-in-law, who was also with us in that year, sleeping in the guest room because we couldn’t trust her to be on her own. My mother-in-law had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s four years ago and her short-term memory was shot. She would ask you whether the traffic was bad, and regardless of whether you said it was heavy or light, whether you described the ten-car pile-up that slowed cars for hours on the interstate or the ease with which you breezed through the tollbooths, she would ask you, ten minutes later, whether the traffic was bad.

Being with her made me feel as nutty as Alice deciphering the messages of the Cheshire Cat, and the only way I could bear it was to remind myself that my own mother still possessed all of her marbles, and that therefore I myself stood a good chance of looking at eighty with most of my cerebral parts still in good working order. To think otherwise was to enter a wintry-mix region where every thought shape-shifted into something paler than itself, where your mind steps grew heavy with snowfall, and you were Gretel without Hansel, deep in the forest, with no way home.

My ten-year-old son was thrilled to be hosting his two grandmothers—“I’ve got both my grandmothers for Christmas this year,” he announced to his friends, as if this constituted some sort of familial lunar eclipse. I tried to be of equally buoyant good cheer, helping my husband haul the Christmas tree on a sled from the tree farm down the road, a yuletide ritual that always made me feel like we had stepped out of a Norman Rockwell print, never mind that we could never agree on which tree to cut down. I bought up a storm of stocking stuffers and stayed up past midnight baking cutout reindeer cookies, holiday fruit bread and all manner of high-caloric treats that no one, save our blooming boy with his bean-sprouting limbs, had any business eating.

Holidays can secrete more conflicts than dried-out evergreens can drop needles. But before I elucidate the dramas of this particular Christmas past, I should point out that if my mother were alive and reading this blog, she would object to my use of the word “blue.” Unlike the narrator of “Blue Christmas,” that bit of holiday treacle rendered by every pop singer from Elvis Presley to Bon Jovi and dogging the weary shopper like winter flu down the aisles of Target to Toys ‘R Us, my mother was not alone. Not that there hadn’t been other Christmases where she had slept late in her bungalow in Venice, Florida, her only companions an army of Poinsettia plants stationed on the front and back decks, but this year we were decking the halls and singing joy to the world.

But why I was being such a pill? Why wouldn’t I do what she asked? We were sitting in the car in the Grand Union parking lot, arguing like Jesus, Mary, and Joseph about whether I would pick up a bag of Fritos.

“You know you’re not supposed to eat that garbage. Do you want to end up blind and crippled like Betty?” Betty was my mother’s older sister who had spent seven years in a nursing home, having lost both eyes and her left foot to the ravages of diabetes.

“Don’t talk drivel. I’m hungry, for heaven’s sakes. I haven’t eaten since lunchtime.”

“How about if I get you something healthy, like trail mix.”

“I don’t want trail mix. I want Fritos. Here, I’ll give you el dinero.” She waved a ten-dollar bill in my face.

Mom had been a language major in college, and loved to pepper her speech with foreign words and expressions. I suppose she also thought that if she bribed and cajoled me, I would give in and do her bidding, which most of the time, as her younger, compliant daughter, I did.

“Gigi, I’ll get ‘em for you,” my son said, snatching the bill with a grin, upon which I told him to hand it over and mind his own business.

“What a good boy you are!” my mother cried. “But you need to stay with Gigi while your Mutter shops.”

“Mom, you forgot Gigi’s Fritos!” my son cried. Within seconds of my setting the plastic sac on the seat beside him, he had pulled out milk, seltzer, wine, everything but the evil snack.

“Yeah, well, they were all out,” I said.

“You’re pulling my leg,” my mother said, turning around to inspect the contents of the bag herself.

“I’m not. I looked up and down every aisle, and there were all out. Nada.” I started up the car and revved the motor as if I were preparing to compete at the Daytona Speedway.

“That’s a big fat lie,” my mother said.

“Tant pis!”

We called a Christmas truce to the Fritos battle, and the family segued through the remainder of Christmas Eve without incident. There was the cabbage-and-tofu dinner, pronounced a culinary success by all, including my mother-in-law, who had once made snide remarks about my cooking, something she had long forgotten. There was the ritual opening of one present each, as well as halting piano renditions of Silent Night and Joy to the World (played by your humble blogger), to which we sang lustily, if not tunefully.

Christmas day was the usual exhausting extravaganza with ripped paper and torn bows everywhere and my mother-in-law exclaiming, like a refrain in nursery ditty, “Santa was SO good to us this year,” and my mother doting over the gifts that would go straight back into their boxes, not to be opened up again. The Christmas Day dinner was as festive as its Christmas Eve predecessor. There were no broken wineglasses or chipped dishes, and nothing was spilled on my mother-in-law’s red tablecloth with its trumpet-wielding white angels….

Of course, there was the problem of my mother’s tendency to dominate any gathering with her long-winded ancestor narratives. (Sir Andrew Wyse, who had been best buds with Henry II, made his customary cameo appearance.) All of us, including my mother-in-law, had heard these stories before but we were too polite to say so. It was, after all, Christmas, and excess was the order of the occasion—in eating, drinking, and talking.

As the day crept on little reindeer hooves into evening, my mother showed no signs of letting up with her 12 centuries of ancestor tales. Finally, after my husband had repeatedly mouthed across the room, “You’ve got to get her to shut up,” I convinced her that we all had had too much Christmas and it was time to drive back to the motel.

Our son was asleep when I returned, and my husband was busy measuring out his mother’s nighttime regimen of pills, all prepackaged and labeled by the nursing home, to which we would return her the next day. I was looking forward to a leisurely bath, and he was looking forward to some quiet beside the wood stove. But as he took her by the arm and gently guided her up the stairs, it was evident she had other plans.

“Oh, no you don’t, Mister,” she said, in a loud and unnaturally vigorous voice,
“You’re my husband, and I’m not going to bed without you.”

“Mom, we’ve all had a long day, and it’s time for everyone to turn in.”

“Nosireee. I’m not going another step without you.”

Sundowning, affecting some forty percent of dementia sufferers, is that dreaded condition where the coming of late afternoon and darkness brings all manner of anxiety, agitation, and confusion. My mother-in-law suffered from Sundowning episodes in the nursing home—we had not witnessed them, but there had been several phone calls from the night nurses reporting that she had tried to escape, or had taken a swipe at another resident. Often, just hearing her son’s voice persuaded her to cease and desist, to go gently into that good night of bed.

Her son did becalm her that long-ago Christmas night, but it took close to an hour with my mother-in-law yelling that she wasn’t going upstairs and my husband reassuring her that it had been a long day and that we had had a good Christmas and that Santa had indeed been good to us. At one point, my son padded out in the hall to ask what was wrong and we reassured him that everything was fine and he should go back to bed.

The worst, of course, did come: six months later, my mother became a Christmas tree ornament (the funeral home sent my sister and me a gold-plated star, complete with my mother’s name and birth and death dates). Five years after my mother’s passing, my mother-in-law was laid to rest in the Star-of-the-Sea Cemetery in Marblehead, Massachusetts.

Is it possible that I am nostalgic for this blue Christmas of Fritos battles and Sundowning? I am, which proves that the human condition is stranger than anything Santa and his reindeer could scare up.

Royal Blue Beloved

You grow up with the fiction that you will never become your mother. Then one day, perhaps in a photograph taken in an unscripted moment at a family gathering, leaning close to a young niece as you help her unwrap a new Barbie doll, you spy it: her nose that she was so proud of, that she often made jokes about (“You’ve got a Roman nose—it’s roamin’ all over your face”) has become your nose. For years, you have insisted that yours was less beaky, more ski-jump shaped. Peering closer, holding your breath because the resemblance unnerves you, you notice other mirrorings: there is that same over-radiant grin that clamps down tight over darkened, crooked teeth, that same manic intensity that threatens to erupt from your skull.

Or maybe the moment of genetic truth creeps up more stealthily: a pickpocket in the Christmas season. You are in your local public library, killing time before you pick up your child from school and take him to the dentist, and the magazine you reach for is not the “New York Review of Books” with its analysis of the banking crisis of ’08 but the latest issue of “People”—the Royal Report--featuring the young woman with the shining, orthodontic-perfect teeth, the bed curtains of long, brown hair that descend to a royal blue dress. You grope the pages of the Royal Report. You flip open to more of that wrap dress with the rusching beneath the breasts (it’s by Issa), to that sapphire ring wreathed with diamonds climbing up that tapered fourth finger like an exquisite tropical beetle crawling up the slender branch of a bamboo tree.

You can’t stop yourself; you are a bulimic with a quart of mint chocolate-chip ice cream, you suck up every last detail: how Will popped the question in a mountaintop cabin in Kenya, how the wedding will be held in Westminster Abbey on St. Catherine’s Day in April (“Why April?” you wonder, idly quoting T.S. Eliot, ‘April is the cruelest month’), how Kate wishes she had known Diana, who wore that same sapphire ring thirty years ago when she was a fat-cheeked, nineteen-year-old former nanny.

You remember going through your mother’s things after her death, how you found half a bookcase full of royal-related tomes. There were biographies of Queen Elizabeth (I and II), of Victoria and Albert, Nicholas and Alexandra, Charles and Diana, oversized illustrated histories of the Royal House of Windsor, collectors' editions of “Life” and “People” magazines featuring the coronation of Queen Elizabeth, the funeral and burial of Diana.

The pile of royal titles in your mother’s estate did not surprise you, since you yourself gave her many of these books, for birthday and Christmas gifts. But as you packed up the library in a crate for the local hospice shop, you considered that it was a little like giving chocolate to a diabetic…escaping into the castles of European royalty did not help her become the architect of her own life, the late-life artist she dreamed of becoming...if only she had time.

But how are you, who grew up mooning over Princess Anne in “Life” magazine, Princess Anne in velvet-collared hacking jacket and matching velvet cap bent over a chestnut thoroughbred, Princess Anne in yards of lace, wrapped around her strong-jawed Captain Mark Phillips, how are you different?

You can recall, the way others remember where they were when the Twin Towers fell, what you were doing on July 29, 1981 (deconstructing, with your first husband and another couple in a suburban New Jersey family room, that poignant moment when Diana mixed up Charles’ multiple middle names as she said her vows); whom you were with when you learned that the marriage had been doomed from the moment it began, with Charles in love with Camilla and teenaged Diana nothing but a prized filly to be groomed and whipped by the Windsors (you were between husbands then, and the demise of that fairy tale made you fear no romantic tie was safe); what you were doing on the hot end-of-August day when you learned Diana had met her end speeding through a Paris Tunnel with her lover, Dodi Fayed (having breakfast with your dad, his longtime companion, your second husband and three-year-old son); how you got up at dawn to watch the funeral in Westminster Abbey, how your husband snickered “Celebrity Death!” as you sat in your egg-stained terrycloth robe, weeping as Elton John sang “Candle in the Wind.”

You learn that Kate Middleton will become the first queen in the thousand-year reign of the British monarchy to have earned a college degree (with honors from St. Andrew’s University in Edinburgh, where she met her prince and studied art history), and you consider how your mother, so proud of her own Bachelor of Arts degree from Smith College, would love that detail, how she would say that women really have come a long way, that two hundred years ago our great-great-great grandmothers could not go to college or vote or own property.

You discover that a record television audience is expected to watch Kate & Will’s wedding in Westminster Abbey on St. Catherine’s Day on April 29, 2011, which the United Kingdom has already declared a national holiday. (You google Saint Catherine, and learn that she was born in Siena in 1347, the youngest of 25 children, that half her brothers and sisters died of the Black Death, that Catherine had a vision at aged six of Jesus Christ, that she refused marriage, fasting until she was granted her wish to become a nun--“Build a cell inside your mind, from which you can never flee,” she is meant to have said--that she devoted herself to healing the sick and uniting the warring states of Italy, that her letters are considered some of the greatest works of Tuscan literature).

You pray for Catherine Elizabeth Middleton, that her life with Diana’s first-born son, who was only 15 when he walked behind his mother’s casket, will be joyful, a companionate marriage of equals, that it won’t end in betrayal and divorce, that Kate will teach other women, women like you who are secretly dazzled by her, to claim our extraordinary powers.
All posts copyright© 2010. All rights reserved. No part of this blog may be reproduced or distributed without attribution and/or permission of the author

Blue Dancer: Remembering Jena Marcovicci

A man I once loved is no longer in the world. His name was Jena Marcovicci, and he was taken out three years ago, but because we had long been out of touch, I found out about his passing only last month at a dinner party.

Jena died in his sleep at the age of 62. He had suffered from heart disease, which had killed his father decades before, and although Jena’s doctors had advised him to undergo a simple procedure involving the implantation of stents, he had put it off, troubled not only at the prospect of the operation but also at the post-op medley of drugs he would need to take for the rest of his life.

According to the man who told the story--we were meeting for the first time, but my shock over Jena’s death jettisoned small talk--Jena had often said, If it’s my time, it’s my time. Jena had long believed life was a dance, and if the Big Guy in the Sky suddenly cut the music off when you least expected it, so be it. That didn’t mean you couldn’t live passionately; if you were Jena, you lived more passionately, your mission to go faster, like one of those Slavic dancers upping the ante the lower he gets to the ground.

I don’t remember much about how or when Jena and I met—only that he wasn’t Jena Marcovicci then, he was Gene Marsten, and his dark hair was cropped close to his skull and he didn’t look anything like Jesus. We met on a tennis court in the city of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where we both grew up. It would not have been at the Pittsfield Country Club because his family didn’t belong (his father owned a small ski shop in town) but at the crumbling concrete courts with the smudgy baselines at Pontoosuc Lake where he often taught.

I wouldn’t have been taking a lesson because I had already stopped playing tournaments. (See “Acing the Blues,” for an account of my fifteen minutes of junior tennis stardom.) I was probably playing with my dad, who was disappointed that I had given the game up, disappointed, too, that I had packed on thirty pounds and started getting C’s at school and was running around with a druggie crowd.

But my forehand was still formidable, and if I was honest with myself, I missed playing. Gene was giving a lesson on the next court. He probably asked if I wanted to hit—he liked helping kids who showed some talent, and he was good-hearted and probably did it for nothing.

I loved playing with Gene Marsten. There was no way I could return his serve or even get back one of his smacking cross-court forehands—he had recently been a qualifier at the French Open—but, like a lion who feels no need to raise himself to full height when not engaged in hunting, Gene rarely strutted his championship stuff. We just rallied; we didn’t even play points, and he urged me to keep the ball going for as long as I could. His voice was whispery soft—the opposite of a bullying coach. He said I didn’t need to kill the ball, didn’t have to punish my opponent or myself—playing was not about winning or losing, being up or down, it was about staying light and focused and ready on your feet, being one with the moment, one with the ball, hitting the sweet spot.

The rudiments of this philosophy—a bit of Ram Dass, a soupcon of Jean-Paul Sartre, a pinch of Dame Julian of Norwich--would become the basis for the course Jena would teach every summer at Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York. I never took “The Dance of Tennis,” but Gene’s soft voice and existential sureness touched something in me.

I was 16 then, a not very distinguished 11th grader at Miss Hall’s School. The year was 1970. Naked Buddhist Monks were setting fire to themselves in Saigon and Lieutenant James Calley was blowing away Vietnamese villagers in My Lai and the Beatles were bawling songs with weird lyrics like “Why don’t we do it in the road?” My parents weren’t speaking to each other, and my mom almost never got out of bed, except late at night when she prowled the kitchen and we ate Friendly’s ice cream together, though I never told her anything about anything.

If a 25-year-old woman rumbled into our driveway on a summer night in a battered station wagon, beeping her horn for my 16-year-old son, I’d tell her to get the hell out of the state. But it was a different time back then—the country was at war, the generations were at war, kids were dropping acid, joining the Weather Underground and blowing themselves up in Greenwich Village.

My parents probably figured I could do a lot worse than ride shotgun with former tennis star and current Ph.D. student Gene Marsten. Gene looked more like a Marine than a hippie. He didn’t take LSD or smoke marijuana; he didn’t drink beer, or smoke cigarettes. He didn’t even eat meat.

Gene was the first person I ever met who kept journals, kept them not because he wanted to be Walt Whitman, but because he loved words, loved blue pens and black pens and white pages, with lines and without, bound and unbound, and was so inebriated with the joy and mystery and puzzlement of living that he had to write, get it all down before it vanished, like Puff the Magic Dragon.

One afternoon, before we said goodbye for the summer and he headed to Florida to teach tennis and then to California for a semester at Pepperdine, he presented me with a gift. When I imagine this scene, I picture it on the tailgate of his dented blue Buick station wagon littered with old tennis balls and broken-stringed racquets. The present, taped up in a brown paper bag, was as big as a photo album and weighed as much as racquet bag. It was a black, hardbound journal, with 192 blank pages.

“I started keeping journals when I was younger than you," Gene said. "Get into the habit of making an entry every day. Let writing be a friend to you, keeping you company, helping you pay attention. One day you’ll look back and think, ‘Wow, did I really write that?' One day you’ll be amazed at how much you’ve grown.”

The next summer, Gene went to Hungary and came back Jena. The summer after that he grew his hair to his shoulders and decided to give up talking. He bought a chalkboard and draped it around his neck and wrote messages while conducting his tennis lessons. I was already miffed that I could not call him Gene, but the silent vow seemed too weird for words, and I said so.

We were seated across from one another in an orange creamsicle-colored booth at Friendly’s, and the square chalkboard was leaning against Jena on the seat like a sullen child. Jena reached for the piece of chalk dangling from its string, and wrote, “Only you can know your own path, Beck. I will let you go if that’s what you want.”

Then he smiled at me, as self-possessed as Gandhi. We agreed to part. There were no words, no tears, just the tenderest of embraces, our arms wrapping about one another as delicately as raindrops falling on apple blossoms.

Over the next decades, I occasionally saw Jena on the tennis court when I returned to Pittsfield, but mostly I heard about him from friends of friends, the six degrees of separation that linked our unlinked lives. Jena had started teaching at Omega by then, and he had a gig doing sports psychology sessions at Canyon Ranch. He also ran a tennis program for underprivileged kids in L.A. and Miami, something he had started years ago. And he still played competitively, was ranked in the top five in the under sixties in New England.

After my son was born and when he got old enough to play in tournaments, I fantasized that one day I would run into Jena again and we’d hit and maybe he’d give my boy some tips about how to play in the zone. I thought that Jena and I were both still young, our paths still unspooling before us, different but connecting coordinates along the tantric trajectory of our lives.

One warm November morning, I sat in a neighborhood café near my house with a decomposing manila envelope. In black, magic-markered letters it read, “Letters from Gene, and other memorabilia.” It came from a packing box in a storage area, among old tax returns and marked-up college texts belonging to my dead mother.

I had brought the envelope to the café because the country of the past can be as gloomy as a mortuary at midnight, and I wanted to be among bright lights and people sipping skinny lattes. The letters from Gene, all before he became Jena, were nestled among old photographs; there were about thirty, all on folded, graying notebook paper, filled from one side of the page to the other with lively blue-penned print (the f’s and g’s flowing down like happy children into the next line), the hanging shreds from where he had ripped out the pages still visible.

“Dearest Beck,” most of them began, and they included details of afternoons in university libraries, encounters with bums in L.A., as well as random philosophic pronouncements: “it seems so logical that to be really free one should possess little. And then it comes down to basic goals—peace with oneself.”

The letters weren’t literary—the man who told me about Jena’s death explained that he had been dyslexic, which had never been diagnosed or treated and which explained why Jena's two self-published books on tennis never found much of an audience. But Jena’s words, which included advice to me (whom he called his "pig-tailed princess") about how life would get better, were filled with a passionate intensity. “'You must learn to love the questions,'” Jena advised me, quoting Rilke, whose LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET I would carry around like a Bible for most of my twenties.

I have a file on my laptop that I sometimes open when I’m feeling overwhelmed with what Virgil called “lacrimae rerum-- the tears of human things.” The file contains a list of gratitude quotes, and one goes like this: “Somebody saw something in you once—and that is partly why you’re where you are today. Find a way to thank them.” Thank you, Jena.
All posts copyright© 2010. All rights reserved. No part of this blog may be reproduced or distributed without attribution and/or permission of the author

Telegenic Blue and Arthur Ashe

When Arthur Ashe won the US Open at Forest Hills in 1968, the courts were made of clay and the players dressed in white. Only one other African-American, Althea Gibson, had risen so high in this white-dominated sport. A continent away, apartheid was law in South Africa. When Arthur Ashe applied for a visa to play in the South African Open in Johannesburg, he was turned down because of his skin color.

Decades after Ashe's death from AIDS, the courts are telegenic blue, players dress in multi colors, and African-American children dream of becoming the next Venus Williams or James Blake. Middle-aged white ladies who learned to serve at clubs that excluded African-Americans volunteer at Arthur Ashe Kids’ Day.

Now in its fifteenth year, Arthur Ashe Kids’ Day draws some 30,000 young fans who flock to the Billie Jean King Tennis Center in Queens, New York. Sponsored by a corporate entity (this year it was Hess) in partnership with the United States Tennis Association, the event is free, and requires the volunteer services of 550 adults.

I am proud to report that I was one of those volunteers, having applied to the United States Tennis Association many months in advance as well as attended a mandatory meeting in the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Manhattan, where I picked up my logo-emblazoned white cap and matching shirt.

So how do you insure that all 550 volunteers show up very early on a Saturday morning in their designated locations in a remote corner of Queens? You hold out the carrot of a meal card, worth $12.50 (which doesn’t get much, as one veteran AAKD volunteer sourly pointed out), and dispensed no later than 8:30 a.m.

There is nothing like the threat of missing a free lunch to light a fire under one’s middle-aged butt. After getting hopelessly lost in Queens, this AAKD volunteer found herself racing from remote parking area “G” to a shuttle bus to the South Gate, upon which she hurried through the security check-in to present herself, considerably out of breath, at the East Gate check-in table at 8:25.

On Court 7, Laura Puryear, a young woman in a safari-style hat from Oklahoma, was mobilizing our group of volunteers to the six mini-courts set up within the blue and white squares. Laura explained that all children would be given hand-ball-sized racquets, divided up into groups of four or five, and assigned to each mini-court, where volunteers would place two children on one side of the set, and two on the opposite side. The volunteer would then hand each child a large, foam-filled tennis ball from a hopper of similarly sized foam balls and instruct him or her to start rallying. As soon as one child made an error, he or she would step out and the next player would rotate in.

“It’s really a form of controlled chaos,” Laura joked. By ten o’clock, kids were jumping up and down as they waited in line behind the chain link fence, ready to prove to the world (or at least to their parents, who stood by with digital cameras) that they were Serena-and-Roger-wannabees. Some children had brought their own racquets, and some had the practiced strokes of longtime players. There was one six-year-old African-American boy with a metallic blue bandana and a wicked backhand who boasted that he had been playing since the age of two.

By noon, between the heat, the shrieks, the standing on achy feet, the disputes about what was in or out (with so many mini-courts, we were instructed to take a relaxed approach to line-calls), this volunteer was pooped. Laura suggested that I retrieve balls on the opposite side of the court, where there was less bedlam as well as some shade.

I did as I was told, and fell into conversation with two retirees from Long Island City. Neither played tennis—their grown-up kids had once been swimmers--but the couple were volunteer junkies. “We’ve done Ronald McDonald, United Way, you name it,” the husband said, to which the wife pointed out that studies showed that volunteering is good for you, and helps you live longer.

At 12:45, it was time to pack up the nets, racquets, and balls. Laura thanked each of us with a hearty high-five, and pronounced us free agents: we could have lunch, wander into Ashe stadium, or hang out among the outer courts, where various US Open qualifying matches would soon begin.

I had a second gig in Westchester doing dog-and-chicken sitting, and so after standing in a long line for a goat cheese salad from Stonyfield Farm, after watching a few of the women qualifiers warm up on Court 14, women with tree-trunk-like legs who screamed like Sharapova and made me feel a howl of regret that I was no longer so strong or so young, with such melancholy thoughts, I made my way to Parking lot “G.”

Then a young African-American man who was wearing the AAKD shirt and hat stopped me to ask about buses to Manhattan. He said he had to be back at the Grand Hyatt Hotel for a coaches’ meeting. I said I remembered something about buses at the East Gate, and pulled out my map.

We fell into conversation, where we were from, what we’d done for AAKD—he had been assigned to the “Beat the Pro” session on Court 17. His name was Kobe—his name was actually much longer but it was too hard for people to pronounce and everyone just called him Kobe. He was from Zambia, had been ranked in the top ten in the juniors and now taught tennis at a club in the Riverdale section of Manhattan. He loved the experience of being a volunteer at AAKD; he said it was important “to give back” as Arthur Ashe had done.

Kobe said his dream was to help kids in Africa learn how to play the game, that he had a scheme to send back used balls and tennis racquets to children in Zambia. We exchanged e-mail addresses and I said that I knew pros at Amherst College with whom I could connect him.

“Who knows,” I said, “Maybe my 16-year-old son and I will go to Zambia some day and work with you.”

“That would be awesome,” he said.

Then we shook hands and said goodbye, and I walked away, filled with love for life and tennis and New York. (Where else but in New York could such an encounter take place?) I thought of Arthur Ashe and the adversities he had overcome, beginning with struggling with racism in the South and ending with contracting AIDS from a blood transfusion in the North and how his life had not been about dejection and defeat but about triumph and generosity and goodness.

“From what we get,” Ashe once said, “we can make a living; from what we give, however, makes a life.”
All posts copyright© 2010. All rights reserved. No part of this blog may be reproduced or distributed without attribution and/or permission of the author

The Glories of Azurite

My son is almost grown, which means that the opportunities for volunteering as a parent chaperone are fast disappearing. When my boy was in elementary school, and I was elected secretary of the PTA (not by choice, mind you, but only because no one else was willing to do it), it seemed that every other week I was being tapped to help out in the art class or take over the after-school French class. Back then, in the talc mines of motherhood, when I was complaining about all the minutes I had to take and the cupcakes I had to bake, I never imagined that I would pine for the long afternoons of herding noisy children through museums.

A friend once described me as a hopeless passeist, which means I’m in love with the past simply because it is past, and I can lose myself in a sentimental Proustian swoon over any and all of my yesterdays, however ordinary, simply because they are gone.

All of which is preface and prolegomena to the cameo of your humble blogger wandering like an English sheepdog behind a gaggle of eighteen ninth-graders as they cavorted along the paved walkways of Amherst College, preparing to lay siege to its rust-colored Natural History Museum. Their teacher, Mr. Weems, had warned that they were to be silent as fossils—in fact, if they spoke above a whisper in the corridors, they would never be allowed in the museum again (ill-behaved middle schoolers from another school were responsible for such draconian policy).

As our group shuffled into the high-ceilinged hall of dinosaurs, my son and his classmates were divided into groups, shepherded into elevators, and led to their designated floors. Each student was expected to stand before his or her chosen mineral, and produce a detailed ink drawing on his or her sketchpad.

There were three parent volunteers, including myself. (When we set off from the Hartsbrook school’s parking lot, we had only two but a last-minute cell phone call from the bus scared up Sarah, a harried mother of five who had completely forgotten about having signed on for her tour of duty.) Paul was assigned to patrol the first floor; Sarah was stationed on the second floor; while I became the chatelaine of the third floor, peering over the shoulders of four ninth-graders as they studied their quartz, garnet, topaz, and copper.

My charges were as silent as Tutankhamen’s tomb-mates (my son was presumably equally mum sketching calcite on the second floor), which meant I could relax and admire the sapphire hills of the Holyoke Range from the open offices of the Amherst College geology profs as well as marvel at the queerly named specimens of riebeckite, kyanite, glauconite, cavansite, and sodalite, all of which were displayed and identified in the large glass cases lining the walls. Who knew that there were so many rocks from places near and far with so many declensions of blue? Who knew that it was possible to feel, swanning up and down the hushed wooden floors, as clueless as a medieval peasant? Ah, to barge into the offices of one of those geology profs, and be instructed in the mysteries of plate tectonics!

And then I saw it—the stone that stilled all neuronal pitter-patter. It was at the end of the corridor in a massive tri-level display case across from the janitor’s office and catty corner to the women’s room. The rock was massive, big as the helmet of Pericles, and rivered and pockmarked with blues and greens. The identifying card explained that it was a combination of azurite and malachite, both of which are oxidized forms of copper. The rock hailed from Bisbee, Arizona, and its technical name was a medley of uppercase C’s and O’s and lower case 2s and 3s.

(In the next few days, I would research azurite, learning that it is also called Chessylite, after a mine in Lyons, France, as well as Blue Bice or simply Bice, which comes from the Old French word, Bis, for gray. Azurite derives from the Persian, lazhward, which is an area in the present-day Iranian desert known for its deposits of lapis lazuli, another deep blue stone with which azurite was often confused. Lapis lazuli, which is Latin and means stone of azure, derives from the metamorphic rock of lazurite. Coarse grains of azurite were commonly used by medieval and Renaissance painters; Vermeer and Raphael were both especially fond of azurite. Not as bright and blue as aquamarine, azurite was cheaper and more plentiful.)

“Gather me into the artifice of eternity,” William Butler Yeats once wrote in his poem, “Sailing to Byzantium.” That line had always mystified me. How could eternity be a constructed or even a reconstructed experience? But hovering in the circles of midday light beside the azurite, I suddenly got it. The rock, its blues and greens making prismatic patterns such as one sees when looking through a kaleidoscope, hardly looked like it was extracted from anyplace as humble as the Mule Mountains of Bisbee, Arizona, but as if its crystals were hammered into form by Hephaestus himself.

Then, as if refracting the arc of my son’s childhood, Mr. Weems appeared at my side to whisper that it was time to go. I led my charges to the elevator and down to the outdoor terrace for the obligatory headcount. The mood in the noonday sun was festive, and after all the gangly teenagers were accounted for, we marched back to the bus, the three parent chaperones piling into Paul’s van, with my son and one of his classmates, Sean, settling in the back seats.

On the return to school, we talked of things lapidary. Paul praised the diamonds from Brazil on the first floor, and I recalled the many specimens of quartz, including the purple amethyst. Who knew that the semi-precious stone was a type of quartz? Sean explained that quartz was actually very plentiful, covering 20 percent of the lithosphere.

What’s the lithosphere, I asked, feeling, once again, stupider than a baker, butcher, and candlestick maker. The fifteen-year-old patiently explained that it was another name for the outer surface of the earth’s crust. Oh, I said, thinking that there should be a word—sheeposphere?—for the region a parent enters when her son and his peers prove that they are smarter.

Then the talk segued to the high school prom, which was scheduled for Saturday night, who was taking whom, what the boys were planning to wear (the theme was under the ocean) and whether the services of parent chaperones would be needed. Sarah, with her five children, was an expert in the protocol of proms past, and explained that the entire faculty turned out to chaperone, and that parents’ services were not required, save for the dropping off and the picking up.

The following evening, when my boy, freshly shaven and dressed in his father’s tux, bounded out the door to be ferried by another parent to the prom, I felt a bit teary-eyed. But within the hour, I was back on Google, researching the history of azurite.

Some weeks later, I returned to the museum to wander lonely as a cloud through the empty corridors, riding the elevator to the third floor to visit what I have come to regard as my specimen of azurite, which was even lovelier the second time glimpsed, its rivulets of blues and greens sure to move future generations of schoolchildren and their parents.
All posts copyright© 2010. All rights reserved. No part of this blog may be reproduced or distributed without attribution and/or permission of the author

Wild Blueberries

For the first time in many Augusts, I was alone at the cottage on Georgian Bay. My teenaged son was away at camp; my husband and I were taking a sabbatical from one another. Three of my longtime friends would be flying up from New York during the second week: but until then it was just me and the dog, me in the twin bed pushed against the wall in the yellow bedroom off the deck, the dog at the foot of the other twin. It was a solitary confinement I both looked forward to and dreaded, a time-out that would take me closer to what Emily Dickinson rapturously called her “blue peninsula.” Or drown me in longing for lost days.

I began every morning with a bowl of Cheerios topped with wild blueberries. The blueberries—with their flared crowns packed close together with sprigs of unripened gray or green buds in their cardboard container--had come from a farm stand on County Road 6 in Perkinsfield. The wild berries cost two Canadian dollars more than their cultivated cousins in the same pistachio green pint container, and someone who was looking to save a few bucks might opt for the cultivated blueberries, which were larger and juicier and did not need to be picked over before you ate them for breakfast.

But appearances, as every philosopher since Plato has observed, can be deceiving, and sometimes, as Emily Dickinson knew for sure, less really is more. In fact, the humble, diminutive wild blueberry, which is part of the wild heath family and grows in low-lying bushes in northern climes from British Columbia to Oregon and California in the West and the Atlantic Provinces to Maine and West Virginia in the East, is far sweeter than its plumper high bush cousin. The low bush wild blueberries contain far more disease-fighting anti-oxidants than the high bush variety, and their indigo-colored skins are rich in reservatrol, the same magic ingredient found in red wine. Moreover, the mouth-watering tang of the tiny berries, some no bigger than the honey bees that pollinate them, is just about the most sensuous experience you can have, second perhaps only to the rapture of your first kiss.

My first kiss took place on Addison Beach near the cottage on Georgian Bay on a July evening in 1966. Back in those days, we stayed on the island that my grandfather, William Kynoch, had purchased in the 1930s as a summer retreat for his wife and two daughters, the younger of whom was my mother. He had come upon the five-acre island, which included a small fishing cabin, on one of his walks from Balm Beach, where his wife, my grandmother, was studying landscape painting with Franz Johnston, a member of the Canadian Group of Seven. My grandfather fell instantly in love with the small island, which lay within wading distance of the mainland. With its stands of birch, white pine and oak, its wild blueberry bushes at the northern tip, its massive pink and white granite boulders that ringed its perimeter, it reminded him of the Scottish coast north of Edinburgh, from which he had emigrated years before.

On maps and surveys, the place was called “Tiny Island” after the township of Tiny in which it was located. Tiny was the name of one of the dogs of Lady Sarah Maitland, the wife of a Lieutenant Governor-General of Upper Canada, who ruled the region in the early 19th century when Canada belonged to Great Britain; the neighbouring townships were called Flos and Tay, after Lady Sarah’s two other lapdogs, a funny, stranger-than-fiction fact which my mother repeated to me year after year with undiminished merriment.

My grandmother, who painted the cabin’s kitchen cupboards with soaring gulls and wind-beaten pines, called it “Le Nid de la Mouette,” or “The Nest of the Seagull.” But everybody else--my mother, father, sister, aunt and two cousins, all of whom might be in residence in the sleeping cabin and boat house my grandfather built to accommodate his growing family--called it “The Island,” as if only the most unaffected moniker could sum up its singular magic.

Summer days on Addison Beach tended to all run together, singled out only by the vagaries of weather—the hot, still afternoons where there wasn’t enough wind to sail out to Seagull Island, the rainy mornings when you drove into Midland to shop or sightsee, touring Martyrs’ Shrine, the Gothic cathedral honouring the Jesuit priests who came in the early 1600s to convert the Huron Indians to Christianity only to be massacred by the Iroquois.

On that very hot July Saturday in 1966, so hot that you couldn’t walk across the beach without flip-flops, my grandfather, then in his early eighties, spent his morning sunning himself on the rocks at the end of the island, then, after a light lunch, took his usual walk down the beach to the two-bedroom cottage in the woods, which he had purchased as a retreat to work on the novel he had begun in retirement. The story goes that he was feeling a little tired and so decided to lie down and take a nap on the cot in the spare bedroom.

There was a bonfire on the beach that night—the family who was hosting it had been waiting all week for a windless day—and the kids in the cottages were sparking with anticipation. Not only did this mean we’d feast on roasted marshmallows and whoop around the fire like wild Iroquois, we’d also get a much later bedtime, because the bonfire never got underway until after dark, which in Ontario in July, meant well after nine o’clock.

It wasn’t until dinnertime that the family began to wonder what had become of my grandfather, and someone—my father, I think—was sent down the beach to find him, and discovered him stretched out on the cot, not asleep but dead. When my dad returned with the news, there issued forth a terrible keening from the women in the family that reached my sister and me sunbathing in the dunes on the mainland.

We hurried back to the island, forgoing our usual late afternoon swim, and were greeted with more sobbing. My dad was seeing to all the details that my grandmother, mother and aunt were too grief-stricken to undertake--calling the funeral home and arranging for a service and burial in the St. James-on-the-Lines church in the nearby village of Penetanguishene.

There was no family dinner at the long knotty pine table that night; we made do with leftovers from the fridge, and then because the crying showed no signs of letting up, and because we didn’t know what else to do and because no one told us we couldn’t, we slipped away to the bonfire.

The news that our grandfather had passed had preceded us. The parents at the bonfire hugged us, said what a gentle man, what a kind man, Will Kynoch was, and how much he would be missed. One or two reported that they themselves had seen him that very afternoon, making his way barefoot down the beach, his walking shoes in his hands, hardly, they said shaking their heads, the picture of a man in his last hours.

It’s possible that Bobby—and I confess that isn’t his real name--felt sorry for me, and that that was why he offered to walk me home when the bonfire died down to a few glowing coals. It’s possible that when I stopped to catch my breath from crying, I was acting with a certain calculation, hoping he would drape his long, skinny arm around me, hoping we would stop in the cool, maganese-dark sand a few hundred feet from where the water lapped against the island rocks. I had had a crush on this tow-headed, gangly-limbed boy for two summers. He had never kissed me. No one had ever kissed me. I didn’t even know what it felt like, having only read about it in books. But if something was going to happen, it had to be now, long past our bedtimes, when we were about to say goodbye and my dead grandfather was spinning above us among the Pleiades.

I never saw Bobby again after that summer. His family never came back to Addison beach, or if they did, it was for the first weeks in August instead of the last weeks in July. My parents built a cottage on the mainland, directly across from the island, the last project they created before they divorced. The island was sold in 1988 when my aunt could no longer afford its upkeep. My mother and aunt died within a year of one another, and now lie beside my grandfather in the St.-James-on-the-Lines cemetery overlooking Penetanguishene harbor. His pink granite tombstone is from Tiny Island. Its inscription reads: "Nescit Amor Fines" (Love knows no Bounds).

My morning cup of medicinal blueberries, eaten on the deck with the dog at my feet looking south toward Tiny island which is now a peninsula, will not bring back the name of the twelve-year-old boy who first kissed me, but I will never forget his sandy hands stroking and framing my wet face, the brush of our sunburned lips, his tongue pressing against mine like a mouthful of sweet, wild blueberries.
All posts copyright© 2010. All rights reserved. No part of this blog may be reproduced or distributed without attribution and/or permission of the author

Blue Light

I remember her on her haunches in the upstairs hall banging her butt one hundred times on the cherry-planked floor, getting red in the face and not stopping her counting, even for a second, when my sister or I would interrupt to ask her a question. She also performed an exercise where, dressed in nothing but her bra and panties, she would clench her right fist and beat it against her right thigh; then she would take her left fist and beat it against her left thigh. Each fleshy thigh received fifty lashes. I never asked where she had learned these spot-reducing techniques—no doubt she picked them up at the Harry Conover Agency, where she worked as a model in the year before she married my dad.

“Have you checked your weight today?” a flat, computer-generated voice asked, interrupting the movie-in-my-head of my mother, circa 1965. I was passing directly in front of the General Nutrition Center storefront with its pyramids of vitamins at the Mountain View Mall. Most of the time I ignored the talking scale, but on that rainy July afternoon, chafing beneath my tightening waistband, I feared that I had put on a few pounds. (I had thrown out my bathroom scale years ago after having been advised to do so by FAT IS A FEMINIST ISSUE.) I duly removed my cotton jacket, sneakers and shoes: such outerwear could add two to three pounds, and I wanted to keep the number as low as possible.

I mounted the scale, fed two quarters into the slot, punched in some data regarding my age, build, and height, held my breath, and stood very still as the screen instructed. In thirty seconds, a square slip of paper popped out, imprinted with various numbers and letters, including the date, my weight, and whether I was within my ideal weight range or not. (For another twenty-five cents, I could receive a diet/fat analysis as well as a biorhythm outlook, but having signed up for these less-than-useless extras some time ago, I passed.)

Reader, I don’t expect you to regard this as a tragedy, but I had gained seven pounds! Seven pounds since I last weighed myself two summers ago on this very scale. Seven pounds in two years is three and a half pounds per year, which is about what a middle-aged woman can expect to gain after she reaches 50. The metabolism of the middle-aged is as notoriously sluggish as a gunk-filled bathtub drain: if you don’t reduce your daily calorie intake by 300-500 calories or begin a vigorous exercise plan, you’re going to start looking like a Shaker barn before Obama comes up for re-election.

What was this fat-lady-to-be to do? I had long given up my morning-glory muffin habit, and I was already riding my bike several miles a day. I wasn’t about to start banging my butt on the floor.

Surfing the Internet the next day, I pulled up a web page giving information about a Blue DietLight Refrigerator Appliance Bulb. For the low price of $9.95 plus $6.95 for shipping and handling (Ohio residents must add sales tax), you can receive this magic blue bulb, screw it into your refrigerator, and “watch the munchies disappear.” (For $19.95, you can also receive the weight loss hypnosis compact disc.)

Apparently, the color blue works as a natural appetite suppressant, which is why restaurants used to offer low-cost Blue Plate specials. The most ancient hunter-gatherer part of the brain associates blue with moldy, spoiled food, and naturally recoils. With the exception of blueberries, mussels, and eggplants, there are actually very few naturally occurring blue foods, which may account for this ancient pairing of blue and inedibility. The blue-plate diner morphs into the proverbial picky-eater, and the crazed refrigerator-raider whose Blue DietLight bulb glows over that cheesecake will think twice about forking into it.

Five thousand years of color therapy culled from ancient Chinese, Egyptian, Tibetan, and Native American cultures has shown that the color blue is balm to the soul, explained the website. And lest you still think the Blue DietLight and Hypnosis CD is a scam, read on: the Harvard Business School-- and here the blue type was magnified into screaming 20-point font--reports that blue light promotes positive decision making, and strengthens resolve.

I didn't order the Blue DietLight: I know from exhaustive experience that diets and diet-related products don't work. When I was a teenager working at my first paid job of ski instructor, I was called “Rotunda,” by some of my jokey male co-workers. I didn’t find this funny, nor was I amused when they said: “You don’t have hips, you’ve got ships.” I cried all the way to the candy machines in the base lodge, where I becalmed myself with an Almond Joy, and vowed to start Atkins the next day.

On the Atkins diet, you can eat unlimited amounts of meat and bacon and cottage cheese, but you must stay away from bread, pasta, cookies, cakes, and, of course, candy. I lasted about a week, and moved on to the Scarsdale Diet even though I’ve never been crazy about grapefruits. But only a Trappist monk could stick to the 700-calorie-a-day regime. When Jean Harris gunned down the diet’s creator, Hy Tarnower, because he was two-timing her with his young nurse, I could never take the Scarsdale diet seriously again.

Several years later, I signed up for Weight Watchers, but I always felt exposed at the group weigh-ins, and it was way too much work to keep track of my food points, though I did develop a fondness for Weight Watcher’s two-point English Toffee Crunch bars. I briefly joined Overeaters Anonymous, which works on the same 12-step principles as Alcoholics Anonymous, but everyone in the group was about 100 pounds overweight and I felt a teeny bit self-conscious.

After my son was born, I managed to hover about ten or twenty pounds above my ideal weight, but the prospect of ballooning back into “Rotunda” lodged like a burnt-out bulb in the most ancient part of my brain.

My mother also tried various diets, but they were no match for her ever-enlarging shape. By the time she was sixty-five, she was forty to fifty pounds overweight (she was mortified about the actual number and would never reveal it to me). She had also developed adult onset Diabetes, which is a truly nasty disease. If untreated, it can lead to foot amputations, blindness and heart disease. She started taking Glucovance, but continued to sneak junk foods. Under her bed and in the glove compartment of her car, she hid bags of Fritos, potato chips, and cans of mixed nuts.

During the last three weeks of her life, in one of life’s stranger-than-fiction ironies, my mother became as slender as the girl she had been decades ago. She was admitted to the local hospital for a mysterious infection, which the doctor said was related to her Diabetes and which she had suffered from intermittently for the past several months. My mother had always hated hospitals, and had been fortunate never to spend much time in them. Other than the two weeks she passed in the maternity ward after giving birth to my sister and me, my mother had never been admitted to a hospital, not even to an emergency room.

In any event, being confined to a hospital meant being forced to eat hospital food, which she deplored. The overcooked packet-of-cards-sized pork chop went untouched, as did the puddles of mashed potatoes and creamed corn. She waved away the tiny servings of butterscotch and rice puddings, and sometimes I ended up eating them when I visited. This would prompt me to narrate my favorite Woody Allen joke about the two elderly ladies in the resort in the Catskills: “‘Boy, the food in this place is really terrible,’ one says. ‘Yeah, I know,’ the other says, ‘and such small portions.’”

My mother laughed, praised me for being such a card, then begged me to go out to the supermarket and bring her back a bag of Fritos. I refused, and pointed out that being deprived of 24/7 access to junk food would prove a blessing in disguise. She would get down to the weight she had always dreamed of, go off the Glucovance, and live to see 100.

It was not to be. She suffered a massive heart attack twenty-six hours later. She spent the next five days in intensive care and the following week she was shifted into the hospice ward. I gave her a back rub on the last day of her life, and I was shocked at how the ridges of her spinal column stood out against her pale, age-freckled flesh. She probably weighed less than she did when she was a tomboy of twelve, before the onset of the fleshy thighs and buttocks that would prove such a lifelong torment.

“We’re right here,” my sister and I whispered to her over and over in those last moments when we stood on either side of her bed, gripping her limp fingers and telling her that we loved her. The hospice worker had explained that even though she appeared to be unconscious, she could still hear our voices, still sense our presence. Over and over until it became a mantra that slowed the beating of our own hearts, we said, “Everything’s going to be O.K.”

If only she had been able to say this to herself, fifty times for the right ear, fifty times for the left ear, how different her life might have been: no Fritos, no Diabetes, nothing to dim her resolute blue light.

All posts copyright© 2009. All rights reserved. No part of this blog may be reproduced or distributed without attribution and/or permission of the author

What Color is the Sky?

I’m told that when you get really old, death doesn’t bother you anymore. You get accustomed to it, in the same way you get used to brushing off the dried wasps and blue bottle flies that gather on the windowsills in early fall. Death loses its power to hurt you, its sting leaving only the faintest swelling, the tiniest bull's-eye upon your age-spotted flesh.

I am far from such equanimity. Death still cuts me, even the death of my 93-year-old mother-in-law, who had been suffering from Alzheimer’s for the past decade, who had not recognized me, or her youngest son and grandson, in a very long time.

She was 76 when I first met her, still living on her own, still driving her own car, still working part-time in an antiques store on the coast of Maine. She lived in low-income housing for the elderly, directly off Route 1 in Wells, Maine, across from a Market Basket, a Wal-Mart and a Dunkin’ Donuts. It was a humble address for a direct descendant of a Mayflower ancestor, an engineer’s daughter who had grown up in a sea captain’s house in Marblehead, Massachusetts.

But if she had fallen from upper-middle-class gentility, there was nothing sorry about her or her surroundings. She tended a small flower garden that snaked around the edges of her condo; hollyhocks, delphiniums, and bachelor buttons grew in well-watered profusion. Hydrangea and rhododendron bushes stood on either side of her small stone terrace; a marble cherub invited one to savor the delights of all things horticultural.

Inside the dusted and polished spaces of her tiny home, she made sure no one rucked the oriental scatter rugs layered like patchwork quilts in her living room. She invited callers to sit on the creaky-springed sofa bed that was covered with a hand-crocheted throw; or in one of the two wing chairs, whose arms and backs were protected with freshly laundered antimacassars. A glass-fronted grandmother clock in the corner kept time, tolling, to the agony of anyone who camped on that pullout sofa bed, the quarter, half and full hours. A tasseled Chinese porcelain lamp stood sentry on the flute-edged mahogany end table. Glossy magazines--Coastal Living, Smithsonian and National Geographic, a testament to her weakness for entering Publishers’ Clearinghouse Sweepstakes—were stacked on her antique coffee table.

(A twin of that coffee table, with its brass fittings and foldable sides, stood before the sofa in our living room in my childhood home in western Massachusetts, which partly explained why my mother had nothing but praise for my mother-in-law. The two women, both conservative and proper, unskilled in the business of making money, loved elegant things.)

My mother-in-law was a still-handsome woman, with a broad forehead, distinguished Roman nose and dazzling smile. One could see that she had once been beautiful, and she carried herself with the sureness of someone accustomed to fielding compliments about her looks. She had been a dancer as a girl—the story was that she had been invited to join Martha Graham’s company in New York but that her father wouldn’t permit it; he needed her at home to help care for her three younger siblings during her mother’s protracted illness from cancer, a condition that, in the days before anyone had health insurance, drained the family’s fortunes.

Hemingway says that all of us are broken by life, but some are strong at the broken places. My mother-in-law was strong in many broken places. Her beloved first husband, Woodrow Wilson White, was killed in Italy in World War II, leaving behind an infant daughter. My mother-in-law, then a drop-dead gorgeous widow in her twenties, remarried an Army veteran who had survived the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The couple forgot about the evils of Nazis and Japs, and had two children.

The second husband, whom everyone called Smoky, was as humble as the first one was grand. Smoky, who repaired musical instruments for a living and played the trumpet in a band, doted on the fatherless little girl, and tried to be a good dad to his own two boys, though my mother-in-law once confided that she had never loved Smoky, and had only married him to provide a family for her little girl. My mother-in-law also claimed that Smoky was an indifferent father, and spent every family vacation at the beach shut up inside their rented cottage, working on his music. Like so many things she told me over the years, including why she later divorced Smokey (she was convinced he was having an affair), it was hard to know what was true and what was the ashy residue of her fury for all the men who had betrayed her.

The greatest tragedy of my mother-in-law’s life was something she never talked about. When she was still in high school, she had gotten pregnant; once she started showing, she was sent to upstate New York to a home for unwed mothers. She named the baby girl after her mother, and then gave the child up for adoption. Shortly before my husband and I married in 1993, this baby girl, now a sturdy woman in her fifties with two grown children, tracked her birth mother down. I can only imagine the relief, regret, guilt, and gladness my mother-in-law must have felt when she first embraced this lost girl, who had been blessed with her mother’s good looks and radiant smile. My mother-in-law confided many things to me, but she never discussed the details of how this child was conceived.

In her early eighties, my mother-in-law started behaving strangely—accusing neighbors of breaking into her condo and stealing her things, turning upon her family and friends (she called the child she had given up for adoption a “rat” and me, her mild-mannered daughter-in-law, a “mouse”). Her children moved her from Maine to New Hampshire, to another condo in the complex where her daughter lived, but the rages and midnight calls to the police continued. Something had to be done: her sons took her to court to become her legal guardian, upon which they placed her in an assisted living facility, and then, when the dementia worsened, into a nursing home.

Alois Alzheimer was the German doctor who treated the first patient who started showing symptoms of the disease after which he is named. The woman, referred to in patient records only as Auguste D., first entered Frankfurt Mental Institution on November 25, 1901. She was 51 years old, the mother of one daughter. Her husband, Carl, a railway clerk, had brought her there because he didn’t know where else to take her and because he could no longer endure her bizarre behavior —the delusions and night wanderings where she dragged her bed sheets across the apartment screaming.

Dr. Alzheimer conducted interviews over several weeks with Auguste D. (Her married name was Deter, but Dr. Alzheimer never recorded her maiden name in his otherwise meticulous notes.) Dr. Alzheimer asked her what year it was, and she said, “Eighteen hundred.” He picked up a pen from his desk, and asked her to identify it, and she said, “pencil.” He asked her what color the sky was, and she said blue. But when he asked her to write her name, she could only get out the first few letters of her first name. In a heartbreaking moment of lucidity, she cried, “Ich mich haben verloren (I have lost myself).”

Auguste D’s conditioned worsened; she had periods where she sat motionless for hours, where she could not eat. She never returned to her apartment on Waldenstraat, and five years later, she died. Dr. Alzheimer then performed an autopsy on her brain, and found, in her cortex, the telltale amyloidal plaques and neurofibrillary tangles that have become the signature of Alzheimer’s disease.

The blue cardboard file folder in which Alzheimer kept his 32 pages of notes was discovered in 1995 in a basement at the University of Frankfurt. The notes, recorded in the outdated German “Sutterlin” script, were remarkably intact, having survived the Allied bombings of 1944 and 1945, which destroyed much of Frankfurt Am Main, including the entire medieval city center, as well as the Municipal Library with its collection of Cairo Geniza documents, which included some 280,000 Jewish manuscripts found in 1895 in a Cairo synagogue.

There is no cure for Alzheimer’s disease, and though there are theories as to why some older people get it and others don’t—obesity is a risk factor, as is high blood pressure, Type II Diabetes, extreme sedentariness, intellectual incuriosity, and depression—these theories shed little light upon my mother-in-law’s condition. Although she was slightly overweight and didn’t exercise, she was otherwise risk-free. She took the drug, Aricept, but it did little more than retard the ravages of the disease.

The last time I saw her was on Mother’s Day. It had been a habit of ours to visit on this holiday. We would drive to Portsmouth, New Hampshire; my husband would go into the nursing home to fetch her, while my son and I stayed in the car, clearing out the front seat and making space in the back for her walker. We would drive to The Works Bagel Café on Congress Street, and get take-out: sandwiches for us and hot tea and a cookie for her because she had already eaten her lunch.

My husband would drive us to Sea Point beach in Kittery, not far from the Rachel Carson Nature Preserve and a favorite destination for dog owners. In the early years when she was in assisted living, she would climb out of the car and walk slowly along the beach. But as her condition worsened, she preferred to stay buckled into the passenger seat, watching from behind the windshield as Golden Retrievers, Poodles, and Portuguese Water Dogs leapt for Frisbees and tennis balls.

This past Mother’s Day, because of roadwork along Route 1, we never got to Kittery, but stayed in Portsmouth, driving to a park near the Wentworth–Coolidge Mansion which overlooked Little Harbor. Our destination was of no consequence to my mother-in-law; she wanted merely to sit in the car with us, to sip her milky tea and break off pieces of her chocolate chip cookie and smile that winning childlike smile, which was remarkably unchanged in all the seventeen years I had known her.

Our routine never varied: my son and I would get out to walk the dog, then return to the car, upon which my husband and son would head out to collect shells, and I would climb into the driver’s seat, keeping my mother-in-law company. I never knew what to say to her; the days were long gone when she railed against Smoky and his shortcomings. I filled up the silence with random musings; pointing out this or that wet dog; this or that freighter on the horizon. Whether I spoke or was silent didn’t matter; she smiled and nodded and made these rhythmic humming noises that came from deep inside her thorax and seemed almost like a cat purring.

Nothing seemed final about this last time we sat watching the water. The weather was warm, the sun was out; the tide was low. After she had finished her cookie, I offered her a square of shortbread that I had baked the day before. She took it, and murmured, "Thank you, Honey," and made a satisfied "Ummm," sound while she slowly, bird bite by bird bite, ate it. And though she could not have told you what year it was, though she could not have named the color of the sky or identified the snowy-haired man who presented her with a quahog clam shell when he returned to the car, she was happy, content simply to be.

And now she is gone, and the clamshell sky seems paler.

Birthday Blues

“I wanted to take you to a Blues concert for your birthday,” my friend e-mailed. “It’s on the 11th of June and would require a night away. It’s a terrific lineup—Johnny Winter, Ronnie Earl and Joe Lou Walker. Let me know if you think you can make it.”

I promptly manufactured several reasons why I couldn’t go (because, as Saint Paul wisely observed, "...I want to do what is right but I do not do it. Instead, I do the very thing I hate"). It was my son’s last day of school, and I couldn’t get away. It was too expensive (she was footing the bill, not only for the Blues concert but for the overnight at The Holiday Inn). It would annoy my husband that I was birding off on this frivolous adventure, which my friend, whose own husband was on business in Korea, was billing as our “Thelma and Louise” night. It meant getting in the car and schlepping two hours each way: according to three printed pages from Mapquest, I would need to take ten routes and make fifteen turns, which was way too much work when you were about to turn 56—56!-- and preferred to crawl in a hole and perseverate upon your receding, bleeding gums.

(Did you know that according to recent studies, people are twenty percent more likely to suffer a heart attack on their birthday? No one knows why—it could be the stress of the number itself or the trauma of facing all those unlived dreams. Which meant that I could expire in my seat as I listened to aging rocker Johnny Winter. Yet another good reason to stay home.)

But, as one bumper sticker in our evolved Pioneer Valley proclaims, just because we have thoughts doesn’t mean we have to believe them. With prodding from my better self, I decided, in the words of another bumper sticker, to “encourage my hopes rather than my fears” and go.

“You’re on time!” my friend marveled when I tapped, at three minutes after 6, on the door of our room in the Holiday Inn in Concord, New Hampshire. She was waiting with a chilled bottle of Prosecco, an Italian sparkling wine which I had never heard of (“you really don’t get out much,” she laughed) and which was tangy as a melon sorbet. I had brought a cooler full of cold chicken and pasta salad, but we were too jazzed to think about dinner. Instead, we snacked on hummus and rice cakes, scattering crumbs all over the carpet.

We left the hotel in plenty of time to arrive at the concert before it started at 7:30, walking several blocks up Main Street, a distance the front desk clerk suggested might be a tad too far (when we asked directions on the way back, several people also remarked upon the distance, which meant either that we looked really out of shape or that nobody in New Hampshire walked).

We reached our seats with time to spare for trips to the rest rooms, trips that, to judge by the to-ing and fro-ing of several concert goers in our row, we were not alone in needing to complete. I repeated a saying I had heard somewhere about Queen Elizabeth II, how she never passed a ladies room without stopping to use it, which the woman behind me overheard, causing her to joke that this crowd was as old as the queen and that plenty of us would be hot-footing it to the bathrooms, maybe even in the middle of a set.

It was Woodstock redux all right. Everyone to my left and right was old, fat, gray, lame, bald, and/or hearing-impaired. Many carried canes or tooled around in motorized carts. The handful of folks under forty were accompanied by their parents, one young woman behind me explaining that she had started going to blues concerts in her stroller.

A PR fellow from Family and Children’s Services appeared onstage, explaining that it was cool to have fun and do good, upon which there was much cheering. Then a disc jockey from the radio station, The River, bounced onstage, introducing Joe Lou Walker, who once played back-up with Muddy Waters, Jimi Hendrix, et al. Upon which the blues legend, duded up in skullcap and shades, snaked onstage, his nimble fingers shimmying up and down the frets of his electric guitar. The guy had to be well over sixty, but he wore his years as lightly as Superman’s cape. As he urged the clapping, swaying crowd-- “Come on now, clap your hands together and say Yeah,” and we started clapping our hands and saying, “Yeah,”--it seemed that we were regaining years, possibly even brain cells, by the minute.

There was short break, during which people hightailed it to the lobby to use those overburdened rest rooms and suck down bottles of Bud Lite. Then we were back in the dark waiting for Ronnie Earl and the Broadcasters, which my friend said she had been looking forward to all night. She had seen them at an arts center in her hometown of Concord, Massaschusetts and had been blown away. Earl, whose last name is really Horvath, the Earl, I learned from subsequent research on the Internet, being adopted when Muddy Waters kept mispronouncing Horvath’s name in the 1970s. (Earl was the first name of the blues giant Earl Hooker.) Louise whispered that Ronnie Earl suffered from depression, and only played gigs within a day’s drive of his hometown of Boston. He was also in recovery, and his latest album is called Living in the Light. The River D.J. explained that Ronnie Earl played like it was his last night on earth. Unlike Joe Lou Walker, Earl didn’t sing, not one note. He just caressed the strings of his long-necked guitar, sometimes with such painstaking deliberation that you swore he was going to stop and walk off the stage. There was one moment when he actually did walk off the stage. Then, amidst an audible collective exhaling, he returned, every chord like a prayer, answered at last.

By the time Johnny Winter came on, it was 9:30 and we were spent. It didn’t help that the sound system was turned up to ear-canal-destroying decibels and that we could barely hear ourselves shout. And to be honest, there was something about Johnny Winter, shuffling onstage like someone in the Alzheimer’s wing of my mother-in-law’s nursing home, settling himself down, round-shouldered, in a straight-backed chair because he was too feeble to stand, well, there was just something too creepy about the whole spectacle.

So we were outta there, and, as it turned out, a lot of other people had the same idea because when we found ourselves in the bricked courtyard, it was thick with folks shaking their heads, like swimmers getting rid of water in their ears. Surely one of the gifts of middle age is that you can leave before the party’s over; in fact, leaving when you’re still alert (and vertical) is the mark of the evolved soul.

Our evening ended tepidly. We didn’t pick up any guys and kiss them in parking lots; we didn’t jump into any teal blue convertibles and go careening over cliffs. We returned to our room on the fourth floor of the Holiday Inn, ate our picnic supper, got into our jammies, brushed and flossed our teeth, and then tumbled into our beds, chatting in the dark about our teenagers until we drifted into snoring and sleep.

The Blue Hospital Bracelet

After putting off for weeks, no make that months, the mammogram that every woman over fifty is meant to undergo every year, after deleting phone messages from the nice ladies at my primary care doctor’s office as well as the nice ladies in the radiology department at the local hospital, I finally decided to stop behaving like a surly teenager and, in the words of the redneck bumper sticker, “git r done.” I’ve never understood the meaning of that phrase, but I suspect that it has politically incorrect sexual overtones, and is not feminist friendly.

Mammograms, of course, have no skanky sexual overtones and are feminist friendly, but I still would rather do almost anything than have one. It’s not just that it’s annoying to have your breasts pushed, plumped, and squeezed by nice plump ladies (I don’t know why, but every radiological technician I have ever had has been at least thirty pounds overweight) who turn and twist your mammary glands under the cold, hard metal plates of the X-ray machine like chicken parts on a grill, it’s also that you inevitably put yourself through the worst-case-scenario storytelling spin cycle, as in what will you do if, after three days, you get the phone call. The nice, fat nurses always reassure you that only ten percent of patients get the call, while ninety percent get the letter in the mail signed by your primary care physician, informing you that all is quiet on the western front of your mortality.

My friend, Lisa, got the call, and it led to more calls, none of which contained good news. It will be two years this fall that she’s been gone, and it all started with a routine mammogram at the very hospital in which I find myself on this feverishly hot May morning. As I shuffle down the clean, brightly lit halls--I enter by way of the ER, which I try not to interpret in too ominous a light—I remind myself it’s only a mammogram. If I go in ready for stage four breast cancer, I will have only myself to blame if the news is bad.

“Who’s your primary, Sweetie?” asks the huge nurse checking me in at the radiology desk. Now, you’re probably going to accuse me of sizism, and I really can’t say I would blame you because all I can think about is that this one is over-the-top huge, and I mean so massive that she’s busting out of her teal scrubs and the swiveling office chair can barely contain her. I tell myself that my attitude sucks. If my teenaged son behaved the way I’m behaving, he’d get a big fat lecture and no Red Sox games on TV for a week. I can’t very well threaten to nix my nightly baths, but there’s got to be some way I can find a better PMA (positive mental attitude).

I start mouthing the Scientific Statement of Being, penned over a hundred years ago by Mary Baker Eddy, the discoverer and founder of Christian Science who never had breast cancer, outlived three husbands, and reached the august age of 89. I haven’t darkened the doors of a Christian Science church in forty years, but the pellucid sentences roll off my tongue—“There is no life, truth, intelligence or substance in matter”—and I am back in Sunday school standing like a steeple reciting the six-sentence prayer before the end-of-service bell rings.

But oh misery of misericordias, I am beamed back to a plump, beatific-faced middle-aged lady in a floral dress with lace smoking at the neck. Many lifetimes ago, this Sunday school teacher, who reminded me of a kinder, gentler version of granite-faced, tight-curled Mary Baker Eddy, failed to show up to teach her class, failed to appear when church resumed in the fall, which meant we got her husband as a sub, who could never remember our names.

Her husband was Norman Simpson, a successful writer of bed-and-breakfast books and a minor celebrity in Berkshire County. The Simpsons (and this was long before the television series of that name, though Mrs. Simpson’s trusting character was not unlike Marge Simpson’s) lived in Stockbridge, not far from Norman Rockwell’s studio on Main Street. They sent their kids to the Berkshire Country Day School and belonged to the Stockbridge Golf Club. Mrs. Simpson--and thanks to the declining dendrites in my middle-aged brain, I can’t remember her first name—was the last person you would expect to get breast cancer, but she did, and since she was a devout Christian Scientist, she elected not to have chemo or radiation.

Mrs. Simpson never returned to our basement Sunday school, never sang “Mother’s Evening Prayer,” to the accompanying chords of the Spinet before we were released to our parents’ care. The adults who gathered in the upstairs vestibule on that Sunday after her death whispered that she had slipped away peacefully at home with her family all around her, which is what she had wanted. But I found nothing beautiful about the story. On that morning when I learned that Mrs. Simpson was in heaven with Mrs. Eddy, I informed my mother that Christian Science was a joke, and that I wanted nothing more to do with it.

As I continue to berate myself for failing to remember Mrs. Simpson’s Christian name, my own first name is called. A woman dressed in street clothes—and this one is slender and fit, putting the lie to my sizist stereotype-- beckons me into her windowless office. She wants me to verify my primary care physician as well as my birth date and social security number. When I confirm all these details to her satisfaction, she produces a blue plastic identification bracelet and slips it around my wrist.

“Oh Geez, do they think I’m going to go into cardiac arrest on the breast imaging machine?” I ask.

“Of course not, Sweetheart,” she says. “The hospital just wants to make sure that everyone gets to where they need to go.”

“But I’m here for, what, an hour?”

“New policy, as of last year. Nobody passes through those doors without an I.D. No exceptions.”

Meekly, I return to my straight-backed chair and wait, like Godot. An athletic-looking woman in sleeveless tee and khaki shorts is leafing through a copy of Real Simple, and when she leaves, I pick up the oversized magazine, wondering whether focusing on 26 ways to get organized might take my mind off the 50 ways I’m about to lose it.

Instead, I twirl the bracelet upon my wrist. There are an annoying number of numbers, bar codes, slashes and asterisks on the white rectangle stuck at a rakish angle onto the tissue-thin plastic. The plastic is probably made in China, and no doubt contains cancer-causing polyvinyl chlorides. If I don’t have cancer now, I will surely get it from this wristband.

And why, in the name of Mary Baker Eddy, is the blasted thing blue? Code blue is the big bad wolf of all hospital emergency codes, reserved for those sorry folks who are one machine away from the morgue. Blue also summons up the insurance megalith which began with the best of intentions, covering teachers in Texas in the twenties and oil workers in Oregon in the thirties but which has become synonymous with everything that is wrong with the health care system. (I can’t afford the premiums charged by Blue Cross, Blue Shield, but I do carry insurance from a lesser regional entity and it’s covering most of the procedure, save for $63.68, though how Health New England arrives at this number is beyond me.)

But if you can forget about all these “Sicko” associations, the patient bracelet is sort of calming. It’s the blue of a cloudless summer sky over the Connecticut River, the blue of Block Island Sound when the ferry first slips out of sight of land. I am moved to mouth a random line from the Scientific Statement of Being: “All is infinite mind and its infinite manifestation.”

My name is finally called and I am instructed to walk all the way down the hall to the left of the front desk. I enter another windowless room where the athletic woman in khakis is now seated beside an end table staring at her fingernails. Within seconds a nurse beckons to her and she creeps away on rubber-sandaled feet. Another nurse in periwinkle scrubs appears, asking me whether I am wearing any deodorant, powders, or perfumes. When I report that I’m not, she says “Good Girl,” as if I am a puppy who no longer pees in the house.

Like many life events, my mammogram is far worse in prospect. The nice fat technician calls me Sweetie more times than I can count, reminds me to breathe, says I am doing great (great is technically an adjective rather than an adverb, but I resist the urge to bust her). When all the pics of my left and right breast, front and back, have been taken, and I am permitted to return to my cubby, remove the blue-and-white dotted hospital johnny and slip on my smelly, coffee-stained tee-shirt, I am hologrammic with joy.

On the way out, the admitting nurse, who must have overheard my kvetching about the bracelet, offers to dispose of it in the hospital shredder. But I surprise myself and say, “Thanks, but I think I’ll keep it. For a souvenir.”

I don’t get the phone call, and a little key stroking on Google calls up Mrs. Simpson’s first name: Nancy.

No Blue Without Yellow and Orange

“You’re not always going to look 35, you know,” my mother had pointed out one Christmas years ago when she had arranged for one of her artist friends to paint my portrait.

I was not keen on the prospect. Not only did I dread wasting an afternoon crammed into my blue polka-dotted polyester-and-silk dress when I could be sunbathing on the beach at Siesta Key, I also wasn’t crazy about my sister’s portrait, painted by the same artist who would do me, which hung above the two green sateen chairs, placed conversation style, in front of the television in Mom’s living room. The artist signed herself simply Nanci, presumably in the vein of Vincent of Vincent van Gogh, though the comparison between the two painters ended with the signature.

“I don’t know why you don’t like it,” my mother sniffed, as we watched the MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour and I was on my second glass of Chardonnay and she was nursing her pink lemonade, “I think it’s actually a very good likeness.”

“You can’t be serious!” I said, as the screen flashed to an angry mob of Romanians looting Nicholae Ceausescu’s palace, carting out gold-gilt mirrors and mother-of-pearl end tables, their faces oversized and jeering. “The shape of her face is wrong, her nose is too button-like, and her fingers are so elongated they look like she’s got evening gloves on. Furthermore, she hasn’t been that skinny since she was 25.”

“Honestly, aren’t you a pill! I told Nanci that I liked the portrait so much I wanted her to do one of you, too. She’s coming tomorrow after lunch, and you’ll only have to sit long enough for her to take a few rolls of photos. She works strictly from the photos. She’s very professional, and will have the job done in a month.”

My mother, also Nancy, but with a y, worshipped her namesake, whom she regarded as a kind of spiritual twin: they were both originally from the Midwest, both divorced, both about forty pounds overweight, and both considered themselves artists, though Nanci made her living as a painter, while my mother struggled to summon the self-discipline and focus to complete a few sketches a year, and sometimes not even that.

“It’s a waste of time and money,” I fumed, as the screen flashed to a massive woman in a black babushka explaining, through an interpreter, that Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu had looted the country, massacred thousands, and that finally the Romanian people were sending a message to the world: enough was enough. “How much is she going to charge you, anyway?”

“Her regular fee is five grand, but since she’s my dear friend, she’s giving me a special rate and only charging four.”

“ You can’t be serious! That’s highway robbery!”

I had started to repeat myself, an irritating family trait, which had been pointed
out to me repeatedly by my latest boyfriend, with whom I had recently broken up and for whom I was still pining, despite the fact that our relationship was as turbulent as the fall of the Ceausescu regime. At this very moment he was in Paris, no doubt praising the virtues of the Winged Victory in the Louvre with a woman he’d met in the personal ads while I was getting plastered with Mom on Gull Road in South Venice, Florida.

“ Dearie, you know perfectly well that most of the time I live like an absolute pauper,” Mom said. “I haven’t bought myself any new clothes, nothing for the house. The thing is, I want to do this while Nanci’s got time. And you’re not always going to look the way you do now.”

“You said that,” I snapped.

“Something’s burning,” I said, sniffing into the air and getting a strong whiff of burning meat, the roasted chicken from PIggly Wiggly that was meant to have been our dinner.

“When did you put that chicken in?” I asked.

“I don’t know, maybe an hour ago.”

“Well, it’s done.”

“I want to give it a few more minutes. Sometimes they don’t cook them properly
and you can get very sick from uncooked chicken.”

Neither Mom nor I got salmonella, and Nanci arrived the next day, dressed in a flowing lavender schmata and delivering New Age romantic advice as she circled around me with her flashing Leica. (You need to start visualizing the man you want, she advised, as if it were as simple as ordering a pair of relaxed-fit corduroys from Lands End. She then advised me to relax, to breathe in and out, and to imagine that I had just had fabulous sex with this guy. My mother, overseeing the photo session from the couch, made a face, as if she were shocked by her friend’s remarks, then started to giggle.)

One month later, Nanci hand-delivered the completed portrait, and the following Christmas, the massive, nearly life-sized work was hanging on the wall above the green sateen chairs beside its twin-sister. Both portraits were framed in narrow, burnished gold frames---Mom disliked heavy, ornate frames and contended that they competed with, and, in fact, undermined the art.

Nanci idealized me in the same way she had rendered my sister, turning my dishwater-blond hair lighter, my coffee-stained teeth whiter, as well as shaving off ten pounds from my midriff, erasing the dark circles beneath my eyes, and removing all self-pity from my gaze. She had also removed the black polka dots from my dress, and given me two strands of pearls instead of one. When I pointed this out, Mom said most people were rarely satisfied with their own portraits: the burghers of Amsterdam had been so upset with their portrayal in “Night Watch” that they had threatened not to pay Rembrandt.

But the most reprehensible artistic license Nanci had taken, as far as I was concerned, was to insert a Poinsettia plant in the lower right hand corner just behind the antique chair in which I sat. Mom adored Poinsettias, and every Christmas bought them up in bulk, placing them throughout the house as well as on the front and back porches. There was indeed one beside me when Nanci had taken the photos, but why the plant had to remain in the composition for posterity was beyond me.

Mom explained that the redness in the leaves acted as a counterpoint to the solid blue in the dress, and that contrast was a feature of all great art, from Vermeer to van Gogh. “There can be no blue without yellow and without orange,” my mother said, quoting van Gogh, whom she and Nanci both revered. Surely, as a writer, Mom continued, this notion of point-counterpoint was not news.

It was an argument I couldn’t win, and so I sighed and said, Well, if you like it, that’s all that matters, and she said not only did she like it, she was overjoyed with it, and that seeing the two of us every morning when she passed into the kitchen to boil her egg, our presences so lifelike it was as if we were right in the room with her, never failed to make her heart sing.

Many Christmases passed. I married a man who looked as if he might have stepped out of a Lands End catalogue, and we had a baby boy and for some years lived free of the Strum und Drang that had plagued my relationship with his predecessor. Mom moved--from Florida to Virginia to New Hampshire, each time hovering over the movers to make sure the two portraits were wrapped in layers of brown paper and bound up tight with duct tape. They’re original works of art, she explained, as if her mummified treasures were bound for the auction rooms of Sotheby’s, instead of to her next modest home in their usual spot above the green chairs.

In the New Hampshire retirement community she moved to, she instructed my sister and me to hang the paintings at eye level above the green chairs, and when we were finished, she clapped her hands like a child, as thrilled as if she were seeing them for the first time.

After she died, my sister and I went through her things, stunned by the quantum physics of death, which took Mom away, further from us than Romania, and yet left her possessions intact, as if she had would be returning at summer’s end. We spent hours going through papers and clothes (Mom never threw away anything, even twenty-year-old grocery lists). We kept the green chairs, gave away the thirty-year-old Sony TV, but about the portraits’ fate, there was never any question: My sister would hang hers in the bedroom she shared with her husband, cutting the canvas down to fit on the wall, while I would store mine, face down, in an upstairs closet. I didn’t want to hang it anywhere in my house, since my husband and son found it as kitschy as I did. But neither could I give it away to the local hospice shop nor sell it in a garage sale. Who would buy it? Who would want it?

Four years after my mother’s death, I finally surrendered to the reality that I was never going to part with the portrait. I took it out of the closet and, in a kind of aesthetic homeopathy, hung it on the bedroom wall. Different sleep schedules as well as problematic midlife snoring and flatulence had forced my husband and me to take separate bedrooms. As far as he was concerned, I could put up 10 portraits of my younger self. Fortunately, I only had the one by Nanci, which I hung six inches above eye level to the left of the queen-sized bed, so it would not be the first thing I saw in the morning.

I won’t lie. I still cringe when I’m doing upper-arm lift exercises to banish what one friend calls Bingo arms, and I spy that gleaming-toothed, seamlessly complexioned young woman in blue, the leafy red plant ghosting behind her. But sometimes when I hear Mom quoting van Gogh, “There can be no blue without yellow and without orange,” I think of that line, “There is no me without you,” and I feel richer than the owner of Vase with 15 Sunflowers, because Nanci’s portrait never stops telling me that once upon a time I was loved.

The Blue Zones of Hartwell Priest

The moonstone-blue walls of the Unitarian church in Charlottesville, Virginia, were filled with her art work: watercolors of Venice and Florence created during her Wanderjahr in Europe in the nineteen twenties; lithographs of seagulls at her island in Georgian Bay, Canada, where she and her family summered for sixty years; the Jackson Pollock-like viscosities she did in old age when she dripped paint onto metal plates and then ran them through her lithograph press. This was the body of work that her 103-year-old body—thin-stalked and bent earthward like a November sunflower—had left behind. And if we mourners, fanning ourselves with programs, our faces raspberried with the late afternoon sun burning through long windows, if our eyes misted with only the occasional tear, it was because Hartwell Wyse Priest had lived long and well, and we had come to celebrate her.

She was born in Brantford, Ontario, Canada on January 1, 1901, the youngest of four children and nicknamed New Year or Newie, a name that nearly everyone in the family called her, including my mother, her niece, and me, her great-niece. Newie’s husband, a corporate lawyer who taught at the University of Virginia and to whom she was married for fifty years, was one of the few people who called her Hartwell, the maiden name of her Maine-born grandmother. At her hundredth birthday party, I heard several of her younger artist friends also call her Hartwell. But she remained forever Newie to me, a tiny, bright-eyed figure of merriment, who studied, with my six-year-old son, the pictorial guides for the birthday chocolates that her friends had brought her, ceremoniously selected a cherry-filled mound, took a humming bird-like nibble from it, then returned it slyly to the box. When the party was over, my son noticed, with a kindergartener’s sense of justice, that there were six other partially eaten chocolates. But I laughed and said that when you got to 100, you were allowed to bend the rules.

So how did Hartwell Priest live to 103, I’ve often wondered. By bending the rules? Or breaking them? In BLUE ZONES psychologist Dan Buettner studied centenarians around the globe, hoping to discover why they lived so long. In Sardinia, Italy, Okinawa, Japan, Loma Linda, California, and the Nicoya peninsula of Costa Rica, unaccountably large numbers of elderly men and women were walking several miles a day, tending their gardens, enjoying meals at home with their families. Buettner observed that these residents of blue zones--so named because one of Buettner’s colleagues had circled the areas on maps with blue pens--were alike in several significant ways: they put family first; they did not smoke; they ate a sparse, mostly plant-based diet; they lived in small communities where they enjoyed an active social network; they were engaged in constant moderate physical exercise; they were tough-minded, although they loved to laugh.

Hartwell Wyse Priest never lived in a geographical blue zone, but she inhabited a psychic blue zone, which inoculated her against many physical and emotional ills. After she graduated from Smith College in 1924, she set off for Paris to study art with Andre L’Hote, one of the leading pioneers of abstract expressionism. (Dora Maar, Picasso’s longtime mistress and muse, was also a student at L’Hote’s Montparnasse Institute.) Paris was, as Ernest Hemingway poetically described it, a “moveable feast” in those days, but there were many privileged American women who became dizzy with all the smoking, drinking, and jazz-dancing, flappers like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wife, Zelda Sayre, who couldn’t decide whether to have fun or make art, and ending up doing neither.

But Hartwell Wyse was not one of these lost souls. For one thing, she was accompanied everywhere on the Left Bank by her sixty-two-year-old mother, Rachel Thayer Wyse, an amateur painter who, having raised four children, was keen to pursue her own artistic goals. Mother and daughter were inseparable, sketching Notre Dame Cathedral from the Pont Neuf, studying the masters in the Louvre, attending Sunday services at the Christian Science Church on the Boulevard St. Germain. Rachel was not the type to hang around Les Deux Magots drinking absinthe and smoking Gauloises Bleues, and would never have permitted her pretty daughter such Continental liberties. Did Newie chafe under such maternal restrictions? I never asked her, but I suspect that she would say she was too busy mastering her craft—learning, for example, about dynamic symmetry, upon which she would later become an authority--to worry about whether she was missing out on more quotidian sensual pleasures.

I didn’t really get to know my great aunt until she was in her early nineties and I was in my middle thirties. I was doing graduate work in English at George Mason University, and I often drove down for the weekend to Charlottesville, staying on a pullout couch in her late husband's study (A.J. had passed away in 1978). My mother, stopping for several weeks on her annual migration from Florida to Canada, was in one of the small rooms upstairs. Newie’s house, an Italianate stone mansion set on fifteen acres not far from Jefferson’s Monticello, was big enough to accommodate everyone, including the law school student, Pat, who got room and board in exchange for helping with the shopping and cooking. From time to time, Newie’s trust officer, a protégé of her late husband’s, would lecture her about moving into an assisted living facility, but Newie grumbled that she could never find a place big enough to accommodate her two studios, the basement work area which held her lithograph press, and the upstairs studio adjacent to A.J.’s, where she sketched and painted.

At 90, Hartwell Priest still followed what villagers in the Nicoyan peninsula of Costa Rica call a “plan de vida,” rising early to practice her craft. Sometimes I would join her in the kitchen when she was taking a break. She had always brewed a pot of fresh coffee and set another place at the table, laid out boxes of cold cereal and bananas. Newie’s kitchen was small, compared to the rest of the house, and contained all the original knotty-pine cabinets and beige linoleum floor, now stained and buckling, that had been installed in the fifties when she and A.J. had built the house. Newie wasn’t poor and could easily have remodeled her kitchen, but she was penurious, and hated spending money on frivolities. There was just enough room for the Formica-topped breakfast table and matching chairs, the padded red seats patched together with duct tape. It didn’t take me a Ph.D. to figure out that one of Newie’s secrets to long life was that she didn’t care that much about food. Like the Okinawan villagers who practiced Hara Hachi Bu, the Confucian-inspired practice of stopping eating when one is 80 percent full, Newie never ate to excess. Subsisting mainly on fruits and vegetables, enjoying an occasional glass of wine with dinner, she easily maintained the girlish figure she had cut decades ago in Paris.

After a morning in the studio, Newie liked to go for a long walk along the lanes and dirt roads near her home on Old Farm Road, her fat, old poodle, Alouette lumbering behind her. In the last years of her life, the walks became shorter. Newie’s son and daughter-in-law, who had moved in to the house to take care of her, set up rusted iron porch chairs at intervals along the quarter-mile driveway so that she could rest during her daily constitutionals. By then, the dog had been put down and Newie’s widow’s hump was so bad that she was bent at nearly ninety degrees over her walker. But she kept up the walks as long as she could, and when she no longer ventured outside, her son or daughter-in-law helped her locomote from her bedroom to the upstairs studio to her faded gray velvet armchair in the living room, the journey round the house the last one left for her.

Newie’s life was free of money worries, but not without its tragedies. In 1982, four years after A.J. had passed away, her younger daughter, Marianna, died of skin cancer at the age of 48. Before her illness, Marianna had divorced her Episcopal preacher husband, after discovering that he was having affairs with several women in his congregation. Marianna was a trusting, naïve soul--she and her husband had met as students at Harvard Divinity School, and she had been smitten with the tall, soft-spoken man descended from blue-blooded Boston divines. The break-up of the family was hard, especially since the couple’s children were young. The story my mother told—and, like all family stories, it may be equal parts myth and fact—was that on Marianna’s deathbed in the hospital, Marianna had said to her mother, “I wish you’d spent more time with me as a child. Your art always came first.”

Marianna’s last words, shrapnel to the brain that could never be surgically removed, must have hurt. But like the gnarled villagers in Okinawa, who had survived the “The Typhoon of Steel,” the American invasion of their island in World War II, Newie was a stoic. If she had regrets about her mothering, she kept them to herself. Instead, she sought solace in her summers at Georgian Bay, in the Prussian blue waters of Parry Sound, where she had scattered Marianna’s ashes and where her own ashes would one day fall. The glaciated rocks, the wind-beaten white pines, the gulls wheeling through the sky, the wild blueberries along the paths to her studio--all of it made her feel, in the words of the fourteenth-century mystic Dame Julian of Norwich, that "all shall well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”

Two weeks ago, I donated one of Hartwell Priest’s lithographs, “Autumn Harvest,” to a benefit for Whole Children, a nonprofit organization in the Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts that offers after-school programs for special needs children. I have a stack of Hartwell Priest lithographs and unframed oils in my closet, so it wasn’t a big sacrifice. I also selected a work I wasn’t attached to, one of her Jackson Pollock-like viscosities done in green with sparks of orange.

The benefit was set up so that everyone who paid their $15O walked away at the end of the evening with a painting, if not that of their first choice, then their second or third. I paid the walk-around-and-have-fun rate of $35, which meant I didn’t get an art work but that was fine with me, as I have more art than wall space. There were more art works than patrons, which meant that some works would end up like the proverbial wallflower at the dance, unwanted and unclaimed. For much of the evening, I fretted that I hadn’t donated something that I myself was loath to part with. I stood beside “Autumn Harvest,” prominently displayed on its easel in a corner of the Northampton Center for the Arts, chatting up Hartwell Priest and her vita—“She has an etching in the Library of Congress,” I boasted--like an auctioneer at Sotheby’s. One bow-tied gentleman inspected the matted, unframed lithograph with a magnifying glass, and wanted to know whether it was computer-generated. When I quipped that my great aunt wouldn’t have known a byte if it bit her in the behind, he slunk away in a huff.

“Autumn Harvest” was claimed by a friendly, dark-haired woman from Long Island, a professional realtor and mother of two grown children, who was delighted to support Whole Children (she has an autistic nephew) and delighted to have this lithograph, which had been her first choice and which she had just the place for on her living room wall. We talked for twenty minutes, and I shared some of the highlights of my great aunt’s long life, and when we hugged goodbye we exchanged e-mail addresses.

I walked back to my car, parked just down the hill from the ivy-covered entrance arch to Smith College, wheeling in my own blue zone of happiness like one of Hartwell Priest’s gulls.