The Blue Hours of Middle Life

Blue Laws

2012-01-21T08:03:00.008-05:00

Until some three years ago, I spent nearly every night of my one, precious life in either a mildly or not-so-mildly inebriated state. It was as if the glass of wine, always at my side as I made dinner, shucking corn or slicing tomatoes, were a sort of lover, ever ready to overlook my flaws—how I left too many gossamer hairs upon the shorn cobs, how I never made Apple Brown Betty, how I failed in ways large and small as a wife and mother. The five, ten, or fifteen ounces of Pinot Grigio or Chardonnay (I rarely drank red, even though it was meant to be healthier) was always ready to whisper endearments in my ears, to tell me I was merveilleuse, extraordinaire, magnifique, to fill up my silences with sweet-talk.

I never got the shakes when I went without a drink, but I did experience a kind of silent-screaming panic. I remember going down to visit my ninety-something father-in-law in Richmond, Virginia, who had long since stopped any regular imbibing of alcohol, as it seriously messed with his head, to say nothing of his sense of balance, and panicking because he didn’t have a corkscrew. There were silver-and-nickel-plated knives and forks, plastic spoons, crumpled napkins, multiple packets of Sweet N’ Low…but not one corkscrew in all the wax-paper-lined kitchen drawers that I ransacked.

Going door-to-door in his suburban neighborhood, I rang bells, rapped on windows, like some mad-dog Jehovah’s Witness. I didn’t want to chat about the holidays, didn’t want to talk about whether my father-in-law was still driving or going to the Y. All I wanted was the silver gizmo that might unleash the firewater from its bottle and deliver me, at least for the next hour, of self-loathing and despair.

“Everything in moderation,” advised the Roman philosopher Petronius, “including moderation.” But we Americans, unlike our older, wiser European counterparts, despise moderation. We are all sinners in the hands of an angry god, in need of thundering preachers to keep us from drinking ourselves into a stupor every day of the week, which is what our illustrious ancestors loved to do, from the folks who stepped off the Mayflower right up through Benjamin Franklin, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Our founding fathers began their drinking in the morning with hard cider and continued right on through the day with beer, wine, and spirits. The early colonists were forced to institute “blue laws” which put all kinds of restrictions on the consumption of alcohol, banning the purchasing of beer or wine before noon on Sunday, something that remains on the books in most states today, which always shocks me when I try to purchase a bottle of white before noon at my local Whole Foods.

Why blue laws are called blue laws is shrouded in mystery. One theory goes that it was because of the color of the books in which the laws were first printed; another that it was the chosen shade of the stockings of those pesky ladies who tried to better mankind by lobbying for repressive laws.

What we do know is that blue laws didn’t succeed in curbing the early American’s passion for drink, a passion that his children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren took up with equal ardour until an entire temperance movement sprung up, which finally succeeded in 1919 in writing an amendment to the constitution to ban the sale of alcohol in every state in the union, as well as in parts of Canada. And of course even this most ultimate of blue laws didn’t do much to stop drinking, which continued in speakeasies all over the country and which was trucked across Canada and into the United States, entire fortunes including Joseph P. Kennedy’s being made on the illegal profits of bootlegging.

My first cousin, Lisa, died at 45 of acute alcohol poisoning, unable to face a single day, let alone the rest of her life, without the rivers of vodka that she poured down her throat. Her funeral, held on a sunny April morning in a gray granite church in Penetanguishene, Ontario, Canada, overlooking the agate waters of Georgian Bay, where she had passed many a drunken afternoon lounging on the decks of friends’ boats, was one of the saddest events I have ever witnessed. Her eighty-three-year-old mother, wheeled in on a stretcher from the local nursing home, wept with a copious and terrible abandon. Afterward, the mourners gathered in the dark smoke-filled Canadian Legion. Her friends cried, smoked cigarettes and knocked back shots of tequila.

It was enough to turn me into a teetotaler. But like Edwin Arlington Robinson’s legendary malcontent Miniver Cheevy, I had simply accumulated one more story to despair about, one more reason to have another drink.

Lao Tzu says that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. And so it was with my drinking: I made one small and subtle change in my alcohol consumption, which, though I could not have predicted it, changed my behavior conclusively. Three years ago, I joined a writing group in Northampton, which met every Wednesday night from 6-9:30 p.m. A hearty dinner of pasta and oven-baked squash was served at 6; drinks were strictly of the seltzer and juice variety; coffee pots were always full.

But this wasn’t a chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous, though several members were recovering alcoholics. After dinner, we had a moment of silence, then retreated to various parts of the house to spend an hour with our laptops, returning after an hour to read and receive comments.

Even if you were Miniver Cheevy himself “sighing for what was not, and dreaming of Thebes and Camelot,” you were not allowed to say: “That was nothing like Euripides.” Instead, you had to be positive; you had to find the firewater phrase, perhaps even just the single word that bootlegged your consciousness, that lit up your heart.

The adventure did something to you, made you feel full and unaccountably happy. All these strangers scribbling down the bones of their lives, speaking of divorce, loneliness, heart disease, alcoholism and Alzheimer’s, and you had nothing to do but listen, you wanted to listen, and for the first time in many decades, you didn’t think about how you couldn’t get through a night without a drink, you thought only about stories and similes and how amazing that people could spend an hour drinking deep of themselves and coming up with such treasures.

When you returned home well before midnight, you were too loaded with words to do anything but climb into bed. And so it was that you passed one night without alcohol and you slept a deep, dream-drunk sleep and when you woke, you thought, “piece of cake to go without a drink,” and if you could pass one alcohol-free day, surely you could pass another and another, and before you knew it, you had had five, ten, fifteen alcohol-free days, which you tracked with blue stars on your calendar. After a year, you counted up 150 days of stars.

And so it was that you learned to pass your own blue laws, learned to drink occasionally and moderately…and even though the shadows of a winter afternoon approaching five o’clock still make you yearn for the deliverance that only a glass of maple-colored wine brings, you know you can go without.

All posts copyright© 2012. All rights reserved. No part of this blog may be reproduced or distributed without attribution and/or permission of the author

Paying Attention to Peacock Blue

2011-06-06T09:45:00.008-04:00

“I live to dream,” begins the first sentence of an unpublished novel that I wrote years ago. The novel is about a young woman who lives in New York and seeks in sleep a vibrancy she cannot find in life. Her name is Beth, a single syllable that disappears into itself as soon as it is uttered. She sleepwalks through her days, working as some assistant in publishing, though the details of what she actually does are vague. On page 88, she gives up her job—where she finds the funds to do so is not explained--and travels to Paris, where she meets, at the base of the Winged Victory in the Louvre, an older professor, on sabbatical from an American university. He is headed for the Greek island of Santorini in the Aegean Sea, and persuades her to join him. Not long after they have settled into his cliffside rooms with spectacular views of the active volcano, Beth discovers that he is suffering from a fatal disease.

The story, only loosely autobiographical, was my fictional attempt to prepare for the overwhelming likelihood that my beloved, much older husband would predecease me. When several agents and publishers rejected it, claiming that the character and her dilemmas were not fleshed out sufficiently, I put the novel aside, saving all the rejection letters.

The novel and its narrator were drifting, pollen-like, through my consciousness recently on a warm, May evening in New York. My friend, Christine, and I were walking around the Morningside Heights neighborhood of New York. We were headed to a bookstore off Broadway to hear a friend read from his new book of short stories, and had arrived early to inspect the peacocks--one of which was rumored to be all white--in the Cathedral Garden of St. John the Divine.

The peacock-peeping was orchestrated entirely by Christine, who is forever questing after exotic phenomena, especially anything ecclesiastical. When we traveled to north Wales together seven years ago, staying with our mutual friend, Lilla, in the Vale of Clywd, just down the road from where Gerald Manley Hopkins had written, “The World is Charged with the Grandeur of God,” we spent many an afternoon tracking down holy wells, tramping through muddy paths in a sea of farmers’s rain-soaked fields, our boots growing brown with sheep dung.

The holy wells were invariably disappointing, small, rock-strewn dips and indentations with only the faintest trickling of actual water. Unlike Christine, I lacked the imagination to time-travel back to the Middle Ages, when life was simpler and earthly quirks more miraculous. My reaction to these vulva-like holes in the ground was that of a bored teenager’s, as in, “So? Are we done?”

I kept my reservations to myself, trudging gamely along and focusing on the afternoon treat we had promised ourselves: the cream tea at the village pub in Tremerchion. Christine was following her bliss, clicking away at her digital camera, and explaining that there were more holy wells in Wales than in any other part of Great Britain.

But this May evening as we were searching for the white peacock, I somehow had the feeling—maybe it was simply because we had scored a parking spot on Broadway—that some epiphany was already winging its way toward us.

Something was stirring at the Cathedral: a whole block of parking spots were sealed off with sawhorses, and everywhere there were fleets of limos and cells of workers dressed in black-and-white catering uniforms. Whatever it was—a concert, a benefit, a surprise visit from the Dalai Lama--we had the sensation, which comes often in New York in the cocktail hours before dusk, that we were at the epicenter of everything magical.

We turned off Amsterdam Avenue and pressed deeper into the garden, putting the secular world behind us, and giving ourselves up to the rhododendrons, irises and bleeding hearts. But where were the peacocks? Surely on a summer night like this, they wouldn’t be sequestered in their cages in one of the Cathedral’s garages, where they waited out the cold, New York winters.

Then Christine grabbed my arm and said, “Look!” And there on the terrace of one of the faux-medieval stone buildings that belonged to the Cathedral School, we spied it: a peacock with its train fanned out in full, as still as if it were posing for its portrait. We crept closer, our footsteps mincing, our voices whispering. But the creature paid no attention to us; he didn’t so much as flutter one of his many-eyed feathers.

I don’t know how long we stood there: two, five, ten minutes, but it felt longer, the way time stretches out and becomes eternal when one is fully in the moment. “I have never been this close to a peacock,” I whispered.

“Me neither,” Christine whispered.

“Look at all those eyes on its feathers.”

“I read somewhere that the more eyespots on its train, the more attractive he is to the female,” she said.

“Well, this guy is definitely the Johnny Depp of peacocks.”

“Look at the tiny crown on its head,” she said. “Look at the iridescent blue of its neck.”

“Peacock blue. Now I finally get what that means.”

Then, as if sensing that it was the object of our awe, the bird did a full 360-degree turn, showing us its fluffy, ivory-colored backside (imagine the end of a very elegant dust-mop).

“Look,” I said, “it’s shaking its booty.”

“There must be a peahen nearby,” she said.

We checked the time on our cell phones and realized that we’d have to hurry if we were going to get to the reading by seven. We passed one of the young caterers, half-hidden by a flowering cherry tree, and taking a cigarette break. We asked her what was going on at the Cathedral that night and she said it was a benefit for St. Luke’s Hospital. Then Christine asked about the white peacock. Had anything happened to it? Oh no, it’s around, the young woman said, already bored with our questions and releasing a scarf of smoke.

We thanked her and hurried away, and then we saw the creature strolling slowly along the stone paths among the hostas and ferns, carrying the tail of its ivory train behind it, a sort of avian version of Pippa Middleton at the recent royal wedding. But extraordinary as the bird was—I had seen only three or four peacocks in my life, and none had been white—it couldn’t compare to the one in full-dress regalia on the terrace.

Or maybe it was simply that all our attention had been concentrated to a fine point, captured in one of those multitudinous eyes on the creature’s train. Perhaps we were worn out with seeing, the way one feels after spending an afternoon looking at masterworks in a museum.

At the reading, my mind kept wandering to my novel, resting in a white typewriter-paper box among the manila envelopes of sympathy cards I had kept after my first husband’s death, one of which had been written by the man who was now giving the reading. (“It’s impossible to imagine,” he had written, “that so much life force is no longer in the world.”) And then it suddenly occurred to me what the novel’s failings were: its narrator had not been paying close enough attention to her life, and because of this it was hard for a reader to pay attention to her, to care about her.

It wasn’t Beth’s fault; it took effort, focus and energy to pay attention. Perhaps, if “absolute attention is prayer,” as Simone Weil once observed, it even took a measure of religious faith. In any case, the work of paying attention was harder if you suffered from depression, as my narrator surely did, as I had when I had written the novel, though I had not been able to own the experience.

At fifty-six, going on fifty-seven, was it too late to start paying attention? Perhaps, but then I remembered that old African fable about the best time to plant a tree: “The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago,” the fable goes, “The next best time is now.”

The Blue House of Marc Chagall

2011-03-31T18:32:00.012-04:00

Polyhedral, the tumble-down logs running vertical, horizontal, higgle-piggledy, the blue house looms as large as a temple, filling the right foreground of the painting. In the distance is a fantasy village of minarets and castles, the ancient city of Vitebsk where Marc Chagall, who came into the world as Moishe Shagal, grew up.

The windows in the house are open, containing the same freakish mix of rectangles, trapezoids, and squares. The door is ajar; there is a figure just inside, half-hidden, crouched over something, perhaps a cooking pot. On the threshold other half-bent figures hover, cast in lumpy shadows upon the mustard-colored ground. The scene, whispering of poverty and privation, evokes Chagall’s own childhood as the eldest of seven surviving children, his father struggling to eke out 20 roubles a month hawking herring, his mother selling dry goods from the family's home. It is a world in which Jewish children are not allowed to attend Russian schools or universities, a time when Jewish boys might be conscripted into the Czar’s army or killed in a pogrom. And yet the scene is without menace, as if the boy Moishe Shagal were stationing himself in that house and saying, Even though life is hard, there is radiance and magic, and that radiance and magic can never be stolen from me.

“La Maison Bleue,” was painted outside in a single sitting in the summer of 1917. Chagall and his wife Bella Rosenfeld had escaped from the tumult of St. Petersburg, recently renamed Petrograd, to the countryside around Vitesbsk. Months earlier, after a minister from Kerensky’s provisional government had resigned, Chagall had written to his father: “the country is heading for a general slaughter, famine, the collapse of the front, where half the soldiers will perish…mobs will roam the countryside with rifles…I will not live to see it, and I hope neither will you…”

But Moishe Shagal, or Mark Zakharovich Shagalov as he was known to Russian officials, would live to escape not just the Bolshevist Revolution of October 1917, the burning of Vitebsk, the depressions of Europe, but also the rounding up of Jews in Vichy France, the gas chambers of Dachau and Auschwitz and Treblinka.

I remember the first time I saw a Chagall painting—in the Museum of Modern Art as a student at Sarah Lawrence College, back in the middle seventies. I was young and earnest then, and had long conversations with my then-boyfriend, George, about the meaning of Chagall’s work. There were several Chagalls hanging among Monet’s Water Lillies and Andy Warhol’s Soup Cans, but the work that captivated me was called, “I and the Village.” Why is the cow’s head transposed to look like a woman’s face, I wondered. Why is a female figure milking the cow inside the cow’s head? Why is the couple in the distance upside-down? Why do noses look like moons and moons like noses? “I and the Village,” seemed to be rendered in another language, and I wanted to translate it, find the hidden correlate between symbol and sense, metaphor and meaning.

Time passed, bringing the usual up-endings. I left the home I shared with George and began a life with Len, whose imagination and life experience seemed as crowded and surrealistic as a Chagall canvas. Born a Jew but recently baptized a Catholic, Len held degrees in medicine and philosophy. He had been analyzed by Eric Fromm, and was working on a multi-volume study in philosophy which would unify the languages of art and science. I believed that he was the glass through which I would finally see the universe clearly.

I followed him through all the museums of New York, and some years later, when he was awarded a teaching post at the University of Leuven in Belgium, through the Musees Royaux des Beaux-Art in Bruxelles, the Louvre and the Centres Pompidou in Paris, through the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.

We bought EuroRail passes and rode trains from one European capital to another, tracking down Chagalls, Breughals, Memlings, Della Robbias and Michelangelos. We played games of chess speeding through the Ardennes, through fields of lavender in the south of France, through vineyards outside Siena and Gubbio. In Vienna, we visited the homes of Ludwig van Beethoven, and in Munich, we took a suburban train thirty minutes from the city center to a village called Dachau.

Dachau. One of the most heinous of all the concentration camps and yet it had been so scrubbed and sanitized that it had become harmless, historically inconsequential. It reminded me of one of the civilian conservation camps created by Roosevelt in the 1930s. There were rows of new pine-planked bunks and neatly piled army regulation blankets and bare, pillowcase-less lozenges with gray-and-white-striped ticking. Prison uniforms hung upon hooks. There were tin cups, plates, knives and forks. Everything was suffused with an outdoorsy, summer-campy air, as if the Germans had merely been treating the Jews to a crash course in rural education.

But what shocked me most was not to be found in any cordoned-off display or carefully recreated diorama or series of black-and-white photographs in the museum. As the morning rain and fog gave way to the palest flags of noontime sunshine, groups of German schoolchildren gathered at outdoor picnic tables and opened up thermoses full of tea and coffee, taking out sandwiches and munching on potato crisps.

“Only love interests me, and I am only in contact with things I love.” The quote was from Marc Chagall and I stumbled across it many years after that day at Dachau. It was a wintry morning at the end of March 1985, just three months after Len’s passing, and I was a long way from accepting that I would never see him again. I couldn’t read newspapers or magazines; the goings-on of the world seemed trivial, made me vaguely angry. And yet there was an old man with merry eyes and a shock of white hair on the front page of "The New York Times," living and dying in a French village called Saint-Paul, leaving this world just three years shy of his hundredth birthday.

I turned the pages of the newspaper, inhaling the details of Moishe Shagal’s long life. Born in what is now Belarus, Chagall had lived in Paris, in Berlin, in Moscow and St. Petersburg, in Manhattan, finally returning to France, the country that had given him his name and artistic start. Chagall had taken up new addresses, the obituary writer said, the way Picasso took up mistresses, drifting across continents and capitals, searching for a place to call home. The Stalinist government had repudiated him; the Nazis had called him degenerate; a handful of art critics in America had called him derivative. Still, he keep painting, stopping only for a few months after his first wife, Bella, died.

Twenty-six years after that end-of-March day in 1985, my dreams haunted by the fading faces of the dead, my footsteps as uncertain as the upside-down girl in "I and the Village," I turn on my laptop computer every morning to glimpse "La Maison Bleue" which covers my screen.

Its radiance fills me like prayer.
All posts copyright© 2011. All rights reserved. No part of this blog may be reproduced or distributed without attribution and/or permission of the author

Wallis Blue

2011-02-04T13:43:00.009-05:00

“Whatever happened to Wallis and Edward,” my son asked, “I mean after he had abdicated?” We had just celebrated our son’s seventeenth birthday by taking him to see the “The King’s Speech,” which is about the constitutional crisis in Great Britain attendant upon Edward VIII’s abdication and the accession of his younger brother, Bertie, who overcame a speech impediment to become George VI.

“Were they happy together? He gave up everything for her. Did he have regrets?”

I confessed that I was no Duke and Duchess of Windsor maven. I knew some gossipy details, most of which I’d gotten second-hand from my mother, who was a girl of eleven in 1936 and would have been much affected by what H.L. Mencken called “the biggest news story since the Resurrection.”

My mother never referred to Mrs. Simpson as the Duchess of Windsor but always by the heavy-baggage, tri-partite Wallis Warfield Simpson, her voice erupting in a spitting, dyspeptic rage, which somehow made me think of Adolph Hitler ranting about the Jews.

Wallis had many failings, according to my mother, the first of which was that she was not pretty. Why this could be construed as a fault, I never quite figured out. Given that my mother was pretty herself—she had been a model in New York before her marriage--you would think she would have had more compassion for those less blessed in the looks department. But in the shopworn Keatsian manner, my mother equated truth and beauty: Wallis Warfield Simpson’s mannish looks served as an embodiment of her inner ugliness and duplicity.

“She had the morals of an alley cat,” my mother said, explaining that Wallis was divorced not once, but TWICE. Long before Wallis had started carrying on an adulterous affair with the Prince of Wales, she had “stolen” second husband Ernest Simpson away from his first wife, not long after Wallis had divorced HER first husband.

“She was a gold digger,” my mother continued, explaining that Wallis was descended from an old Southern family that had fallen on hard times after the Civil War, and that she thought nothing of manipulating men to get what she wanted. But if she was so plain, what was her power? How did she get the most powerful man in the western world to fall in love with her?

There was no ready answer to this question, but it came up often at our dinner table when I was a child, with my father never failing to point out that Wallis must have been “some piece of work” in the bedroom, that she had supposedly picked up certain “techniques” in China in the 1920s, and that once she tried these tricks on poor Edward, he was a goner.

“Honestly, what drivel you talk!” my mother said, kicking him under the table and shooting him a look that could have boiled an egg.

My parents’ differing opinions about the Windsors spoke volumes about their own irreconcilable differences, which would lead, some years later, to their divorce. To my father, Edward’s giving up the throne “for the woman I love,” as Edward put it in the famous radio speech delivered on December 11, 1936 showed existential courage, proving that the heart abides by its own laws, and that these supercede duty to country and family.

Divorced once before he met my mother, my father didn’t see a problem with Mrs. Simpson's divorces; it simply meant that she had been “around the block,” that she wasn’t a virgin ("and no one," he said, "could lock her up for that"). Mrs. Simpson embodied the tough-minded heroine who gave convention the middle finger, who followed her heart.

Who were Wallis and Edward, or W.E., as they referred to themselves in their pre-abdication correspondence? Why did they evoke such passion from people who had never met them? Wallis was so famous that “Time” Magazine named her woman of the year for 1936, the first time the publication had ever given that honor to a woman. The Duchess of Windsor also had a color named after her, “Wallis Blue,” a pale tourmaline shade that matched her eyes and was coined by the Parisian couturier, Mainbocher, who designed her wedding dress.

Obsession with the Windsors continues, decades after they have been laid to rest side-by-side in Frogmore cemetery at Windsor Castle, Wallis’ stone still missing the HRH title that her royal in-laws stripped her of in 1937 (changing the English constitution to do so). Madonna is rumored to be making a movie about the lovers, claiming that both have been pilloried by history. English Heritage recently considered installing a blue plaque on the apartment building in the West End of London where Mrs. Simpson lived in the 1930s. The government-sponsored agency finally vetoed the plaque for Bryanston Court because of Mrs. Simpson’s alleged Nazi past.

Was the Duchess of Windsor really a Nazi? I don’t remember her politics coming up at our family dinners, but any Nazi association would certainly account for my mother’s antipathy to Mrs. Simpson. My mother had lost her first love, Harold, a Norwegian flyer, who was stationed in England during the war and who perished somewhere over the English Channel; she never shared any of the details with me, only that it happened during the summer of 1943, that she had been a girl of 18, that one day the tissue-thin blue airmail letters he had written to her stopped coming, that she had been so distraught she hadn’t been able to go east to college, and that she’d taken to her bed in the Middle West for months.

Perhaps, in some inexplicably convoluted manner, my mother attributed the senseless death of her beloved Harold to the shallowness and self-centeredness of people like the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. (In 1937, Wallis and Edward made a much-photographed trip to visit Hitler at Berchtesgaden. Wallis was also rumored to be the mistress of Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Nazi Foreign Minister to London, at the same time as she was seeing the King. Von Ribbentrop, who was later hanged at Nuremberg in 1946, supposedly sent Mrs. Simpson 17 carnations every day to express his gratitude for the seventeen times she had slept with him.)

“Answered prayers cause more tears than those than remain unanswered,” wrote St. Theresa of Avila, whom Truman Capote quoted in his last, unpublished novel. (Capote often partied with the Windsors when they came to New York in the nineteen sixties.) According to two biographies of Mrs. Simpson, Wallis did not want Edward to abdicate, and hoped to remain the King’s mistress while staying put in her marriage. “I intend,” she wrote to her aunt, “to keep them both.”

But the King’s slavish devotion to her (she called him “the Little Man” but his passion was hardly diminutive) proved as unstoppable as Hitler’s desire to annex all of Europe. “How can a woman be a whole empire to man?” she confided in bewilderment to her uncle. Years later, she said that it was not possible to “abdicate and eat it,” and that she would rather be “the mistress of a king, than the wife of the Governor-General of The Bahamas.” (Churchill had posted the Windsors to the Bahamas in hopes that they would not interfere with the war effort.)

“You can never be too rich or too thin,” the Duchess of Windsor is meant to have said, a maxim that she had stitched onto throw pillows in the living rooms of her homes in France and New York. Thanks to the largesse of Great Britain as well as the French government (the Windsors leased their Paris home in the Bois de Boulogne for decades for only a nominal fee), the Duke and Duchess were very rich. They spent their days shopping for the 100-plus dresses the Duchess purchased each year (when asked in an interview how he passed the time, the Duke confided that he had spent his morning helping the Duchess pick out a hat), with time out for the Duchess to have the tiny layer of fat on her tummy massaged, and the Duke to putter in his gardens.

There was a song that my father used to play on the phonograph in his study in the declining years of his marriage to my mother. The song was by Peggy Lee and it was a moody mix of melancholy and gaiety: “Is that all there is? Then let’s keep dancing…”

When I think of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, together and together and together in their rooms of Wallis blue, I think of that song.

Blue Christmas Past

2010-12-31T08:42:00.007-05:00

“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

2010-12-04T08:48:00.015-05:00

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

2010-11-10T10:52:00.014-05:00

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

2010-10-17T11:16:00.010-04:00

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

2010-09-21T14:26:00.006-04:00

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

2010-08-31T07:23:00.010-04:00

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 Belle-Eau-Claire 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 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 hundred-year-old cabin built by an early English settler, 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 neighboring 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 simply “The Island,” as if only the most unaffected moniker could sum up its singular magic.

Summer days on Belle-Eau-Claire 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 honoring 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 Belle-Eau-Claire 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 1987 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

2010-07-29T08:01:00.007-04:00

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?

2010-07-17T09:32:00.016-04:00

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

2010-07-05T18:21:00.009-04:00

“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

2010-06-03T10:20:00.010-04:00

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

2010-05-09T09:54:00.005-04:00

“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

2010-04-26T11:54:00.004-04:00

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.

Easter Gladness and Lupines

2010-04-10T10:05:00.000-04:00

My son is many Spring Equinoxes past believing in the Easter Bunny, and yet I still haunt the aisles of drug stores in search of cream-filled eggs, jellybeans, and chocolate bunnies. I no longer secrete these items in baskets filled with neoprene-green grass, no longer leave the baskets like Moses in the bulrushes outside bedroom doors. Now, I merely arrange the offerings on our placemats at the breakfast table. And from years of retrieving squashed bunnies and stale jellybeans from dust-bunny-deep corners of my son’s bedroom (miracle of miracles, he has not inherited my passion for corn syrup-laden poison), I have whittled down the leavings. This past Easter, one slim white chocolate bunny with a collar of lavender flowers and one fudge-filled hedgehog jollied up the family breakfast table.

Like most children in our secular American society, my son is better acquainted with the Easter Bunny than Jesus Christ. He has never attended an Easter service, and though I begged him to accompany me to UU this past Sunday, he cheerfully passed, preferring to worship at St. Mattress and leaving the resurrection to more wakeful souls.

When my mother was alive, she fretted about her unbaptised grandson’s lack of religious literacy: that he couldn’t have explained the difference between Moses and Jesus, never mind between Jesus’ mother and Mary Magdalene. If you had pointed out that Easter is an ancient pagan holiday, that the First Council of Nicea which created Easter in 325 A.D. was really engaging in an act of theological piracy, stealing the goddess “Eostre,” from the Anglo-Saxon pagans—if you had spouted such talk, Gigi would have made a face.

Had I dragged my sleepy son through the blue doors of UU, he would not have left any the wiser regarding, say, why Mary Magdalene is sometimes pictured in blue, or why Jesus says “Noli me Tangere,” before ascending to heaven: instead, the intergenerational Easter service featured a dramatic reading of Miss Rumphius. The story followed Miss Rumphius from childhood to old age with our new lady minister reading from the illustrated book by Barbara Cooney and groups of children and adults cavorting beneath the pulpit.

In case you haven’t read the story, here is a summary: Miss Rumphius informs her elderly seafaring grandfather that when she grows up she wants to be like him, traveling the world, then returning home to a house by the sea. The grandfather explains that this is all well and good, but that she must also “do something to make the world more beautiful.” Miss Rumphius becomes a librarian, then rides camels through the desert. As an old woman, she fulfills her promise to her grandfather by scattering lupine seeds about the hillside near her Maine home, which grow into long-stemmed blue, pink and purple wildflowers. To dramatize the final scene, several folks in the middle pews held up real lavender lupines and waved them about. In homiletic summary, our minister explained that Miss Rumphius is a bit like Jesus Christ, doing her part to make the world more beautiful.

Conflating Miss R. and Jesus C. is a boneheaded connection only a Unitarian could make, and it would have caused my mother to make a major face. Which set me to reflecting on my own memories of Easter at the mock-Gothic Christian Science church on Wendell Avenue in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.

Christian Scientists don’t make a fuss over most Christian holidays, but for some reason, they make an exception for Easter. The bare, white-walled nave was dotted with potted Easter lilies and the first and second readers on the podium were decked out in fancy vestments, almost like priests or cardinals. There were readings from the Gospels, and a plethora of Mary Baker Eddy’s syntactically tortured sentences about the immutability of the resurrected body. My sister and I, in matching Tweedledum and Tweedledee Easter outfits and sporting carnation corsages, struggled to keep our hands to ourselves and to arrest random attacks of pins and needles and charley horses. Our parents, rarely together anywhere let alone in church on a Sunday (my father joked that he worshipped at the church of the New York Times), flanked us at either side, dignified as Greek Kouri.

With the singing of “Easter Gladness,” a remake of the 1734 Easter staple “Jesus Christ is Risen,” by Charles Wesley, a wonderfully rousing hymn in c-major whose melody and single line, “Every day will be an Easter,” my mother loved to hum, with this thrilling finale, my sister and I were free to escape onto the grassy patch in front, usually “mud-luscious,” and seriously messing with our Easter finery. But Mom didn’t notice: she was too busy introducing Dad to the other doddering, blue-haired Christian Scientists. By the time we were home, she didn’t mention the mud on our bobby socks and patent leather shoes, occupied as she was with haranguing Dad to visit her practitioner, which seemed about as likely as Mary Baker Eddy making a phone call from the grave. (After Mary Baker Eddy’s death, a telephone was installed in her crypt at Mt. Auburn Cemetery, in case she was moved to communicate from the great beyond.)

My sister and I leapt out of our dresses and into our corduroys and returned to the serious business of sacking our Easter baskets, trading jelly beans and marshmallow peeps (she liked the black and orange ones, I preferred the reds and purples, and our bartering was as peaceable as the early transactions between the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Mashpee). By afternoon’s end, there was nothing but neoprene-green grass in our baskets, and we were working on tummy aches severe enough to require the prayerful intercession of a practitioner. But we would have to heal ourselves, because Mom and Dad were busy ramping up their own version of The Thirty Years’ War--“Create in me a clean heart, Oh God,” my mom shouted down the stairs at the retreating figure of my dad--with Dad jumping in his silver Corvette Stingray and pealing out the driveway, and Mom minutes behind him in her blue Wagoneer.

There’s a scene at the end of the movie “Annie Hall” where Alvy Singer has broken up with Annie Hall, but realizes he still loves her. Alvy tells this joke about a guy who goes to a psychiatrist: “'Doc, my brother’s crazy; he thinks he’s a chicken,'” and the doctor says, 'Well, why don’t you turn him in,' and the patient says, 'Well, I would but I need the eggs.'" Alvy reflects that love is like that, crazy and irrational, but we keep going back to it because we need the eggs.

Religion, I often think, is like that too: crazy and irrational but we keep going back to it—filling up churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples on Easter and Passover and Ramadan--because we need the eggs, the pale out-of-the-blue proof that life is renewing itself, that every day really is a sort of resurrection.

My son’s white chocolate bunny with its collar of lavender flowers lies uneaten in the cupboard, and the hot-cross buns I served for Easter dinner are a mess of hardened icing, but I wake in the ever-lightening mornings humming “Every Day Will be an Easter,” and sometimes when I think of my mom, gone from the earth these five Spring Equinoxes, I imagine her riding her bike through the lupine-filled woods near her summer cottage on Georgian Bay in Canada, and I think she is a bit like Miss Rumphius, free at last to scatter the seeds of her Easter gladness.

The Bluebird of Happiness

2010-03-23T13:41:00.000-04:00

The painted metal bluebird pin has nested in a back corner of my jewelry box for more than twenty years, and for many a spring, I have considered getting rid of it. Simplify, simplify, simplify, Thoreau counseled, long before self-help books made their authors rich with titles like Give Away 50 Things This Year. I never wear this bluebird pin, never use it to pin a scarf together or brighten up the lapel of a jacket, not being the type to wear animal pins on scarves or coats, as women of my mother’s and grandmother’s generations did. My bluebird pin is hammered neither of 14 nor 18-karat gold and boasts no lapis eye or pearl-crested beak. It’s sitting in a pocket of seed-pearl dust motes among a tangle of its costume jewelry cousins: a silver ankle bracelet with dangling miniature bells, a galloping horse-and-rider pendant long since separated from its chain, a turquoise necklace with cracked stones and busted clasp.

The bluebird pin was a birthday present from my father’s longtime companion who, for all intents and purposes, is my stepmother even though my father and she never married, both being survivors of divorces and unwilling to fly again into what Montaigne called the “cage of marriage.” My stepmother gave me the pin sometime in the first years after my first husband died, explaining that “the bluebird of happiness” was a symbol of hope and renewal. I wasn’t much for cheering up in those days, feeling a bit like Woody Allen, who said, “Early in life, I was visited by the bluebird of anxiety.” And so I wrote her a thank you note, and tucked the pin away in a corner of the split-level floral jewelry box, where it slept, like a drugged princess in a fairy tale, for the next two decades.

Then I began work on The Blue Hours of Middle Life, and discovered that things that had hitherto held little interest suddenly demanded my attention. Grateful that I hadn’t given away the bluebird pin, I rescued it from the jewelry box, stuck it in an inner pocket of my purse, and began to ponder its beloved particularity. Why the bluebird of happiness, as opposed to the blue fish of happiness or the blue dog of happiness? I am not a birder, and know next to nothing about bluebirds, except that they are not to be confused with blue jays. I therefore took myself to Google and learned that the bluebird, an insectivorous member of the thrush family, comes in three varieties in North America: the Eastern Bluebird, the Western Bluebird, and the Mountain Bluebird, which is almost completely bright blue. As with many other species, the male bluebird is the bright one, who “carries the sky on its back” as Thoreau poetically described him, and the female is mud-colored. All bluebirds are cavity-nesters, and their nests are often destroyed by starlings, sparrows, and crows, as well as snakes, cats, and raccoons, who could care less that the bluebird is the bearer of happiness, and think nothing of smashing its tiny blue eggs.

The bluebird is considered sacred by many Native American tribes. In the Cochiti tribe, the firstborn son of the Sun was named Bluebird. The Navaho also associate the mountain bluebird with the rising sun and even have a song about him which they sing to wake sleeping tribe members: “Bluebird said to me, /’Get up, my grandchild. /It is dawn,’ it said to me.” In more recent times, musicians such as Cole Porter and Irving Berlin have written popular songs celebrating bluebirds: “Be like the bluebird who never is blue,” wrote Cole Porter, “For he knows from his upbringing what singing can do.”

On Daylight Savings' morning, I woke with bluebirds dancing in my head, and hurried off to the early service at UU, which was led by the youth group and devoted to the subject of happiness. Bluebirds did not feature in any of the music or readings, but I had the pleasure of listening to my friend’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Liz, deliver one of the three sermons. I have known Liz since she was smaller than a bluebird’s egg in her mother’s womb—in fact, her mother, Pat, and I were residents at Byrdcliffe Art Colony in Woodstock, New York, when Pat discovered she was pregnant—so I felt privileged and proud to be sitting in a front pew, marveling at the poise of this lovely, brown-eyed girl who recalled her own moments of happiness and defined the condition as that state of mind in which one is entirely present, free from the past or future, free from ambiguity or conflict.

But the bluebird of happiness is, by definition, flighty, and so I returned home, only to be ragged on by my husband for not removing my muddy sneakers when entering the house. (In fairness, he had spent the previous afternoon vacuuming.) I grumbled for five minutes, then put on a pair of house slippers. Then, in a series of truly lame events, I jumped on my bed to open the curtains, then leapt off with equal enthusiasm (I suppose I was trying to recapture my earlier UU bliss) and landed smack on my left ankle, which has long been weakened from a sprain sustained as a teenager when leaping over a tennis net. I howled. And howled. My husband came running with an ice pack and instructions to keep my foot elevated. The ankle swelled to the size of a tennis ball.

Three days later, killing time before picking up my son at school, I was limping around Barnes & Noble, my ankle still throbbing despite the ace bandage I had wrapped around it. In the Women’s Studies section, I noticed a small hardback book called Bluebird, its front cover displaying a blue glass bird. It seemed that the book had been written and packaged just for me. Like a greedy jay attacking a mound of sunflower seeds in a feeder, I grabbed Bluebird: Women and the New Science of Happiness, and carried it to the café in the front of the store. I settled at a table with a coffee, and began to read.

I learned that happiness studies was the hot new field in psychology, and that researchers hoped to define the conditions that cause happiness just as they had isolated the conditions that caused depression. I learned some fairly obvious things: that the things we think will make us happy usually don’t (winning the lottery, buying a bigger house, purchasing a new car), and that the little experiences that we don’t pay much heed to (a child’s smile at the breakfast table, the shades of aquamarine in the sky during the blue hour, the sound of crickets on a summer’s night) make us surprisingly happy, lighting up the left prefrontal cortexes of our brains. Most people, happiness researchers have discovered, possess a “set point of happiness,” which is surprisingly immune to external physical conditions, which explains why someone like Helen Keller could be happy as a clam and Paris Hilton could end up in rehab.

Happiness comes from the root Norse word, hap, which also means luck, but happiness is actually a practice, which can be learned and cultivated by engaging in such daily activities as doing meditation and keeping a gratitude journal. I fished out the notebook I always keep in my purse and copied down a quote from Man’s Search for Meaning, a book that I once read religiously as a morose teenager but hadn’t picked up in years. “Everything can be taken from a man but one last thing,” writes Victor Frankl in his account of his years in Auschwitz, “the last of the human freedoms, to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

As I wrote, I was engaged in what happiness mavens call "flow," the process by which one achieves a temporary bliss by forgetting oneself. But I reverted to my set point of grumpiness when I realized that I had browsed through most of the book, and come across not a peep about bluebirds. Returning Bluebird to its shelves, I felt a shiver of Kantian-style guilt: if everyone read books they never bought, our economy, already limping along like a bird with a broken wing, would crash.

The next morning, I was picking at the crusty top of a pistachio muffin in the Donut Man, writing as fast as I could on my laptop before I had to ride my bike home,jump in the car, and drive to Gill to pick up the little boy that I take care of three days a week. A group of elderly ladies noisily approached the table next to me, all white-haired and in various states of creeping decrepitude, one bent like a broken branch over her walker, another hooked up to a portable oxygen tank. I was half-overhearing their conversation, which was about the recent illness of one of their friends, who had been in and out of Bay State Hospital.

Then three of the ladies went off to order their coffee, leaving the one with the walker alone in the booth. She smiled in my direction and I smiled back just enough to be polite but not too much because I really wanted to finish what I was writing. Then she asked if that was my bicycle chained up out front, and I said that it was, and she began a long-winded anecdote about how she had seen another blue bike in Belchertown yesterday and it couldn’t have been mine, could it? Because that’s a long way from here, and surely I didn’t ride that far? I replied, more curtly than I intended, that it must have been a different bike.

Her companions returned, bearing foam cups of steaming coffee, plates of rainbow-speckled and chocolate-frosted donuts, and rescuing me from further chitchat. Their talk turned to the upcoming warm weather, which was to be in the mid-sixties and none of them were complaining because they had had quite enough of winter. Then one said, “Spring’s early this year, I saw a bluebird yesterday.”

“Sorry for interrupting, but did you say bluebird?” I asked. The old woman, so massive she took up most of the wooden booth, nodded vigorously, her broad face reminiscent of an aging Cabbage Patch doll.

“Can I ask where you saw it?” I asked.

“Just a few miles from here, up in North Hadley,” she said.

“That’s so cool. I was just writing about bluebirds,” I explained, looking sheepishly in the direction of the woman with the walker, who smiled at me beatifically, as if it wouldn’t occur to her to hold it against me for my previous rudeness.

All these ladies knew their bluebirds, and the one with the walker explained how she and her husband had once built bluebird boxes in their backyards, and that one of their favorite things had been to linger over breakfast and watch the bluebirds at the feeder. He was gone now, but whenever she saw a bluebird, she always thought of him.

Then I noticed the time, and said I was sorry but I had to run. I thanked them for sharing their stories, then packed up my laptop. They warned me to be careful on the bike, and I promised I would.

Before heading home, I searched in my purse to check on the bluebird pin (I can be absent-minded, and I did not want to lose this now-precious object). Then I whispered what Meister Eckhart called the only prayer one ever needs: "Thank you!"

New Year's Resolutions & Blue Devils

2010-02-08T11:19:00.000-05:00

This was the first year in midlife that I did not make New Year’s resolutions to lose weight, drink less, or exercise more. Which is not to say that I couldn’t stand to reduce my avoirdupois, just say no to that second, O.K. third, glass of Fat Bastard Chardonnay, or take the dog for the mile loop through the neighborhood instead of to the yellowed patch of snow at the end of the driveway beneath the mailbox where all the neighborhood dogs lift their legs. But New Year’s Resolutions are easy to make, and even easier to break. Some time around the end of January or the beginning of February, the nagging bad habits reappear; they come back like grainy scum around the bathtub, like the Christmas cactus of dust above the chandelier, like the facial hairs that grow at the cleft of one’s chin, no matter how much nightly tweezing they are subjected to.

In the second decade of the twenty-first century, I therefore resolved to make resolutions I could keep. I decided to embrace my blue devils. I’m not talking about rooting for Duke University’s football team. Or bidding for back issues of Blue Devil comics on E-bay. I’m not talking about smoking pot or having an affair or consuming an entire Sachertorte, all of which is way too much work for this post-menopausal princess, whose idea of debauchery is taking a scalding hot bath and retreating to bed with E.H. Gombrich’s A Little History of the World…I’m talking about something more mysterious and possibly more dangerous: I’m talking about letting myself go.

Where would a woman go, syndicated columnist Ellen Goodman asked in her final column on January 1, 2010, if she gave herself permission to let herself go? Goodman explained that she planned to spend a lot of time hanging out, sans make-up, sans shoes, sans Blackberry, on her front porch in Maine. This lowly blogger, who stopped wearing high heels in the ‘90s, who has never owned a Blackberry or coastal Maine real estate, has humbler aspirations: to let herself go into cyberspace to learn the secrets of blue devils.

Here are seven salient facts about blue devils that you never knew you needed to know: (1) The marauding Celts and Germans, intent upon terrorizing their enemies, painted their bodies blue when making war upon the Romans, which may explain the origins of blue devils; (2) Blue devils may alternatively be connected to the ill effects of woad dyes, which, when mixed with the mordant of a drunken man’s urine, made their dyers bad-tempered; (3) Blue devils were all the rage in the Middle Ages, and popped up on stained glass windows of French cathedrals, as well as in the crowded canvases of Hieronymus Bosch, where they worked overtime to convince people it was not a good idea to engage in excessive amounts of fornicating, drinking, eating, and lounging around ; (4) Blue Devils enjoyed their run through the Enlightenment, appearing in illustrations by Isaac Cruikshank, jeering in groups of two or more around one sorry figure suffering from too much of the aforementioned bad behavior; (5) By the 19th century, the phrase had become a cliché, with Henry David Thoreau boasting that his solitary mornings at his cabin overlooking Walden Pond were filled not with “the blue devils” but with “the blue angels,” while one of Edith Wharton’s characters, the adulterous metropole Gus Trenor, claimed that “dining alone gave him the blue devils.” (6) In the twentieth-century, blue devils underwent a makeover worthy of the late Michael Jackson, deleting their surname and becoming synonymous with the haunting African-American music called, “The Blues." (7) Blue devils continued to morph from bad boy to hero-icon, becoming “Les Diables Bleus,” the nickname for the Alpine infantry unit of French soldiers who fought in the First World War, as well as other American military groups, such as the 88th Infantry Division, “The Fighting Blue Devils,” who served in both world wars. Athletic teams took up the blue devil mantra, with Duke University grabbing the moniker for its football team in 1920, and prompting other universities and secondary schools to play copycat, which, in turn, encouraged the mass marketing of blue devils to sell everything from wines to comic books to blockbuster movies. If you doubt the truth of this analysis, consider the recent enthusiasm for the cute skinny Blue People in Avatar.

But lest you think that embracing your blue devils is all fun and games, and not without its risks, consider the case of Carl Jung. In 1913, Jung was a world-renowned psychologist and lecturer, having realized at the age of 38 nearly all of his worldly ambitions. But he was like one of T.S. Eliot’s Hollow Men, having lost connection with some wild wolfish part of himself. While traveling on a Swiss train, Jung was overcome with a vision of the world being overrun with blood, which he would come to see as a metaphor for his own spiritual crisis as well as a kind of clairvoyant channeling of the First World War. The vision was so powerful that Jung could not let it go: after a busy day of seeing patients at the sanitarium Burghozli and lecturing at the University of Zurich, Jung sat down at his desk every evening from 6 until 7 p.m. struggling to fix, in watercolors and words, the bizarre creatures and shapes galloping around in his imagination.

An accomplished painter and calligrapher, Jung began to transcribe the words and images from a series of black notebooks into a large, over-sized red journal with thick parchment pages, which he called Liber Novus, or The New Book. He would spend the next fifteen years on this work, amassing some 1,000 pages, which stretched into two volumes, Liber Primus and Liber Secondus. With its calligraphic writing and colorful images, Jung’s evening pages are reminiscent of illuminated manuscripts from the Middle Ages. But the Red Book is no pastoral idyll of peasants and nobles engaged in the parallel play of planting and jousting. Crammed with monsters, dragons, and serpents, as well as figure eights and mandelas, Jung’s “method of active imagination” resembles some forbidden work of alchemy, for which its author might have been imprisoned or burned at the stake. The blue devils in Jung’s work, fish-like piranha creatures snarling in the waves, don’t much resemble the jokey satyrs in Bosch or Cruickshank; these devils are dead-serious, intent upon their ends as manufacturers of nerve gas; this is the underworld of Jung’s secret self, blue in tooth and claw, nothing but devil between the devil and his deep blue sea.

The images in Liber Novus were so bizarre that Jung decided not to let them see print, fearing that his critics would think him mad. For the next thirty years, Jung kept the Red Book locked away in his study. After his death in 1961, he willed the behemoth to his six children, who secured it in a safe deposit box in a Zurich bank. Forty-years after Jung’s death, thanks to the efforts of Jungian scholar, Sonu Shamdasani, the Society of Heirs of C.J. Jung finally agreed to release the Red Book to the public, and a facsimile, coffee table sized edition of The Red Book can now be had from W.W. Norton for $195.

Jung’s Red Book, pages of which are currently on display at The Rubin Museum in New York, is one of triumph, but for every Carl Jung, there are thousands of men and women whose journeys into their unconscious will lead straight to the locked ward of mental institution or federal penitentiary. I think of the inmates of Mattawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, in Beacon, New York, whom I taught years ago when I was a student at Bard College. These men had never heard of C.J. Jung, and they certainly didn’t look like him. (“Jung looks exactly like my grandfather,” said my friend, Christine, after studying the full-page black-and-white portrait in the museum’s catalogue of an unsmiling fiftyish burgher in three-piece suit, sporting gold waistcoat watch and pearl-studded tie pin.) My students at Mattewan were mostly black and covered in tattoos: serpents crawling down their arms and biting their wrist bones, Jesus or Satan spread-eagled upon their hairy chests; big-breasted mermaids diving from their shoulders. These were men who had committed horrific crimes, crimes so unspeakable that they could literally not be spoken of, and everywhere my co-teacher and I went, there were big-bellied guards with nightsticks to ensure that we weren’t subjected to any funny business, verbal or physical. (Several times during our earnest discussions of T.S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men, the guards had to remove one soft-spoken bald-headed man, who never said a word as he sat in a middle row and masturbated.)

There was one Hispanic fellow who kept a lined notebook filled with drawings and poems, the energy and detail of which were not unlike the effluvia that spilled forth from Jung’s hand. This man, and I’ll call him Carlos because I confess I have forgotten his name, was a born-again Christian who had gotten Jesus long after he’d done whatever he’d done to get into Mattawan. His face was covered in pimples and his hair was short and dark, slicked back from his forehead like a 50s-style greaser. He wore a gold-plated crucifix, which gleamed menacingly from his hairy chest. He was short and slight, the kind of guy who was picked on when he was in middle school. No doubt he also suffered from the unwonted attentions of child sex predators—a history that was pretty much standard issue for these men. Carlos was obsessed with the Book of Revelations, and he sat glaring in the back row, several desks between himself and his fellow inmates. His beliefs were never going to win him friends or influence people, and even my co-teacher and I sometimes ignored his raised hand, since he tended to dominate discussion and/or incite shouting matches with the other inmates. And yet, I have never forgotten the precision and passion of his drawings—a blue-penned, flowing-bearded Christ rising up in a haloed cloud like an a-bomb exploding over the New Mexico desert. How I wish I might have told him that his artwork reminded me of the Red Book.

Embracing the blue devils is clearly not an occupation for the faint-hearted, and yet as any artist, or artist manqué, can testify: it is something to which one feels driven. I was thinking about this recently while watching The Last of the Blue Devils at my local art house cinema. Now I should explain that I don’t know squat about Jazz. When my husband found out that I was going out alone on a weeknight to catch this documentary of Kansas-City musicians from the 1930s, his only comment was, “Since when have you been interested in Jazz?” And I really had no credible explanation, except to explain that ever since starting this blog, I am like a dog with its bone, compelled to masticate on anything connected to my blue theme.

The theater was full that night—it was a one-night-only showing, hosted by Tom Raney, our local Public Radio’s Jazz a la Mode host, and drawing the Pioneer Valley’s pasty-faced kooks and spooks, most of whom looked like they never went to bed before midnight. I felt like I’d turned up at the race track when I should have been at the dog track, and secretly imagined that my seatmates knew perfectly well that I couldn’t tell Cannonball Adderly from Hot Lips Page and were planning to throw me out and make me go next door to watch Coco Before Chanel, a very entertaining movie which I had already seen and wouldn’t mind catching again, but not tonight, because I really needed to get the skinny on blue devils.

The lights went down, and the movie started, and no one threw me out. And even though I was moderately bored, and didn’t burst into applause when Eddie Williams and Big Joe Turner appeared on screen, there was one scene that made me sit up a bit straighter in my seat, and that was of Count Basie, a huge bear of a man in his 70s sporting a captain’s cap, who needed help as he negotiated the icy steps of the club in Kansas City where the old Jazz greats were gathering, someone to carry his pearl-handled cane, someone to take him by his elbow, someone to call 911 if the good-natured ribbing (“Hey, Captain, where’s your ship?”) made his heart go fluty. But when he sat down and played the piano, the frailties dropped away, and he was like a man who gets the news that he’s cancer-free, or that his life sentence has been commuted, that he’s free to let himself go. And all I could think of was: Sweet Lord, give me some of that joy juice, because if anything will make me feel like I’ve dropped ten pounds, dropped ten years, this is it.”

“And now Jazz is exported to the world, “ mused Martin Luther King, Jr. to the Berlin Jazz Festival in 1965. “For in a particular struggle of the Negro in America, there is something akin to the universal struggle of modern man. Everybody has the Blues. Everybody longs for meaning. Everybody needs to clap hands and be happy.”

Clap hands and be happy. Another New Year’s resolution I could actually keep.

Blue Moons and Boot Soles

2010-01-19T16:43:00.000-05:00

“Do you ever think about where Len is?”
We were walking through dense fog around the cove along the Damariscotta River. It had been raining hard since before dawn on this late December morning two days after Christmas, and my friend, Judy, and I had paused on a rise on a peninsula jutting out into the gray waters. Then Judy had asked the eternal question, the question that I had once imagined, in hubristic youth, that I might answer (never mind that no one from Buddha to Beethoven had ever been so enlightened). Surely my much older husband who loved me more than life itself, would give me some kind of sign when he passed, would tell me where he had gone.

It was the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death, and there had been no sign. Even so, I continued to feel, as I had for the previous December 27ths, that I must not let the day go unmarked, must do something extraordinary, something that would put me into an altered state such that, if there were some parting of the clouds, some voice in the wind, I, faithful widowed amanuensis, would be ready to receive it.

I hadn’t planned to be in Edgecomb, Maine, but it had worked out that way. The day before I had driven from Massachusetts to New Hampshire, where I picked up my dad, who had spent Christmas with my sister, and ferried him back to his condo in southern Maine. Since Judy lives sixty miles north and since I rarely see her more than once or twice a year, sometimes even less, I drove to her house for dinner and an overnight, returning to Massachusetts the next day. It was enough road-time for a long-distance trucker—over five hundred miles—and the weather was lousy, that dreadful combination of rain and snow that forecasters have dubbed a “wintry mix.” There were weather advisories up and down the Maine coast, but I was acutely conscious that one day I might not be capable of transporting myself across three New England states in two days.

Judy is my oldest friend; I have known her since we were in Mrs. Moore’s kindergarten class at the Berkshire Country Day School. Mrs. Moore was plump and mean with short gray hair and always yelling at us for failing to hang up our coats or talking out of turn or using too much construction paper. Mrs. Moore is surely no longer among the living, no doubt she is bossing around other dead folks, possibly even Len himself, though I hope, for his sake, not. Anyway, Judy is one of a handful of people who remembers that my long-dead first husband used to call me “Beckala,” someone to whom I can say, “Len died twenty-five years ago today,” and she will nod and look hard into my eyes, and not feel sorry for me or accuse me of being morbid or secretly wish I’d talk about something else, such as the multiple mistresses of Tiger Woods.

Still, my old buddy groused when I proposed our rainy outing. She’s actually a lot tougher than I am, having sailed around the world with her husband and four children and now supporting her family by laboring on the night shift as the ER doc in the local hospital. Judy, who had worked all Christmas day, fussed so much about the weather that her twenty-one-year old daughter joked that it wasn’t as if she was going to melt. There’s nothing like being reprimanded for wimpiness by one’s smug offspring, and so Judy put a sock in her whining, and agreed to go. Fishing in her downstairs closet, which looked like a seconds outlet for L.L. Bean, she hauled out enough rain gear for the two of us: slickers with hoods, rain pants and rubber boats. And then we set off, leaving behind half-filled cups of coffee and bits of soggy waffles in pools of maple syrup, leaving behind the warm, pellet-stove-heated home.

“I used to think that Mom was in some horrible place after she died,“ Judy said, as we stood looking over the river, whose seal-colored waters were just visible beneath the mantle of fog. Judy was referring to her mother’s death in a plane crash thirty-one years ago, an event that we always seemed to come back to when we got together, not because we had nothing else to talk about but because neither of us had many friends who could travel so far back in time. Who else knew that her mother kept her girlish figure by parking her car in the furthest spot in the supermarket lot so that she would be forced to get the extra exercise? Or that she set the breakfast table every night before she went to bed? Who else remembered that night in September in 1978 when her parents were flying across Maine in a single-engine Piper plane, her father at the controls, the gas gauge nearing empty, with not enough gas to get to Bangor, and so they had to land in Greenville, which was a podonk airport, with its lights on the blink, and they had missed the runway and crashed into a mountain. Judy’s mother had died instantly, her father had survived with cracked ribs and a broken ankle.

“I know exactly what time it happened,” Judy said, explaining that she had recovered her mother’s watch, which was stopped at 8: 06 p.m., “but the oddest thing was I didn’t have any horrible premonition at that time. Just the opposite, I was camping out in the Catskills and looking up at the stars and feeling this incredible sense of well being. For a long time, I felt guilty about being so happy at the moment when Mom died, but then I thought, ‘Wait a minute, maybe this means that she is OK, that she is in a peaceful place.'”

The rain had begun to let up, and we were both silent. Judy had readjusted her tasseled hat beneath her hood so that a greater portion of her strong-boned face was exposed to the elements, revealing, as she did so, several strands of chestnut-dyed hair gone white at the roots. It always took some getting used to: seeing one another after the gaps between our visits. We still saw the goofy kid smirking in the hallway of the Berkshire Country Day School, doing time for some childhood infraction. We could not get used to the fact that we were light years away from those days. Judy had outlived her dead mother by seven years, and I was exactly the age Len had been when I first met him, which meant that if I lived as long as he did, I had seven years, a calculation that took my breath away.

“’Look for me under your boot soles," I finally said, quoting Walt Whitman's Song of Myself. "Len loved that line.”

“Do you still think about him, even after all these years?” Judy asked.

“Every day. I mean I don’t talk about him, or people will think I’m meshugganah, but not a day goes by when I don’t remember something funny he said or some insight he had. Last week I saw this movie, A SERIOUS MAN, at the Amherst Cinema, and when the credits started rolling and the screen flashed to the line, ‘No Jews were harmed in the making of this movie,’ I laughed so hard people started giving me dirty looks. Of course they didn't know I was laughing not just for me, but for Len too.

“Laughing for two, I love it,” Judy said, reminding us, without having to spell it out, that her own childhood boisterousness had landed her in the hall at the Berkshire Country Day School.

Then we started home. Judy picked up the pace and I trudged behind her, negotiating a bit of rain-slicked ice along the path, ice that was bisected with strands of frozen grass. I laughed as I yelled at her to slow down, thinking to myself that I really didn’t want to commemorate this day by breaking a bone.

By the time we returned to the small gray-shingled farmhouse, it was no longer drizzling but we were still soaked. We stripped down to our long underwear and left our clothes on the red bricks in the front hall. Judy explained that her house had radiant heat, and so we could just leave everything in a heap and it would dry. But she said she was going to throw my socks in the dryer, and that she’d get me a clean pair, and that I didn’t need to send them back, that I should consider them her Christmas gift to me: a thick pair of navy wool ankle socks. Then she made us a pot of chamomile tea.

“Do you know that line from that Country-and-Western song, ‘When you get the chance to sit it out or dance, I hope you’ll dance’?” Judy asked, as we sipped our tea.

“It’s so corny and I always cry when it comes on the radio and my kids always laugh at me. But it says it all. So thanks for getting me to dance.”

Four days later, Judy and I were e-mailing each other; apparently, I had left behind a woolen scarf ("I figured it's yours because it's blue," Judy said). It was New Year’s Eve, and there was a blue moon. A blue moon occurs when there are two full moons in one month. The expression comes from the fact that people used to refer to the twelve moons in the calendar year by specific names, such as the harvest moon or the wolf moon. The blue moon, which was also called a betrayer moon, was reserved for that extra moon that didn’t have any special designation. A blue moon has nothing to do with its color, though in 1883 after the eruption of Krakatoa in Indonesia, the moon was blue for nearly two years, owing to the smoke and dust from the volcano. Blue moons are actually quite common: with the normal lunar cycle at twenty-nine days, a blue moon appears once every 2.7 years. But blue moons falling on New Year’s Eve are rare.

I shared some of this celestial trivia with my oldest friend, then asked her to keep the scarf until we next saw one another. I said that I hoped we would still be well enough to hobble around the Damariscotta River in 2028, the next time there would be a New Year’s Eve blue moon. I told her that even though it sometimes seemed that we only saw one another ‘once in a blue moon,’ it didn’t matter because when we were together, time stopped, and we made up for all the months or years we had lost.

She e-mailed back right away, promising to safeguard the scarf. She said that we had better get together before the next blue moon or she’ll be really unhappy. Then it occurred to me that maybe here, in my Google mail inbox, is what I have been looking for, the sign from the cosmos that all is well. Then I spied the huge blue moon rising outside my window, and imagined I could almost make out Len’s Roman-coin-like profile in its craggy convexities.

The Blue Candles of Chanukah

2009-12-17T11:20:00.000-05:00

Wandering through Whole Foods in mid-December, dodging displays of gingerbread house kits and boxes of Clementines, obsessing over the disquieting reality that I had not begun my Christmas shopping, or sent cards or baked cookies, let alone put up a wreath or tree (I wasn’t a total Scrooge, as I had baked a fruit cake and hung a few ceramic Santas from the windows, as well as gotten out the red tablecloth with white angels that had belonged to my mother-in-law, she who made ten varieties of Christmas cookies every year and generally knocked herself out until she was comatose on Christmas morning), in this pre-Christmas funk, I noticed a small Menorah in the window beyond the checkout. Peering closer, I saw, Oh Hosanna in the Highest, that its candles were blue!

It was the first night of Chanukah, but having celebrated Christmas all my life, I was not mindful of Chanukah. (Christian Scientists don’t celebrate Christmas, or Easter, since they believe Jesus is as immutable as Jupiter and can neither be born, crucified, nor resurrected, but such theological hair-splitting wasn’t my mother’s style and so we put up a tree and hung our stockings like most other folks in our New England town). True, my best friend was Jewish, and she was always singing the praises of latkes and Chanukah gelt. I had admired the large silver Menorah on the dining table at her home (polished to a flawless shine by her mother), and sometimes envied that she got presents every night for eight nights, while Christmas lasted only one day…even so, I couldn’t have answered one serious question about her holiday.

Why, for instance, did Chanukah last eight nights instead of twelve, like the twelve days of Christmas, which we performed at our school every December? (One year, we got to wear starched pinafores, carry shiny pails and parade about among the eight-maids-a-milking; another year, we wore red tights and cavorted with the boys as the ten lords-a-leaping. But neither of us ever got to be Queen. That honor went to Cathy Dykeman, who was also Jewish, but this didn’t diminish her delight at appearing in a white pouffy dress fit for a Tudor princess and perching smugly beside her king, fifth-grade heartthrob Andy MacGruer.) In seventh grade, my best buddy, who always made the high honor roll and who was so smart she could dissect fetal frogs with her eyes closed, tried to teach me a few basic facts about Chanukah. She explained that it commemorated the victory of the Maccabeans over the Greek-Syrians. The Maccabees eventually became as oppressive as the Syrians, and so “The Festival of Lights,” focused more upon the miracle of the oil, which burned for eight nights after the temple was rededicated. Chanukah predates Christmas by 164 years; in fact, if there had been no Judas Maccabee there would be no Jesus.

The information stayed in my hippocampus about as long as a burning Chanukah candle (one half-hour, for all you ignoramus Christmas mavens). Christmas was just so much simpler. A baby. A stable. Shepherds watching their flocks by night. Wise men carrying gold, frankincense, and myrrh. I had no idea what frankincense and myrrh were, but I liked the sounds of the words and I figured the stuff was pretty fantastic, the equivalent for me of opening the biggest present under the tree and finding, nestled in layers of creamy tissue paper, a Chatty Cathy doll. There was the nagging problem of Jesus’ mother and her supposed virginity, but in the dark, unenlightened 1960s, no one thought kids needed to know about bleeding hymens. I could put the problem of Jesus’ conception aside, and simply stare blissfully at the doll-like, painted creatures inside the little wooden crèche that my mother put out on the hall table, and leave the metaphysics to the Redeemer’s Dad.

I am ashamed to admit that my goyisha incuriosity about Chanukah continued into adulthood. Yes, my first husband was a Jew, and he was as smart as my best buddy, possibly smarter, but he wasn’t about to instruct me in the history of the dreidel; he didn’t even own a Menorah, for Heaven’s sakes. For one thing, he had grown up in a non-observant family in Philadelphia which was neither fish nor fowl, which is to say they lit a Menorah AND put up a Christmas tree, much to the head-shaking of their Jewish neighbors. Even more shocking: this grandson of a pious, long-bearded Jew who had escaped the pogroms in Russia and who had studied the Talmud every day while his wife ran a dry goods store in the slums of Philadelphia, this Jew, Leonard Feldstein, my husband, was a baptized Catholic! What’s more, and I guess this goes with the territory, he got high on everything Christmas, from drinking eggnog to hanging mistletoe to listening to all fifty-two movements of Handel’s Messiah.

Len’s conversion to Catholicism, which puzzled, if not outraged, many of his Jewish friends, did not occur on my marital watch, or I would surely have put a stop to it. Leonard Feldstein became a Catholic two years before I met him, when he was between wives, between girlfriends and generally so low that he even flirted with suicide. (My blue hours of middle life are a stroll through the Bronx Zoo compared to his unhappiness.) He was rescued by the Jesuits of Fordham University, with whom he spent long, drunken evenings speculating about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. These wily Fathers, most of them raging alcoholics, convinced him not only that Christianity was superior to Judaism, but that he should save his soul straight away by getting baptized. Len once confided that the Jewish view of death with no afterlife was depressing, and that the promise of heaven was more appealing. Moreover, he felt that some of the greatest artists of Western civilization—from Dante to El Greco to Bach—were inspired by the iconographies of Catholicism.

My second husband also happens to be a Catholic, albeit of the lapsed variety, and he too, loves Christmas, but he comes by his passion more honestly, as it were, since his mother, my mother-in-law, she of the knock-yourself-out-brand of Christmasdom to which I must always fall short, made a religion of Christmas. Not only did she bake all those Gingerbread Men, Rum Balls, and Russian Tea Cookies, she also hauled out an attic full of Christmas lights, decorations and flashing knicky-knackies, most of which still survive in their original tissue paper and lie in wait for my husband to unpack for another round of Christmas merriment.

All of which is prelude and prolegomena to the Christmas tableaux of me, your sorry blogger, wandering among the bright aisles of Whole Foods five hours after sundown on Chanukah’s first night, whispering Alleluia to the blue candles of that toy-sized Menorah.

So why are Chanukah candles blue? Or mostly blue with hints of white and silver? No special reason, according to Chabad.org. Chanukah candles can actually be any color, but most are blue-and-white to distinguish them from the reds and greens of Christmas (there are very few blue staples of Christmas, save for “Blue Christmas,” crooned by Elvis Presley). Blue and white also summon up the colors of the Israeli flag. And blue, according to one online Jewish scholar, has a hallowed significance, as it was the designated color of the fringes of the Tallit, the Jewish prayer shawl. The book of Numbers specifies that there must be at least one blue thread, or techelet, woven into the fringes of the tallit; in this manner, each man, when he prays, will be king. Blue was so rare and expensive in ancient times that the Greeks and the Romans didn’t even have words for it. The blue of tekeleth, which is dark with hints of purple, was procured from sea snails. The snail’s hand had to be drilled and the dye extracted from its pulsing innards; 8500 snails had to be dismembered to produce one gram of blue dye.

Which makes the creation of frankincense and myrrh, which involves extracting the resin from a boswellia and commiphora tree, respectively, seem like a dreidel game. But I digress. Here’s to you, dear multicultural reader: Merry Chanukah! Happy Christmas! Bright Solstice! Joyful Kwanzaa!

The Serendipity of Blue

2009-12-04T09:48:00.000-05:00

Depression, psychologists tell us, is not merely a neurological impairment; it is also a cognitive deficiency, a stubborn insistence upon seeing the glass as half-empty rather than half-full. The sun rarely shines in the dust-bunny-ridden halls of the melancholic mind; the depressive goes about his business mechanically, grumpily, a veritable Scrooge, begrudging others their joy, asserting with the preacher in the Book of Ecclesiastes, (without doubt the bleakest book in the Bible, so depressing that it should have its own category in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) that “there is nothing new under the sun.”

Imagine, then, my shock, my delight, my childlike wonder, when I read about the accidental discovery of a new shade of blue! Full disclosure here: having been raised as a Scientist (i.e. Christian Scientist), my acquaintance with chemistry, and indeed all forms of lower case science, is minimal. I can safely assure my reader that I am not smarter than a fifth grader when it comes to matters scientific. So I had to reread the article in the Science section of the New York Times at least five times before it stuck in my feeble hippocampus: in the course of an experiment in the chemistry lab at Oregon State University, which had to do with testing the properties of manganese oxides to determine whether they were both ferroelectric and ferromagnetic at the same time (you get a gold star if you know the difference), a graduate student happened to remove one of the pieces of manganese from a furnace—heated to a temperature so hot (2000 degrees Fahrenheit) it would scald the devil himself—and discovered that the material had turned bright blue. The student (not mentioned by name and not likely to get credit in the scientific journals) summoned his professor, and both were struck dumb as Paul on the road to Damascus: Lo and behold, the universe had made a whole new shade of blue!

But wait, it gets better: This new manganese blue was a better, safer, and more durable blue. Ever since the early Egyptians developed the first synthetic blue by grinding copper shavings with sand and potassium, the color has been difficult to create. Indeed blue was so rare in ancient times that the Greeks did not have a word for it. (Homer never refers to the sea as blue, only as “wine-dark.”) The Celts and Germans used woad, an herb of the mustard family, to create blue (and indeed the word blue is Germanic in origin); Indian peoples, since Neolithic times, have dyed with indigo; but both these blues tend to fade with time. The semi-precious stones of lapis lazuli, mined from mountains in the Far East, were often ground down to create a blue paste used in fine arts painting, but this brighter blue is costly. Cobalt blue, developed in France in the 1800s, was often carcinogenic. And Prussian blue, developed about the same time in Germany, releases the deadly chemical of cyanide. But this new manganese blue—featuring ions patterned in a trigonal bipyramidal coordination worthy of a Cubist painting—releases no evil carcinogens and will not fade with time. The new improved blue is expected to turn up in everything from inkjet printers to house paints.

And to think that the entire business was an accident, just as so many of the great scientific discoveries were accidents: Isaac Newton grasping the theory of gravity after being struck on the head by a falling apple; Henri Becquerel discovering X-rays after leaving his equipment in a drawer and noticing that a uranium rock had imprinted itself upon a photographic plate without being exposed to sunlight; Alexander Fleming discovering penicillin after failing to clean up his work area before going on vacation and noticing, when he returned, that a culture plate containing bacteria had developed a layer of mold which killed the bacteria around it.

Such serendipity is almost enough to make you believe in the prime mover, the author of all holy books, the maker of the periodic table himself.

Of course, if She exists, She’s got to be wearing blue!

Blue Bloods

2009-11-18T10:31:00.000-05:00

They weighed upon my girlhood like medieval chain mail. They came bearing birth dates and death dates, their genealogical trees spreading through my consciousness like the roots of Blue Spruces, their family crests seared into my imagination like sealing wax, their Latinate mottos befuddling me, even in translation: Sapere Aude, Dare to be Wise; Sapit Qui Deo Sapit, He who is Wise is Wise through God. My mother talked about them obsessively, about the great, great grandfather or the great, great, great uncle as if she were talking about the neighbors; indeed, they were more vivid to her than the neighbors, who had the bad form to live in ranch houses instead of castles, who lacked the pedigree to gallop back into the twelfth century, to dine with a certain grand ghost named Sir Andrew Wyse, originally of landed gentry from Devon, who had crossed over to Ireland and subdued the native Celts, for which Henry II rewarded him with a title and 2500 acres. According to my mother, Sir Andrew could ride his horse twenty-five miles, twenty-five miles she would repeat, as if I were hard of hearing, in any direction.

When my mother talked about her ancestors (and she always called them, “my” ancestors, to distinguish them from the dead white folks on my father’s side, whom she considered slightly beneath her, since none were titled), her face lit up and her pupils blazed, as if she were starring in her own son et lumiere show. Her audience, it should be said, was primarily my sister and me, since everyone else upon whom she plied her tales died a bubonic plague-like death of crushing boredom. Mom could fly through the years faster than the flipping pages of calendars in black-and-white movies. Sometimes she began at the end: with her mother’s father, John Francis Henry Wyse, who was born in 1860 and grew up on a plantation called Deer Park outside of Baltimore, and then parried back to his father, Henry Francis Wyse, her great grandfather, who kept slaves at Deer Park but freed them some ten years before the Civil War, riding further back to Sir Thomas Wyse, an eldest son who had remained at the family seat, St. John’s Manor, outside of Waterford rather than seek his fortunes in America. Sir Thomas, who required cash to maintain St. John’s Manor in the style to which it had become accustomed, won the hand of Laetitia Bonaparte, Napoleon’s niece (which meant, my mother crowed, that we were related to Napoleon!). Laetitia Bonaparte, though she brought a handsome dowry, proved to be “bad news” for Sir Thomas. After giving birth to two sons, Napoleon Alfred and William Charles Wyse, she “ran around’” with other men, finally fleeing rainy Waterford for the continent, and bearing three more illegitimate children before she divorced Sir Thomas and married Count Ratazzi, leading my mother to concede that there were “counts and no-counts” among our relations.

My father had no use for ancestors: his view was that if you went far enough back we were all related, all family trees branching out from the original monkeys in trees. Dad’s favorite sport was teasing Mom about the Wyses: one of his standard routines, which he resorted to whenever there was a pause in dinner table conversation, was to insist that the Wyses were connected to the potato chip dynasty. And even though my mother had a sense of humor about Laetitia Bonaparte’s libido, she was dead serious about the Wyses having nothing to do with Earl Wise of the Wise Delicatessen in Berwick, Pennsylvania who had bagged and sold his own potato chips in 1921. My ancestors were W-y-s-e not W-i-s-e, she painstakingly explained, spelling out both versions like a first grade teacher each time the subject came up.

“Your mother is straight out of a Jane Austen novel,” a friend once joked, and of course it was true. Snobbish to the point of caricature, my mother, who hung a framed portrait of the Wyse family coat of arms beside the hall mirror, truly believed that she had blue blood in her veins, and that it gave her permission to lord it over everyone around her.

According to Robert Lacy, author of the entertaining tome, Aristocrats, the Spanish were the ones who came up with the bizarre idea that some mortals have blue blood rather than red running through their veins. Some years after the Moorish occupation of Spain in the 9^th Century, certain families, especially in the Castille region, refused to intermarry with their dark-skinned conquerors. (Moors, by the way, did not have a good rep in Europe, as evidenced by the portrait of swarthy, hot-blooded Othello in Shakespeare’s play.) As the Spanish successfully pushed the Moors out of the Iberian peninsula, the term "sangre azul,” was applied to all Spanish aristocrats, whose skin allegedly revealed slightly bluer blood vessels than ordinary people, especially in the veins of the arm and hand. What’s curious about “sangre azul,” Lacy observes, is that while aristocrats’ light skin could be attributed to their avoiding peasant-type work in the fields, as well as possibly the disease of argyria, which came from ingesting trace amounts of silver in eating utensils, “sangre azul,” had nothing to do with breeding, since all Spanish people, themselves descended from marauding Visigoths, intermarried with their Moorish cousins, especially if you went far enough back in history.

Curiously enough, blue blood did not enter the English language until 1834, at which time the European aristocracy was already on the wane, the use of titles having been banned by the United States Constitution in 1787 and the titled themselves falling to the guillotine at the dizzyingly bloody rate of sixty an hour during the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror.

(By the way, the entry for blue blood in my online dictionary reveals that the only living creatures that can boast of truly possessing an oxygenated form of blood containing hemocyanin are horseshoe crabs, who, at 400 million years old, were around long before the Visigoths.)

The United States has a love-hate relationship with blue bloods. Although we profess to eschew all things aristocratic, we nevertheless have created organizations like the Mayflower Society and the Daughters of the American Revolution, which encourage all kinds of snobbery, racism, and elitism (my mother belonged to neither, as ‘her’ ancestors did not come over on the Mayflower, though she claimed that she could have joined the DAR). The DAR famously banned internationally renowned soprano Marian Anderson from singing to an integrated audience in Constitutional Hall in 1939. Fifty years after the DAR dissed Anderson, Barack Hussein Obama addressed thousands of blacks and whites gathered on the mall on a cold January morning (including this humble blogger and her family), speaking in his ringing baritone of the dream of equality in which everyone, regardless of their origins or skin color, has a chance at the American dream. Obama, mindful of history and its symbols, held one of his first business meetings among the gold-gilt French Empire chairs in the Blue Room of the White House. Obama thus put the blue-blooded Bush dynasty to bed (remember the late Governor Ann Richards’ joke about Bush pere that “he was born with a silver foot in his mouth”?).

I often wonder what my mother would have made of Barack Obama. When she was a girl growing up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the 1930s, her family had employed a black cook named Orilla, whom my mother adored in the simple way many white children adored their black ‘mammies.’ But such affection had boundaries; she would no more have considered fraternizing with Orilla’s children than she would move to Brazil to take tea with Amazonian pygmies. There were no blacks in my mother’s class at Smith College; no blacks at the country club where we played tennis; or at the Church of Christ, Scientist, where we recited the Scientific Statement of Being; no blacks anywhere in our New England city, save in a ghetto of run-down triple-decker houses with mangy dogs and uncut lawns.

But like all ancestor mavens, my mother worshipped at the temples of success and power. In the end, she would have been impressed by the Obama’s Harvard credentials, literary acumen, princely demeanor, as well as his Nobel Prize. I suspect that she would attributed Obama’s rise not to his white mother, Ann Dunham, from Wichita, Kansas (whom she would have considered poor white trash) but to his black African father, Barack Obama, Sr., a Luo from Nyang’omo Kogelo, Nyanza Province, Kenya; a prince in Africa was hardly the same as a lord in Britannia, but nothing else, in her lexicon, could account for his meteoric rise to power.

“Success is counted sweetest,” Emily Dickinson once observed, “by those who n’er succeed.” As I have grown into middle age, I see my mother’s ancestor worship in a different light, not only as comedy, but also as tragedy. All those knights and lords of the manor that weighed upon me as a child gave my mother, an insecure girl from the Middle West whose family could barely scrape together the tuition for Smith College, a certain gravitas, a sense of identity and purpose. Because she feared that her own little light would never be powerful enough to shine its brightness through the world, she depended upon the luminosity of the dead to shine for her.

“There’s an old Irish saying about ancestors,” one of my boyfriends had informed my mother one Christmas dinner years ago when she was droning on about the Wyses.

“What’s that, dearie?” she had inquired sweetly. Sean Shesgreen, whose people were lawyers from Letterkenny, couldn’t hold a candle to the Wyses of Waterford, but my mother was impressed by Sean’s table manners (“he’s a gentleman and a scholar,” she had enthused) as well as the fact that he was largely self-made, having arrived in Chicago in the 1960s with not much more than $100 and a suit. She had brought out all the family silver to entice him to marry me. (I was then in my middle thirties, widowed and without issue.)

“Ancestors are like potatoes,” he said merrily, “the best thing about them is under the ground.”
My mother, who was not without a sense of humor, laughed heartily, complimented Sean on his Irish wit, which reminded her of her grandfather’s, then returned to the story of how St. John’s Manor had been given to the Wyses by Henry VIII when he dissolved the monasteries.

I didn’t marry Sean Shesgreen, but that’s another story, and it has nothing to do with blue bloods.
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In Brooke Astor's Blue Room

2009-10-24T09:18:00.000-04:00

Toward the end of the six-month trial, which kept tabloids screaming with headlines like “Diss Astor,” and “Bad Heir Day,” the jury asked to review photos of the blue room. The blue room was not the grandest in Brooke Astor’s ten-room duplex apartment on Park Avenue —that prize belonged to the oxblood-lacquered library, designed by Albert Hadley and featuring red velvet Louis XV chairs and over 3,000 first editions in Moroccan leather—but the blue room was where Brooke Russell Kuser Marshall Astor had spent her last years. A small sitting room adjacent to her bedroom, it contained a fleur de lis rug, a blue and pink chintz couch, blue sateen armchairs and matching drapes. The blue room was where Mrs. Astor received the occasional visitor, and ate dinner alone (dressed in fancy frocks and diamonds) on a folding tray in front of the television. Mrs. Astor, who suffered from Alzheimer’s in her latter years and could not recognize close friends, signed several codicils to her will in the blue room, surrendering control of the bulk of her 185 million dollar Astor fortune--once slated for New York City charities-to her only child, Anthony Marshall, and his third wife, Charlene.

If the walls of all the blue rooms that Mrs. Astor inhabited over her life could speak, they would tell stories so violent they would knock the million-dollar, gilt-framed paintings off the walls. Begin with the conception of Anthony Dryden Marshall, christened Anthony Dryden Kuser, which occurred in the middle of the roaring twenties in a bedroom done up in gray-blue velvet with matching armchairs, drapes, and velvet headboards. Dryden Kuser, Anthony’s father, heir to his financier father’s millions as well as his mother’s fortune from the Prudential Life Insurance Company, was drunk, as he had been most nights of his marriage. He was also in a foul humor after losing at cards. His twenty-one-year-old wife was asleep, and he woke her, demanding sex. When she murmured that he was drunk and she was half asleep, he persisted, forcing himself upon her, taking what he regarded as rightfully his.

In the era of the Teapot Dome Scandal, where rich men got richer in the Blue Room of the White House, no one talked about marital rape or domestic abuse. When Brooke Kuser discovered she was pregnant, she was shocked, as well as angry: “Having not participated very willingly in this future event, I was perturbed,” she wrote with well-bred euphemism in her 1980 autobiography, Footprints. Six months later, Dryden Kuser got drunk again, fought with his wife, probably about money (in one afternoon on the golf course, he lost $36,000) or his affairs with other women. Dryden Kuser was accustomed to getting his own way. That night he got so enraged, he knocked his wife down and broke her jaw. Brooke’s father urged her to get out of the marriage, but she stayed for the sake of her son.

Anthony Dryden Kuser grew up in rooms decorated in every color of the rainbow—rooms in red, green, violet and blue, filled with marble fireplaces, floor-to-ceiling drapes, Louis XVI chairs and 19th century Chinese wall paintings, grew up with Shetland ponies and Pekinese dogs and French nannies, had everything a child could possibly want except his mother’s love. Even after Dryden Kuser divorced his wife to marry another woman, giving Brooke custody of her son as well as a handsome alimony, she handed her little boy off to nannies at every opportunity. When she remarried stockbroker Buddy Marshall, she and her new husband took off on a months-long European honeymoon, leaving Tony behind to be cared for by nannies. When Buddy Marshall thought that Tony Marshall’s longtime French governess, whom the boy adored, was spoiling him, Brooke fired her. At the age of ten, when Buddy observed that Tony needed toughening up, Brooke sent her only child to boarding school, where he was friendless, and beset with nightmares. As Tony put it in a self-published, thinly fictionalized novel, Dash, “As the infant developed into childhood he was regarded in both physique as well as in manner as a hereditary mistake.”

When I imagine the childhood of Tony Kuser, I think of Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy. In this classic 1770 painting, a slim teenaged boy with a face so sensitive, pale and refined it might belong to a girl, stares out from the huge, elongated mostly blue canvas with a melancholy vacancy. His elegant, cavalier clothes—ermine-plumed hat, blue satin britches, matching waistcoat, lacy ruffled shirt, silk stockings, leather shoes tied with blue ribbons—tell us that he is not accustomed to any play or work in which he might soil himself. His arm crooked confidently at the waist suggests that he will become master of the landscape he dominates--pastoral, estate-like countryside with a gentle brook in the distance. Yet, beneath the patrician pose, there is a tentativeness and vulnerability, as if he doesn’t have a clue why he has come into the world, much less how he will make his way in it. (Ironically, research into Gainsborough’s masterpiece revealed that its subject, Jonathan Buttall, son of a rich ironmonger, proved woefully inadequate to the task of making a living, filing for bankruptcy in 1796. The Blue Boy changed hands several times, leaving Great Britain in 1922, purchased for a record $728,000 by California railroad magnate Henry Huntington, inspiring Cole Porter, who socialized with Brooke and Buddy Marshall, to write a song about its fate called, “Blue Boy’s Blues.”)

Tony Marshall, who turned up in an elegant blue suit and tie on most days of his trial, did not go bankrupt; but he never won the blue ribbon of his mother’s love, especially in later life. At 18, he legally changed his surname to Marshall, but when Buddy Marshall died and Brooke married Vincent Astor, Brooke Astor curtailed relations with her grown son, explaining in Footprints: “ Vincent was jealous of Tony.” Tony was going through his first divorce, and Brooke felt guilty about rejecting her son at a time when he clearly needed her, but as she explained in Footprints, “I needed to concentrate on Vincent.” Brooke tried to make it up to her son by donating $100,000 to the reelection campaign of Richard Nixon, which helped secure Tony an ambassadorship to Madagascar, but she privately complained to friends that Tony was a n’er-do-well. She resented that she had to hire him herself, some years later, to manage the Astor millions. When Tony divorced his second wife to marry penniless Charlene Gilbert, Mrs. Astor was appalled. Not only was Charlene the ex-wife of an Episcopal priest, she also had “no class and no neck.”

Tony Marshall’s son, Phillip, blamed Charlene for the ill treatment Brooke Astor received in her final years, which led Phillip to sue his father to win guardianship of his grandmother. “The Battle of the Blue Bloods,” with its tales of a dog-urine soaked couch in the blue room and the disappearance of a multi-million dollar Childe Hassam painting from the living room, was on the front pages of every newspaper in New York, including the decorous New York Times. When the case was over, Phillip Marshall wrested guardianship of his grandmother from his father, as well as inadvertently paved the way for the elder abuse unit of the Manhattan District Attorney’s office to charge the elder Marshall with sixteen counts of fraud.

So why do we care? Partly, it’s because we conflate beauty and truth, as well as beauty and goodness. We imagine that because the rich can create perfectly choreographed rooms with antiques and art work from every corner of the globe, because they can turn themselves into objects d’art with glittering Ceylon sapphires and the latest designer fashions, because they can dine off Blue Willow China and sleep in canopied beds, we imagine that they are better than we are, that they are gods. Money is power, and power is a kind of aphrodisiac, as Henry Kissinger, friend of Brooke Astor, once observed.

But money cannot buy love, and when the well-appointed life in the blue room goes wrong, the rich take each other to court, and the rest of us can’t get enough of their misery and dysfunction, because in the end, rich or poor, blue blood or not, we are the same, desperately seeking the serene blue depths of our mother’s love, desperately seeking, to paraphrase the words of recovering alcoholic writer Raymond Carver, “to call ourselves beloved.” (“And did you get what/ you wanted from this life, even so? / I did/And what did you want? /To call myself beloved, to feel myself/beloved on the earth.”)

In the People vs. Anthony Marshall, the jury of eight women and four men, "little people" as Leona Helmsley would have called them, who worked as caterers, consultants, and teachers, found Anthony Marshall guilty of grand larceny, fraud and embezzlement. At 85, in frail health, he will likely spend the rest of his life in jail. After the conviction, the jury repaired to the Blue Ribbon Bar in Greenwich Village, miles away from Brooke Astor’s blue sitting room on Park Avenue.

Into the Wild Blue Ocean

2009-10-13T12:24:00.000-04:00

“There are two things you will never regret,” writer Mary Gordon once observed, “a swim in the ocean, and the birth of a baby.” I recite this like the rosary every time I consider plunging into salt or fresh water, every time I list the usual reasons why I shouldn’t—the water is too cold, the air colder, I’m too tired, too depressed, I don’t want to get wet, I look like a Henry Moore sculpture in a bathing suit. Sometimes I talk myself into a swim; sometimes I don’t. One simple fact remains constant: the older I get, the less inclined I am to embrace the labor of plunging into cold water, especially ocean water, with its breakers and riptides, its potential to fling me about like so much sea kelp.

On the second-to-last day of September, on Crescent Beach in Block Island with the wind blowing so hard that you had to shout to make yourself heard, I repeated this homily to my three friends, hoping to convince them to join me in what would likely be the last swim of the summer. My friends are writers as well as mothers (actually, all are grandmothers, but don’t tell anyone because it makes them seem ancient as the Mohegan clay cliffs). We met years ago in a writing group in Westchester, and have mostly stayed in touch, through moves, divorces, and remarriages.

We were spending five days on Block Island, courtesy of Mary-Ann’s agent, who had generously offered to let us use her vacation home with its many bedrooms, porches and gardens in Rodman’s Hollow. We had divided the day into sessions of writing, biking, hiking, and gossiping. A swim in Block Island Sound seemed just the thing to make already unforgettable day even more so, before we headed home to drink wine and watch the sunset.

But no argument would sway Sarah, our southern belle from Virginia, who ironically was the only one wearing her bathing suit beneath her biking clothes. Sarah said swimming was a good idea in theory but that she had dipped her toes in the water and it was just too (expletive) cold, that her scrawny limbs were turning blue at the mere thought of plunging into Block Island Sound. If we were at Cape Hatteras in August, or Bermuda in March, but we weren’t, we were in the Bermuda of the North, thirteen miles off the coast of Rhode Island a week into fall and nothing would make her get wet, no matter how blissed-out she might feel afterward.

So Sarah huddled against her backpack, promising to record the polar swim on her Nikon, while we three nutty New Englanders made our way to the Crescent Beach bathhouse, which was unfortunately closed for the season. Draping a towel over a railing on the outer deck, which provided only the flimsiest cover against the gazes of passersby, including an old geezer with a metal detector some twenty feet away, as well one fortyish fellow in a golfing hat, who later approached us and confessed to watching us swim, pointing out that the water couldn’t have been that cold because we didn’t even use a towel to dry off. (The truth was, which we didn’t share as there was no need to discourage his plans to go swimming, we had packed only one towel!)

But changing our suits, we were hardly aware of him or any other idling beachcomber, shouting into the gale that we wouldn’t have dreamt of doing such a thing twenty years ago, but that now we didn’t give a hoot. Or, as Mary-Ann put it, quoting from a slogan on a tee-shirt that she picked up in Old Saybrook, a slogan that became a kind of shorthand for our island idyll,“Frankly, Scallop, I don’t give a clam!”

It probably won’t surprise you that my bathing suit was blue—with tiny white polka dots that a saleslady assured me some ten years ago were meant to provide a visually slimming effect, enhanced by the old-lady skort that reached to mid-thigh. It was the sort of suit that my mother would have approved of, would have worn herself had she been inclined to swim in the ocean in September.

But here’s what made me sad: when she was my age, my mother was not inclined to swim in the ocean—not in September or any other month of the year, even though she lived within a few miles of several beaches on the Gulf of Mexico in southern Florida. In the summer months, when she headed north to her summer cottage in Canada on Georgian Bay, where she had spent nearly every summer of her life since she was a child of five, where, in fact, she had first learned to swim, she didn’t go into the water either. She always had her reasons: she had just had her hair done, she was getting over a cold, the water wasn’t warm enough (even though Lake Huron was considered the warmest of the Great Lakes, a fact which she always proudly cited to friends), she didn’t want anyone to see her in a bathing suit as she had recently put on a “few tons.”

“Did your mothers stop swimming when they got to be a certain age?” I had asked my friends earlier, as we made our way from the Greenway Trail down to Mansion Beach, scouting a spot in which we might take our swim.

“Yeah, even when we were kids going to the Connecticut shore every summer, my mother rarely went in the water, she always said she didn’t want to mess up her hair,” Mary-Ann said, explaining that her mother reported that your skin gets more sensitive as you get older, and that she had never been able to bear the cold even when she was younger.

“My mother swam a lot when she was young growing up in England,” Sarah remembered, “but now that I think of it, she hardly ever went in as she got older.” Sarah’s mother had been a smoker, and had died of emphysema at the age of 78.

“My mother doesn’t swim as much as she used to, but she still does a kilometer in the pool almost every day,” Christine offered brightly. Christine’s mother was the only one of our mothers who was still alive, and maybe, I theorized, there was a connection; maybe when you stop swimming, stop submitting yourself to the baptism of cold water, something shuts down and you start preparing to die.

“On the other hand,” I continued, “we can’t forget that it’s only been in the last hundred years that women have been encouraged to swim, or engage in any other sport, for that matter. There was no women’s swimming competition at the Olympics until 1912.”

“And when they did go in the water,” Mary-Ann said, “think of the bathing costumes they had to wear—bloomers, caps, trousers. Who would want to get wet wearing all that stuff?

When we reached Crescent Beach, we agreed that we were the lucky beneficiaries of feminism. If it hadn’t been for pioneers like Annette Kellerman, the woman who designed the first one-piece suit that she wore in attempting to swim the English Channel in 1905 (and was, in fact, arrested for wearing on a Boston beach two years later), and Gertrude Ederle, the first woman to swim across the entire English Channel in 1926, completing the feat in 14 hours and breaking all previous records, we might not be here today, plunging, in our one-piece Spandex suits, into Block Island Sound.

Then, with Sarah capturing our posteriors for posterity, we charged into the surf, whooping and hollering, repeating that it wasn’t all that cold, except when the wind scattered bits of cresting wave on our goose pimpled arms. We counted to ten, asked each other who was going to be first. In seconds, Mary-Ann, the oldest and gutsiest among us—and what you should know about Mary-Ann is that she has earned enough money from the ten books she was written to buy a condo on the Connecticut shore--dove into the surf. Christine was next. I was last, breaking out into a lusty, mangled French version of La Marseillaise—“Allons, enfants de la patria, le jour de gloire est arrive”--that would have given my high school French teacher a mini-stroke. (“Rebecca,” she used to say in a voice that let me know I was going straight to the guillotine, “You don’t roll your r’s.) But I digress: in a quieter moment between breakers, I explained that singing the French national anthem was what my first husband, Len, had done when he went swimming, and that belting out the rousing verses never failed to warm me.

“Three cheers for Len,” they cried. All these dear ladies, including Sarah on the beach, had known Len. All, if I asked them which I did more than once during our reunion on Block Island, could tell me one funny story about him that I had forgotten. Then Christine and Mary-Ann screamed out their own mangled versions of La Marseillaise, and it made my heart sing like a barking harbor seal. How many friends could I go back with twenty-five years and have it be as brief as the lull between one breaking wave and another?

Sarah, who shared the dozen pictures she had taken of us that evening after an Indian dinner of Mary-Ann’s lentil dahl, remarked that what was so amazing about watching us was that we went into the water as droopy-butt middle-aged ladies, but that once we got wet, we became girls again, our oldest, deepest selves suddenly laid bare, like sandbars at low tide.

“The experience of swimming is both sexual and spiritual,” observed Annette Kellerman, who continued swimming just a few weeks before she died in California at the age of 88, “The sensation of water flowing over the body is dynamic, erotic, enlivening, and yet it awakens, at every moment, our consciousness of the fragility of our breath.”

In Praise of Blue Hydrangeas

2009-09-24T13:23:00.000-04:00

I have never been a gardener, resisting the easy equation of flowers and femaleness, and making it a matter of feminist pride never to learn about the myriad varieties of roses or the uses of baby’s breath or anything about the conditions under which climbing arbutuses climb. Thus, I could distinguish myself from generations of women who made gardens, and only gardens, their life’s work. Women like my grandmother, who belonged for decades to her local garden club and knew her pansies from her phlox, her rhododendrons from her hydrangeas but could not tell a Rainier Maria Rilke from a Jean-Paul Sartre. I was meant for higher things, or so I thought in my arrogant youth. It probably didn’t help that one of my father’s favorite jokes, which came up every spring faithful as a perennial, was the old saw about horticulture.

But in the silver-blue dark of middle life, I spy with my far-sighted eye many new things, including the splendor of blue hydrangeas. All blue flowers are lovely to look at—cornflowers, delphiniums, forget-me-nots, bachelor buttons, gentians--even though I often need help in identifying one from the other--but there is something about the lush, puffy extravagance of hydrangeas that never fails to stop me from whatever task I am hurrying to finish, and praise the goddess of all flowering things. I am told by my gardener friends—and, oddly enough, I have quite a few, a virtual bridal bouquet of smart, accomplished women with advanced degrees who are clearly not air-heads—that blue hydrangeas, unlike their pink or white sisters, require a high level of acidity in the soil, or they will not flower into that glorious deep blue. I’m also told that blue hydrangeas grow best in mild climates, which is why one sees them so much on Cape Cod and along Long Island Sound.

My father’s mother has been dead for over twenty-five years, but sometimes I wish I could bring her back on an Indian summer afternoon like today, when a few lone hydrangeas are still in bloom but beginning their slow fade back to green, and ask her, “Did you have hydrangeas in your garden? And did you love them as much as I do?” Of course, she would scold me for being so dim-witted that I didn’t pay more attention as a child, didn’t notice them on all those summer afternoons when my sister and I were visiting, and we called through her big house, and she screamed, “Youhoo, I’m in the garden,” and we raced outside to the back porch, and onto the stone veranda and down the walk, edged on one side with boxwood hedges, and there she’d be, a grey-haired figure with sun-blotched cheeks, dressed in baggy Bermuda shorts and faded shirt, a sweat-stained khaki hat pulled low over her forehead to keep out the sun, crouched down over her sweet Williams.

“Of course I had hydrangeas,” she tells me, slowly uncoiling her arthritic limbs and wiping her dirt-encrusted fingers upon the coat tails of her shirt, her voice brisk and confident. “I had white ones and pink ones. I had blue ones in front of the guest cottage because there’s a perfect mix of sun and shade back there. You can turn pink ones into blue ones, if you add aluminum and coffee grounds to the soil. If you had spent more time helping me weed—you’ll remember that I did offer to pay you a dollar an hour—you might have picked up a thing or two about gardening and you wouldn’t be such a ninny now.”

“I was suffering from depression,” I confide, “and it tinged everything I felt and saw with a kind of watery grime so that I never really noticed anything, and the world was washed in a grainy, rain-soaked fog. It was like living in Belgium where you could go for weeks without seeing the sun. I remember reading Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea and identifying with that that sense of dread and panic that he was describing. It was what I felt all the time.”

“Well, I’ve never heard of this Jean-Paul whosiwhatsit, and I’ve never been to Belgium. I thought there was plenty to learn about my own country without running off to Europe.”

“Sartre was an existentialist. He lived in Paris, and he believed that God was dead, that you had to create your own reality.”

“What bunk! I thank my lucky stars I never went to college. What good did it do you?”

“Do you know that the first poem I ever wrote was about you? It ended with a question, which I wanted to ask you but never could: Where will you go when you’re gone?”

“Well, I never! Imagine anyone writing a poem about such a fool thing as that! Let me tell you something, death is nothing, don’t waste your time thinking about it.”

I tell her all the things I’ve learned from the Internet about blue hydrangeas. I have to explain the Internet, which is a challenge, because, when she was alive, she was always talking about the good old days, and how the modern world was bunk. (She often said she wished she hadn’t lived long enough to see Neil Armstrong walking on the moon, that people should stay on earth, where they belonged.) But when I explain that the information superhighway makes it possible to learn all kinds of things in an instant with the click of a mouse (I have to explain that a mouse is not something you catch in a trap), she perks up. I tell her about Wikipedia, and how you can look up Hydrangeas on it. I explain that there are 70-75 species of hydrangea, and that most come from China, Japan and Korea, and that the very first one was brought to England from a Chinese garden in 1739 by a Sir Joseph Banks. Of course, she has heard of Sir Joseph Banks; he was one of those brilliant, peripatetic Englishmen, an 18th century Charles Darwin, who traveled the globe and knew everyone and influenced everything, from the creation of Kew Gardens and the British Museum, to the colonizing of Australia. I tell her that Banks was apparently the model for a character in Mutiny on the Bounty.

We talk about all the poems that have been written about blue hydrangeas—about one by the German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, called “Blaue Hortensie.” It was written in Paris in 1906, when she was a girl of 14 and a student at the Emma Willard School in Troy. I read it aloud, not in German, because my German is primitive and she never learned the language (though she boasts that her older brother, George, who went to Oxford, knew German ‘like the back of his hand’). I read it aloud, as she used to read “A Hollow Tree,” and “Winnie the Pooh” to my sister and me in the library after dinner in the evenings.

Rilke’s poem is about the beauty of dying blue hydrangeas, comparing them to “old, blue notepaper notes,” and to the faded grays and violets of a “washed out children’s apron.” Rilke talks about how everything passes so quickly, how the dying flowers remind us of “life’s short duration.” But in the end as one blue umbel blooms against the green, there is a sense of life renewing itself.

“Of course, because hydrangeas are perennials,” she says, “and they come back, year after year.”

Then we say goodbye, and I promise that next spring, I will grow my very first blue hydrangea.

Acing the Blues

2009-09-14T10:10:00.001-04:00

The funeral home sits so close to Rally Point that when my teammate and I were driving there from Massachusetts, her global positioning system cheerily announced, as we passed the sumptuous blue-and-white striped awnings, that we had arrived at our destination. This foot-faulting technological glitch made us laugh, soothing our nerves as we lugged our racquet bags and water coolers into the club, ready to play our first match at the United States Tennis Association’s New England District Adult League Championships in Greenville, Rhode Island.

Tennis in America began in Rhode Island—in nearby Newport, where the United States Lawn Tennis Association held the first Men’s Singles Championships on grass courts at the Newport Casino in 1881 (the event was not open to women but ladies’ competitions were held at the Philadelphia Cricket Club in 1886). The Newport and Philadelphia championships added doubles competitions and evolved into the current U.S. Open at the Billie Jean King Tennis Center in Flushing Meadow, New York, played on DecoTurf II courts that were painted blue in 2005, in order to make the matches more telegenic.

Tennis, which was first played in the Middle Ages by monks during religious ceremonies and taken up by the French royal family in the 16^th century, gets its name from the French nobility’s habit of shouting, “Tenez,” or “Heads Up,” before starting the game. In the late 19^th century, tennis had overtaken croquet at the sport of choice for the leisured rich on both sides of the Atlantic. Lawn tennis courts, which could be grafted onto smooth croquet courts, appeared on estates owned by European barons and American robber barons alike, as well as on the grounds of watering holes and spas throughout Europe. Edith Jones Wharton learned to play tennis on her family’s private court at Pen Craig, one of the immense ‘cottages’ on Newport Sound. In 1876, a 14-year-old Edith Jones, writing to her governess, Anna Bahlmann, described the newfangled sport as “difficult, tiresome, destructive to pretty dresses and to the complexion, but nevertheless delightful.”

Not that I was focused on the history of tennis as I was playing the number two singles spot for the Aces Wild Tennis Team on court six. But I was thinking, during a long, sweat-soaked rally--indoor tennis in Rhode Island in mid-August can be punishingly hot--which ended when I whipped a cross-court forehand to a remote corner near the baseline where my opponent’s coltish 33-year-old legs would not take her, that there is nothing like tennis to free the mind from morbid thoughts of depression, failure, and death.

I have been playing tennis for most of my life—my mother, in the summer months when she wasn’t in bed with her mysterious colds, teaching me to play on hot, lazy afternoons at the Pittsfield Country Club, a sprawling, many-porched 19^th century mansion that Edith Wharton herself could have belonged to. I had a wooden racquet in those days, and the courts we played on were red clay, which turned everything—the service and base lines as well as our white Treetorn tennis balls, white tennis shoes, and white ankle socks with fuzzy pom poms at the heels--a rusted, dried-blood-colored pink. I had a two-fisted backhand (still do, though it was more of a lethal weapon in those days) in the manner of my heroine Chrissie Evert, who was already making a name for herself as a junior, and who would win the U.S. Open Women’s Singles in 1975, when it was played on Har-Tru clay courts at the West Side Tennis Club at Forest Hills.

When my mother was well enough not to be indifferent to the fortunes of her daughters, she used to brag about how good I was. She saved all the trophies I had won in tennis tournaments throughout New England, and displayed them in the living room of our home on West Street. When she moved to Florida, she took them with her, proudly displaying them in the all condos and bungalows she inhabited. The story she liked best was the time I was in the finals of a 14-and-under tournament in New Haven--it was at the New Haven Lawn Club, founded in 1891, in the posh East Rock section of the city—and the club pro started watching me and told my mother I was good, that I could be really good, and that if she wanted to develop my game, she should send me to California to work with Pancho Segura, who had been number one in the world in 1952 and who was now coaching promising juniors, including legend-to-be Jimmy Connors.

“I taught her how to play myself,” my mother boasted to the pro, which wasn’t strictly true as I also played with my dad, particularly when I got good enough to beat my mom. In addition, I took several summers’ full of group and private lessons from Dudley Bell, who all the kids called Dud, and who had the good humor and patience of Segoo himself as he drilled me for hours in the split step.

“I know she’s good,” my mother went on, “But she’s only 14. I’m not taking her out of school and sending her to California. Anything could happen to her. She could be sold into ‘white slavery.’”

The pro wisely chose to ignore this bit of melodramatic foolishness and proposed that my mother accompany me to southern California.

“And let my husband fend for himself?” my mother said. “Not on your life.”

Chrissie Evert probably would have begged her mother to send her out west to play tennis—although it’s a moot point as Evert grew up in Florida and was coached from an early age by her tennis pro dad--but I didn’t argue with my mother. When you’re 14, you pretty much do what you’re told, especially if you’re a girl. Then, when the United States Lawn Tennis Association’s New England division rankings came out the next year (the organization dropped the snooty-sounding ‘lawn’ from its moniker a few years later), I had my first identifiable-as-such crisis of confidence. The number one player in the 14-and-under girls’ division was a big, muscular girl from Westerly, Rhode Island, and I had lost to her 6-0, 6-1 in another tournament several weeks after New Haven, barely even winning that one game. I had achieved the number five spot, which was hardly anything to cry about, but I knew very well that I was miles away from being number one. Maybe all the talk about Segura and California was just that—talk. Even if my mother had been willing to send me, I wasn’t sure I had what it took to be the best.

Then I did something only a crazy teenager could justify: I gave up tennis. I gave up the very thing that gave my emerging life passion and purpose. My reasons were as silly as a toddler’s: if I couldn’t get what I wanted, i.e., the number one spot in my age group, then I wouldn’t play. As the years passed and I found increasingly unwholesome activities to fill up the hours that tennis had occupied—taking up with a series of druggie boyfriends, who would have sold me into white slavery in a heartbeat if given the chance—I developed new reasons to spurn tennis. Tennis was a rich girl’s game, the mindless diversion of Republicans and Nixonites and corporate drones. Never mind that a smart, soft-spoken black man named Arthur Ashe, who learned to play tennis on segregated public courts in Richmond, Virginia, was busy winning majors and breaking the color line and speaking out against racism and apartheid.

I took up competitive tennis again when the Williams sisters started to dominate the women’s tour. I was moved by their story—how they grew up in the projects of Los Angeles and hit hundreds of balls every afternoon from an old shopping cart, how their parents heaped positive encouragement upon them, telling them, from an early age, that they were destined for greatness. There was really no connection between me, a middle-aged, overweight mom trying to adjust to a second marriage and working off her post-baby weight while playing in a local 4.0 USTA League in northern Vermont…and Venus and Serena, their dread-locks encased in white beads, screaming as they hit their 120-mile-an-hour serves, reaching the finals of the U.S. Open at 17 and 19, respectively. Then again, maybe Venus and Serena’s success--thanks to Venus’ efforts, women pros are now, for the first time in tennis history, making as much as men--made me believe that there was something about the game that whispered of hope and transformation, even to an old duffer like me, who wanted to drop twenty pounds and get a break from feeling like such a loser.

The Aces Wild Tennis Team did not ace the Districts in Rhode Island. In fact, we beat only one other team (and they were from western Massachusetts, and we had already trounced them three months ago so it hardly seemed like a real win). Most of the players on the other teams were younger, fitter, and steadier. Though many of us lost in nail-bitingly-close third-set tiebreakers—on Day two, I was taken out by a much younger woman in a match that went on for nearly three hours--it wasn’t enough to send us to the next level of competition—the Sectionals in South Hadley, Massachusetts. But as we headed home past the blue-and-white awnings of the Anderson-Winfield funeral home, stopping for ice cream at the Newport creamery just beyond the town green (not to be confused with the Blue Hills Crematory, whose services were being offered through the funeral home), we talked about how, next year, we were going to start practicing earlier, organize more scrimmages, maybe even do some clinics with the Amherst College assistant tennis coach.

Next year, we vowed, wiping the soft-serve, anti-oxidant-rich blueberry ice cream from our sweaty fingers and high-fiving one another, we were going to do it, advance to Sectionals, and, maybe, with a little luck and a lot of PMA (positive mental attitude), even to Nationals.

Tangled up in Blue: The Sermon

2009-08-17T10:06:00.000-04:00

My mother, who had a great sense of humor when she wasn’t suffering from depression, used to say about Unitarians: “The only time they use the word, God, is when the janitor falls down the stairs.” Mom was a fervent Christian Scientist, and she brought up my sister and me to be fervent Christian Scientists, in which endeavor she clearly failed or I wouldn’t be standing here before you this morning quoting the likes of Bob Dylan in a sermon called Tangled up in Blue.

Well, OK, she didn’t fail completely to pass on the gene for Mary Baker Eddy, the discoverer and founder of Christian Science, because I can still recite the Scientific Statement of Being, which I learned at the age of 10 in the spanking white, mock-Federal-style First Church of Christ, Scientist on Wendell Avenue in Pittsfield, which never really looked like a church to me, but more like a bank. “There is no life, truth, intelligence or substance in matter/ All is infinite mind and its infinite manifestation…” I can remember standing straight as one of those Ionic front columns as I rose in Sunday School with all the other immaculately dressed kids—the boys looking like little bankers-to-be in their three pieces suits, the girls like wedding-ready flower girls in their puffy tulle dresses—all of us well-behaved as circus dogs as we recited these big, fat, ten-dollar words.

Between you and me and the chalice, I didn’t have a clue then what the words of the Scientific Statement of Being meant and I still don’t. The phrases all circled back on themselves like the Queen of Heart’s imperious pronouncements in Alice in Wonderland or Gertrude Stein’s maddeningly tautological, “A Rose is a rose is a rose.” What did it mean to say that, “God is all in all,” or that “Spirit is immortal truth/matter is mortal error.” What, moreover, was so wrong with the material world—my pretty royal blue velvet dress with its lace collar, matched with my navy patent leather Mary Janes--that it was a mistake? And if the visible world was an illusion, where did that leave evils like slavery and the Holocaust, and what were you supposed to do about them? These were the questions with which I pestered my patient Sunday School teachers as I sat with folded hands at one of the round maple tables in the basement of the First Church of Christ, Scientist, whose robin’s egg blue walls were decorated with plaques with quotes from Science and Health and The Bible.

The most important question, which I never could have formulated, much less have been brave enough to ask was, why was Mary Baker Eddy’s God not helping my mother? Why was she spending increasing amounts of time in bed—not getting up to see my sister and me off to school, and still huddled beneath her burial mound of comforters at 3:00 in the afternoon, the shades pulled tight against the bright afternoon sun. Beside her in bed, in ravines on either side of her body, were navy-blue hard-bound copies of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, the Christian Science Concordance, and Robert Peel’s multi-volume biography of Mary Baker Eddy. There was the small, heavily underlined pamphlet called The Lesson, which came each week in a brown wrapper and included daily readings from The Bible and Science & Heal. There were rolled-up, rubber-banded copies of The Christian Science Monitor; under the bed were copies of The Christian Science Sentinel, which included testimonies of healing from ordinary Christian Scientists about how they had been cured of broken bones and impacted wisdom teeth, how they had prayed their way through job losses and financial reversals.

Years later, taking college courses in women’s history, I would learn that Mary Baker Eddy, thrice-married and often short of cash, had been an invalid herself. Like many smart, undereducated middle-class women in the nineteenth century, Mrs, Eddy suffered from a menu of mysterious ailments—headaches, fatigue, anxiety, hypersensitivity to noise—that would now be diagnosed as a mood disorder and treated with the latest serotonin-reuptake inhibitors like Prozac and Zoloft. But in the years after the Civil War, American medicine in general, and psychiatry in particular, was still in its infancy, and people who suffered from mental disorders were left to their own devices, becoming agoraphobic like Emily Dickinson, who was born a year after MBE, or seeking relief from the latest faddish healers—like those who peddled phrenology, mesmerism, and magnetism. Mary Baker Eddy, after studying with the famed healer Phineas Quimby, and taking to heart his central idea about the power of mind over matter, began, well past the middle of her life, to take up her bed and walk. She became a healer herself, and developed a following to rival Qimby’s. People came from all over New England to Lynn, Massachusetts to study with her; by 1886, when her contemporary Emily Dickinson had died of Bright’s disease at 55, Mary Baker Eddy had already published Science & Health, and was busy soliciting funds for the massive Mother Church in Boston. By the time Mrs. Eddy passed away at the age of 89 in 1910, she had become, according to Mark Twain, one of the most powerful women in America.

Christian Science saved Mary Baker Eddy, but it failed my mother. In the years after her divorce, she continued to read The Lesson every day, her depression and anxiety piggy-backing onto other health problems, such as high blood pressure and Type II Diabetes.

For my part, I became the archetypal angry young woman, despising all religion—not only the God of Mary Baker Eddy but also the God of the Unitarians and the Congregationalists and the Catholics and the Jews. My creed became the existentialist lyricism of Bob Dylan and the lassitudinous blues of B.B. King. It was the mid-seventies, and the country was suffering from the malaise brought on by the political betrayals of Watergate and Vietnam. A hard rain was gonna fall on all the sacred cows the older generation had worshipped—organized religion, Repbublican politics, conventional marriage, the military-industrial complex, everything was going to be destroyed and made again, in our image.

Then, a curious thing happened in my middle forties. The periods of depression and lassitude, which had begun in my teen years and dogged me all my life, began to worsen. On the surface, my life, like that of the country’s which settled down into the feel-good platitudes of Fleetwood Mac and Bill Clinton, seemed normal, if unremarkable. After losing my first husband to brain cancer, I had married again, and given birth to a much-longed for baby son. My family and I were living in northern Vermont, where my husband taught writing at Johnson State College. I had two Master’s Degrees and a modest success as a freelance writer, having written a memoir and several articles for national women’s magazines. But nothing seemed to fill the hollow in my deep heart’s core, the sense that, when all was said and done, I was lost, tangled up in blue, a driver bearing down hard on the accelerator, moving further along the highway to nowhere.

Like Mary Baker Eddy over a century before me, I searched for the key that would unlock my despair. I played hours of tennis until every muscle was bursting with lactic acid, baked apple cakes and chocolate-chip cookies for the PTA, wrote long letters to my agent with ideas for new writing projects, the enthusiasm for which I could never sustain past the first ten or twenty pages. I tried Prozac, Zoloft and Celexa, and nearly every night I self-medicated into oblivion with white wine, which my son jokingly observed should be spelled, ‘whine.’ Sometimes late at night when I couldn’t sleep, I even whispered the hocus-pocus tautologies of the Scientific Statement of Being.

Time passed; my mother moved from Florida to Virginia to New Hampshire, back to Virginia and back to New Hampshire, becoming increasingly dysfunctional with each uprooting. In 2005, she passed away at the New London Hospital in New Hampshire at the age of 80, my sister and I holding her hands as she took her last breath. One of the final bills that arrived a week after her death was from a Christian Science practitioner in Toronto, Canada. My sister paid it and sent her Mom’s obituary, which I had written and placed in newspapers in four states. The practitioner sent a kind note back:” You know you and your sister meant everything to your mom,” she wrote. It was the sort of thing people said to the bereaved, and yet we took comfort in the fact that our mother’s love for us was one of the constants in her life.

Meanwhile, my family and I moved to Massachusetts so that our son could The Hartsbrook School, a Waldorf school based on the alternative, educational principles of Rudolph Steiner, whose philosophy which places the spirit at the center of the learning process, is, in some respects, similar to the mind-over-matter creed of Mary Baker Eddy. One of my son’s friends at the new school turned out to be a Christian Scientist, and his mother was a Christian Science practitioner. It was as if fate was calling me to put all the pieces of my life into some kind of pattern, to make them make sense.

I could not bring myself to return to the First Church of Christ, Scientist, but I was hungry for some kind of spiritual connection. At the suggestion of P., my dear friend from graduate school and long-time member of UU, I joined the Society in Northampton. I came alone, as my husband contended that religion was a crutch (this didn’t really bother me, as I had said as much myself back in the day). My teenaged son preferred to sleep in on Sunday mornings. (To my great surprise and gratitude, both came to my August 2nd sermon.)

A small legacy from my mother permitted me to devote myself to writing full-time. But the depression followed me like fellow depressive Winston Churchill’s legendary Black Dog—I tied it up outside the Forbes Library in Northampton and the Jones Library in Amherst, where I worked most days, but it kept barking and yapping, demanding that I pay attention to it. Maybe I was kidding myself that I could revive my writing career, I was in my fifties now; most writers my age had several books under their belt. Instead of working, I would surf the Internet, Googling my out-of-print memoir and learning to my despair that it was going for one penny on Amazon, for one dollar on E-Bay. What if nothing came of all this time I was squandering, what if I ran through all my money, and had nothing to show for it? Maybe, in the end, I was simply a prisoner of my genetic heritage, neurochemically programmed to repeat my mother’s failures, destined to live forever tangled up in blue.

“Make a study of your depression, learn everything you can about it.” The voice belonged to my first husband, Leonard Feldstein, who had been a psychiatrist in New York, who had been dead more than twenty-five years. The words came to me during one of these long wasteful afternoons at the library. But the words were addressed not to me but to one of Len’s former patients, whom I hadn’t thought about in years, and whom I’ll call Terry.

Terry was a psychologist in her late forties, a former concert pianist who lived alone near Carnegie Hall and saw patients in the living room of her one-bedroom apartment. Terry suffered from depression, not just a sometime attack of the blues, but serious, crippling depression where she would be so distraught she couldn’t get out of bed. During her senior year at Bennington College as well as after the break-up of her marriage, she had made several suicide attempts, for which she had been hospitalized.

Terry was no longer Len’s patient—he had stopped seeing her several years before Len and I were married--but she still used to call, always at night and always in tears. Len had an answering service (this was well before the era of cell phones) so she never would interrupt our evenings directly, but the service would phone, and by the pinched features on his somber face, I would know that it was Terry, calling not just once, but several times within the last hour. Len would call her back immediately, and often he would be on the phone with her through the night, listening as she cried that her life was a mess, that there was nothing to live for, that she couldn’t go on.

Sometimes he would reassure her that whatever she was feeling was intensified by her solitude, by the lateness of the hour, by the wine she had drunk earlier. He would tell her that the despair would pass, that she herself was separate from and more than her depression. Sometimes, when her crying would subside, he would talk about his own dark periods after his own divorce, how he read the Bible. “Weeping may endure for a night,” he would quote from The Book of Psalms, “But Joy cometh in the morning.” When Terry, a lapsed Catholic, said she couldn’t abide anything having to do with scripture, Len talked about the existentialist writer Samuel Beckett, and quoted from him: “I can’t go on. I won’t go on. I’ll go on.”

Len reminded her that all the great artists had suffered from depression—Goya, Van Gogh, Picasso, Rilke, Eliot, Yeats, that no sensitive person could be immune from the atonal music of hopelessness and helplessness, the sense that one was utterly alone, the world a “booming, buzzing confusion.” He urged Terry to think of her condition not as a burden but as a gift, one that she could use in her own therapeutic practice to help others.
“Make a study of what you are feeling,” Len would repeat when Terry was finally calm enough to hang up the phone, “draw it, paint it, write about it, learn everything you can about it.”

Then, in a Eureka moment reminiscent of Archimedes in the bathtub, right there in the Forbes Library among various loafers and idlers playing computer games and staring at Internet porn, it occurred to me make a study of blue—blue, which was, in fact, my favorite color, and the favorite color of most people in the world, I would learn, blue, blue which was a synonym for depression.

“The test of a first-rate intelligence,” F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, “is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind and still retain the ability to function.” What I began to discover about blue was that contradiction and duality were at its very core. The Russian painter Vassily Kandinsky called blue the “most spiritual of all colors,” and yet it was also emblematic of a mood disorder that affected millions. It was the color of the sky, which Emily Dickinson termed the “inns of molten blue,” it was the color of her paradisal “blue peninsula” yet it was also the shade of the blue-bottle fly that was the very last thing one glimpsed before death. Color theorists contend that blue expresses dominance and power, and blue was indeed the color of Roger Federer’s shirt when he won the French Open for the very first time this year. At the same time, code blue was also the hospital’s alert for a patient going into cardiac arrest; blue was the color of the flesh turned before it turned gray.

Navy Blue was the color of the uniform of the Union’s soldier’s during the Civil War, just a shade darker than the blue-gray of the Confederate soldier, and the blues were the name of the music that African-Americans invented after the war was over, when African-Americans discovered that even though they had won their freedom as well as the right to vote, they were still second-class citizens, not fit to live in the same neighborhoods as whites or attend the same schools or sit in the same sections of the bus or even drink from the same water fountain as whites. Blue was the color of all the states that voted for Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election, and blue was the color of President Obama’s suit when he was inaugurated President of the United States.

So what does all this have to do with the god of the Unitarians?
I would like to conclude with another story.

Depressed people tend not to notice details; for us, the season is always deep winter; the hour groggily post-prandial. We don’t “see a world in a grain of sand,” as William Blake rhapsodized, but simply sand, about which—whether it contains mica or feldspar or bits of broken shells--we are incurious. Which brings me to confess something I noticed several months ago as I walked into this very red brick Greek Revival Unitarian Church. I had just removed my bike helmet (when the weather is good, I ride my ten-speed to the services, which reduces my carbon footprint) and was hurrying up the stone steps when, perhaps because it was spring or maybe because I was uncharacteristically early, I looked up. Then I saw what I had never noticed before: The big double front doors are blue, each paneled door topped with a square window of leaded glass divided into eight, fan-like triangular sections. The blue is a lovely azure color, Virgin Mary blue, Saint-Denis Blue, Chartres Blue, the blue that for centuries, from the late Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Reformation and beyond, has been one of God’s favorite colors.

I have been going to the UU services for over a year; I have sipped coffee in the parlor and praised the organist and shaken the hand of the interim minister and used the transgender bathroom in the basement; I have belted out my favorite African-American hymn, “This Little Light of Mine,” with the other congregants, spaced out during readings of Frog and Toad for the children before they leave for their RE classes, brought visiting guests and friends to the services; I even have my own name tag, which hangs on a ribbon in the entryway, which I sometimes remember to pin to my jacket…I have faithfully performed all these things, but I have never noticed that the front doors are blue.

Parsing L'Heure Bleue

2009-07-18T08:20:00.000-04:00

The delights of parsing blue are many: Not only do I muzzle what fellow depressive Winston Churchill called the “Black Dog” of depression, I also travel to exotic intellectual locations, places I scarcely knew existed before undertaking this singular journey. For instance, for my birthday, which came and went a month ago without much fanfare, my dear friend, C., who has been a generous midwife to this blog, gave me a bottle of L’Heure Bleue.

Entre nous, I have never been much of a girlie girl. For most of my adult life, I have rued the feminine niceties of perfume, lipstick, make-up, rouge, eye-shadow, eye-brow pencil, and mascara. I rarely even bother to accessorize my faded jeans and sea-blue shirts. I have a drawer full of colorful silk scarves, but I can’t be bothered to put them on, much less layer or wrap them fashionably around my throat or shoulders.

My mother, who loved to trick my sister and me out in frilly dresses with velvet collars from Best & Company, occasionally tried to cast the tomboy out of me, like some Old Testament prophet getting rid of Satan. From the time I was about 12 until my late thirties before my second marriage, with time out for the years when her own depression made it hard for her to care whether I looked like a shaggy pony that’s been rolling in manure, she filled my ears with fashion advice: how you should never wear black near your face, as it made you look washed out, how monochromatic colors, worn with artistry, could be flattering. She sometimes gave me presents of miniature bottles of perfume, with instructions to dab a little on my arms and around my neck. Like this, she would say, sitting upright as Aphrodite at her dressing table and misting the undersides of her wrists, the hollows of her elbow and dips along her collarbone with her favorite Chanel No. 5 before hurrying off to cast her perfumed glow like some mating firefly at a country club tea dance.

While I loved to look at her looking at herself in the glass, I thought it was gross to stink up my own sunburned flesh with any Frenchified potion, however aromatic. The only smells I craved were those of fresh-mown grass and the sweet stink of fresh manure piling up in the fields and drawing its lace curtain of tiny flies.

But in the twilight of post-menopausal pulchritude, with Mom’s fashion dictives as faded as 1940s pin-ups of Hollywood It Girls, I relish the prospect of misting my secret hollows with L’Heure Bleue. Of course, were it any other perfume, I wouldn’t be the least bit jazzed, but L’Heure Bleue, a mix of roses, iris and jasmine created by celebrated perfumier Jacques Guerlain in the summer of 1912, and meant to evoke the pleasures of Paris at dusk when the roses in the Jardin du Luxembourg and the Bois de Boulogne are said to be at their most aromatic, well, L’Heure Bleue is hardly a perfume at all, but un pays, a Zeitgeist.

“What scent are you wearing,” demands the hapless heroine of another stronger, prouder young woman in Jean Rhys’ first novel, Quartet.

“L’Heure Bleue of Guerlain,” answers the self-possessed young woman.

“Guerlain! Listen to that!” mocks her sometime male companion, as if the idea of linking such a fine perfume with this denizen of the Moulin Rouge is a joke.

“You get on my nerves,” retorts the young woman calmly.

Jean Rhys loved L’Heure Bleue and wore it all her life, according to Lillian Pizzichini, who has just published The Blue Hour, a harrowing account of Rhys’ rootless, alcohol-and-perfume soaked existence, which mirrored the fate of one of her melancholy heroines. Growing up in the British colony of Dominica and sent off to England at the age of 16 to attend the Perce School for Girls, Rhys once acknowledged that she didn’t know a thing about mathematics or machines. But like many young girls who came of age before women received the right to vote, Rhys knew how to captivate men.

There was an early first marriage to Jean Lenglet, a Polish journalist who dabbled in stolen antiques and who served time in a French prison. There was Rhys’ celebrated affair with the older, richer Ford Madox Ford, who gave Rhys money and published Rhys’ first short story in the transatlantic review. (When Ford dumped her, Rhys got her revenge by putting him in Quartet, as the self-centered English picture dealer H.G. Heidler.) There was second husband Leslie Tilden Smith, an English literary agent who met Rhys after her first two novels were published and who was fervently devoted to the pretty novelist, correcting her proofs and looking after Maryvonne, Rhys’ only child. After Smith died suddenly of a heart attack, Rhys took up with his cousin, Max Hamer, who became husband number three.

And yet, despite the manic changes of addresses and lovers and husbands, despite the gin, white wine, and sweet vermouth downed without restraint in cafes all over Paris and in bed-sits all over London, despite a vicious temper that landed her in court facing charges of abuse and disorderly conduct from neighbors, Rhys still managed to write five critically acclaimed novels, still published--at 76, after all her books had gone out of print and she was virtually unknown throughout Great Britain--her masterpiece, Wide Sargasso Sea.

“I must write,” she once confided to the American novelist, David Plante, whose essay about her in Difficult Women is a little masterpiece, “If I stop writing, my life will have been an abject failure. It is that already to other people. But it could be an abject failure to myself. I will not have earned my death.”

Marry in Blue

2009-07-03T12:57:00.001-04:00

I love weddings—the processional march by Mendelssohn, the hush before the bride comes, her radiance lighting up the faces of the congregants like so many votive candles, the readings about life being empty without love, the sober exchange of vows, the first kiss, Purcell’s Trumpet Tune recessional to joyful applause. All weddings move me, but those where the bride and groom are no longer young, where the bride moves slowly down the aisle on her son’s arm and where the groom combs back gray hair with gnarled hands before taking gold bands from a dimpled grandson, well, these weddings touch me because they prove that hope never ends, that even the old can be surprised by joy.

“If you are present for one moment,” said the fiftyish bride quoting Nietzsche to her fiftyish groom in the musty nave of the 18th century Unitarian Universalist Church in Boston, “then you are present for your entire life.”

I knew the bride in another life when we were both married to first husbands. We met in a suburban New York writing group, responding to an ad in our local newspaper. We appeared to have little in common, save the coincidence that our husbands were both named Leonard. She had three children under the age of 10, and had dropped out of college to get married; I had a Master’s Degree, no children, and was a veteran of several serious relationships. Raised in upstate New York, her parents were first-generation Polish-American immigrants; I grew up in western Massachusetts, and my ancestors were buried in my hometown cemetery.

And yet, in the deepest strata of our being, we had everything in common. We both lacked confidence and felt unfinished, hiding behind our stronger, surer Leonards, struggling to sculpt ourselves into form, like Michelangelo’s slaves emerging from slabs of Carrara marble. I remember one poem she wrote back then that took the top of my head off (Emily Dickinson’s description of what a poem should do): It was about her mikva, the ritual bath Jewish women undergo during menstruation or after childbirth as well as before converting to Judaism. She described the fear and humiliation of taking off her clothes in a public bath somewhere deep in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, other older women coolly appraising her breasts and buttocks, a rabbi chanting Hebrew after she emerged from the rainwater-filled pool--all these creepy rites of an ancient religion wordlessly endured in order to please the observant Jewish family of her husband-to-be.

Time passed, bringing changes to our lives as wives. My Leonard died of brain cancer, hers got a job in Dallas; she moved to Texas; I moved to Illinois. She and I lost track of one another, and yet moved in tandem paths of individuation, engaged in the long, slow work of finishing ourselves.

Then one day, as if it were happening in the surreal, non-sequent blue of a dream, I got a phone call at the Vermont Studio Center, where I was working as a grants and publicity writer. It was my friend, whom I hadn’t seen in fifteen years, tracking me down on Google. We talked for close to an hour. She said she was divorced, living in Boston, running a successful design business, her children married with children of their own. I fast-forwarded through my own changes: how I had remarried and had a son, how I had published a book about the first year of my widowhood. More e-mails and phone calls followed; she tracked down my memoir in a second-hand bookshop, read it and wrote me a loving, generous e-mail response.

We both moved again (we also have this in common, a passion for upending our lives), but this time we kept in touch, managed to meet in the Pioneer Valley (remarkably, we looked the same, if a bit rounder and blonder), took walks along the Connecticut River where we recalled funny stories about our Leonards (mine, a proud Leftist as well as an irreverent jokester, called hers, a serious Republican and high-earning exec in a soft drinks corporation, a ‘soda jerk,’ which everyone but her Leonard found hysterically funny). Then one day, one of her long e-mails appeared in my in-box with gob smacking news: she had met someone on Craigslist.

Apparently, she had posted an ad in the personals section in which she stated that she was looking for a serious relationship. But here’s what singled her ad out from all the others blathering on about sunsets and long walks on the beach: she wanted a guy who knew Mark Strand (note bene, all those who are looking for love in the personals—it’s quirky details like these that will lead you to your soul mate). Within days, she had conjured up her Strandophile: he was a divorced journalist and artist who lived in the Greater Boston area. After many meetings--virtual and actual--they got married in the UU church in Jamaica Plain on the first day of summer.

In the ceremony, which was attended by a small circle of relatives and friends (including this happy blogger), the bride and groom read each other poems they had written (hers was a list of the ten things she loved about him and began with, "I love how you always listen to me even when the Red Sox are on TV"). The groom read a similarly sweet poem about her, and before the kiss (billed on their wedding program as ‘the opening kiss’) read a letter from Mark Strand himself, sending his congratulations.

But one of the best things about the wedding—at least for this aficionado of all things blue--was that the bride wore a brilliant turquoise shawl over her white cotton gown. Perhaps she only wore it because it was drafty in the church or because she felt self-conscious in her low-cut dress. Or maybe she was fulfilling that most ancient of bridal superstitions about wearing “something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue, and a silver sixpence in her shoe.” Whatever the reason, the turquoise shawl, which connected this grandmotherly bride to generations of brides all the way back to Roman times who married in blue because they believed it was the color of fidelity (“Marry in Blue/Lover be True” opines one proverb)—this shock of turquoise glowing like a cluster of semi-precious stones deep in the mine of the pre-revolutionary church, gave me a little thrill, and when I hugged my friend after the ceremony, I cried, “You wore blue!”

I raise a cyber-glass to this blue bride and her groom. May they love long and well.

The Color of Life

2009-06-19T14:05:00.000-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Blue Eagle & Edward Hopper

2009-06-08T12:06:00.000-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ode to a Blue Bike

2009-05-22T11:58:00.001-04:00

“Life is like riding a bicycle,” Einstein once wrote to his younger son, Eduard, a brilliant but troubled student who would soon be hospitalized for schizophrenia, “You have to keep moving or you lose your balance.”

As I pedal my blue Motobecane along the bike paths of the Pioneer Valley during the lengthening days of May, I ponder Einstein’s words, which have been much quoted by biographers and bloggers. Not that they helped poor Eduard, nicknamed Tete, by his doting mother, Mileva Maric, from whom the physicist was divorced in 1919. Einstein hated being separated from his two boys and visited them on holidays (he was teaching in Berlin and they lived with their mother in Zurich), but their day-to-day care fell to Mileva, who suffered from depression herself. The older son, Hans Albert, would become an engineer and follow his father to the United States, but Tete would not be so lucky. In 1932, the 22-year-old abandoned his studies—he had hoped to become a psychiatrist—and entered Burgholzi, a fin-de-siecle, palace-like pile on a wooded hill in southeastern Zurich, where some of the most celebrated psychiatrists of the age were gathered, including Carl Jung, who worked briefly as the assistant to Director Eugen Bleuler, who first coined the term schizophrenia. But all these brilliant practitioners were like all the king’s horses and all the king’s men who couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again. Eduard Einstein would return to the Zurich sanitarium many times over the next decades, residing there full time after the death of his mother in 1948. He died at Burgholzi at the age of 55, his life over before it had ever really begun.

I can only imagine the singular hell of schizophrenia—the world fractured and distorted as if one were stuck inside a Surrealist painting, voices yelling in the head like a violent rap song one can never turn off. But I know the immobility of depression, and I know it’s almost impossible to feel sad pumping along a bike path, skunk cabbage growing in velvety profusion in the marshes, long-tailed squirrels and the occasional rabbit hurrying into the bushes.

My blue Motobecane is very old, and I have known it longer than either of my two husbands. My first husband, Len, bought it for me in a bike shop on Martha’s Vineyard during one summer we spent there in 1978. We got it at R.W. Cutler’s in Edgartown, and I remember this only because a gold sticker with the shop logo, two silhouetted figures on a tandem bicycle, is still miraculously affixed to a lower corner of the frame near the rear derailleur.

Len loved France and all things French (I can still hear him singing La Marseillaise as he plunged into the cold waters of Menemsha Sound). He convinced me to get the Motobecane, which had Made in France in block letters along the down tube, Mirage in fancy script on both sides of the crossbar, and the red, white and black Motobecane shield beneath the front reflector. Len said that the French were particular about anything mechanical—they were the ones who invented the bicycle and they also developed the first high-speed trains in Europe; I couldn’t go wrong with the Motobecane. I would have been happy with a cheaper Japanese model (I was and am still a thrifty Yankee who hates to pay top dollar for anything), but Len was the archetypal Jewish mensch who wanted only the best for his shiksa. Nothing but this stylish French Mirage with its low slung handlebars, skinny tires, and light-as-a-branch steel frame would do for his Beckala.

I suppose there must have been other colors—silver, red or orange--but I chose the metallic blue because even then I loved all things blue. The paint is now faded and scarred with rust, but three decades ago it was a lovely, cerulean blue with darker blue bands around its down tube, a dark blue brake cable running along the crossbar. The bike with its sparkle and flashes of navy reminded me of a certain vista that you could see from almost anywhere along Menemsha Beach or the Gay Head Cliffs: Vineyard Sound with the darkish shapes of the Elizabeth Islands in the distance, a wrap-around landscape of sea and sky, miles and miles of blue and deeper blue, so dazzling that on a sunny, summer day, you couldn’t look at it without sunglasses or, if you had none, without holding your hand over your forehead, couldn’t look without feeling dizzy with so much blueness.

Martha’s Vineyard is a biker’s paradise—much of the island from Vineyard Haven to Oak Bluffs to Edgartown is flat as a skipping stone with hillier terrain up island towards Chilmark. But once the metallic blue touring bike was mine, I rarely rode it—not at Martha’s Vineyard, not in New York City, not in Westchester County or in Fairfield County, where we lived after we married in 1981. The bike gathered dust in an upstairs back bedroom of our farmhouse in Bedford Hills, in the garage of our cape in Redding, Connecticut, its chain in need of grease, its tires in need of air. If anyone had asked, I would have said that I didn’t want to ride alone (Len couldn’t ride a bike, owing to a mastoid operation he’d had as a child, which caused occasional balance problems), would have said that I was too busy. I wouldn’t have said I didn’t ride because I was depressed, because I didn’t get that there was a connection between the two events: that if I had been less depressed I would have ridden the bike more and if I had ridden the bike more I would have been less depressed.

After Len died, I detached the spring-loaded front wheel of the Motobecane Mirage and boxed it up with the rest of the bike in a Bridgeport, Connecticut warehouse. Meanwhile, I struggled to find my way as a young widow, moving first to the Midwest to try to make a life with a man, and when that didn’t work out, down to Washington, D.C. for a graduate degree. When I married for the second time and moved to Vermont, the bike finally emerged from storage, red stickers dangling from its rusting chrome pedals. But I still didn’t take it out much, this time blaming the steep hills of the Green Mountains. It would be too simplistic to say that there was a one-to-one correspondence between the force field of my depression and the amount of time I spent on the Mirage, but what I did notice was this: whenever I got into a routine of riding the blue bike, in the morning before work or occasionally in the evening after dinner, singing to myself that silly ditty by Arlo Guthrie, “I don’t want a pickle/just want to ride on my motor-cy-cle…I don’t want to die, just want to ride on my motor-cy-cle,” something shifted. My body, perhaps because two perfectly constructed French derailleurs were levitating it, felt lighter, less burdened with the negativity that shuts down most depressives (you’re fat, you’re old, you’re a loser, you’re a nobody).

Three years ago, when my family and I moved to the Pioneer Valley so our son could attend the Hartsbrook School, the Motobecane got wedged into the back of the U-Haul with sofas and suitcases. We rented a duplex just half a mile from the Norwottock Rail Trail, and pretty soon I was taking mini-excursions to Whole Foods, Barnes & Noble, even to the Cineplex, proud to be saving money on gas as well as doing my bit to reduce global warming. Along with other bike riders, I grumbled about the bits of recycled glass that were mixed in with the blacktop when the trail was created in 1993 (you didn’t have to be an Einstein to figure out that this was not a good idea). That first year, I got five flat tires. But then Dorothy at the local bike shop on Railroad Street suggested I invest in heavier tires: I took her advice, and haven’t had a flat since. I’ve also found other ways to make the bike more user-friendly, adding a cup-holder, rear-view mirror and a wire basket attached to an aluminum frame over the rear wheel.

There’s a black-and-white photo of Einstein riding his bicycle that can be found on many blogs and websites: It was taken in 1933 in Pasadena, California, when Einstein was a visiting research associate at Caltech. The world-famous scientist is dressed up in tie, sweater vest, tailored pants, and fresh-shined dress shoes. He looks like he is preparing to deliver a lecture on quantum theory. He has no helmet (people didn’t wear protective headgear back then), and his mane of white hair is windblown. The 54-year-old genius, who once confided that he never really grew up, is grinning like a kindergartener. He’s smiling even though he is worried about many things over which he has no control: his boy, Tete, who has been diagnosed with schizophrenia; the Nazis, who have been firing Jews from universities and burning books, screaming that relativity theory is rubbish; his summer home outside of Berlin, to which he will not return.

The force field around Albert Einstein is dark and full of black holes, and yet he himself remains a conduit of shining, cerulean-blue California light. Einstein keeps pedaling because he still can, because he knows that if he stops, even for a second, he will fall.

Nocturne at Midnight

2009-05-13T13:32:00.001-04:00

Six days after Deborah Digges jumped to her death in western Massachusetts, I drove to the coast of southern Maine to celebrate my dad’s ninetieth birthday. This juxtaposition of tragedy and triumph is common in midlife, framing our days with a collage of contrasts, making us sometimes as indifferent as the ploughman in Bruegel’s Fall of Icarus, who pays no attention to the boy who has tumbled from the sky.

Not that my dad would be terribly broken up by the suicide of a 59-year-old poet he’d never heard of; you don’t reach your ninth decade in this vale of tears by being overly sentimental, a weepy Caspar Milquetoast. And yet Dad has not been a stranger to dark moods over his long life; as a child, I remember him playing, over and over, on a saucer-sized vinyl record on his turntable, the mournful ballad by Peggy Lee, “Is that all there is? Then let’s keep dancing…” This ditty exasperated me in the same way that “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” by Bob Dylan exasperated him, but I would never have dreamed of telling him so. (He felt no compunction about demanding that I turn off “that garbage by Bobby Die-lan,” whose last name Dad knew perfectly well how to pronounce but said wrong just to annoy me.) A few years later, when the television series M*A*S*H was all the rage, he listened obsessively to its theme song, “Suicide is Painless; it brings on many changes…”

And then there were the hardcover books that piled up on the slender end table in his study—THE SAVAGE GOD: A STUDY OF SUICIDE, by A. Alvarez; MAN’S SEARCH FOR MEANING, which recounted Victor Frank’s survival in a concentration camp; and THE DENIAL OF DEATH by Ernest Becker. Whenever Dad was teaching his Dale Carnegie class, attending a meeting of the Lion’s Club, or traveling to New York on business, I parked myself on his red leather sofa in his book-lined study, usually with a box of Freihofer’s Chocolate Chip cookies and a tumbler of milk by my side, and read until my head ached.

So much misery for a fat, friendless teenager to gorge herself on. There was Sylvia Plath, survivor of multiple suicide attempts, and dead at 30 from the gas of an oven she’d turned on herself in a London flat in 1963. There were the Jews, gassed not by choice but by coercion, rounded up and stripped naked in Dachau, Auschwitz, and Bergen-Belsen. The Austrian-Jewish psychiatrist Victor Frankl, who had spent five years in four different labor camps, including Auchwitz, had lost his father, mother, brother, and wife in the Holocaust. Victor Frankl had stayed alive by summoning up the figure of his beloved wife, who had been shipped off to another camp, talking to her while fending off hunger, beatings and forced marches. Other survivors had recited poetry, scrawled drawings on bits of toilet paper, sung arias from operas they remembered. People, observed Frankl, could endure anything as long as they could still love, could stay connected to some person or idea greater than themselves. According to Ernest Becker, every human being needed a causa sui project (four years of Latin at Miss Hall’s School was finally proving useful) to help him forget that he was a “god who shits,” a great big pile of nothingness.

I didn’t have a clue what my own causa sui project was, but sometimes it seemed that Dad had one. Late at night, after coming home from his many meetings and long after my mother, sister and I had gone to bed, Dad would sit alone at the grand piano in the living room, playing Chopin. Dad was no Artur Rubinstein; he had taken up the piano as an adult, beginning around the same time I did, in the middle 1960s. (Years later, he would explain that his parents had not let him play as a child, insisting that the piano was for girls and forcing him to play the trumpet, which he gave up as soon as he was allowed to.) Dad and I had the same teacher, a woman named Betty Maby (this was her real name, which I accepted without irony as a child but which now seems darkly comic, if she were a character in a theatre of the absurd). Mrs. Maby had been a concert pianist in her youth, but was reduced in middle life to instructing children (still mostly girls, as my grandparents had observed a generation ago) in dumbed-down versions of Sheep May Safely Graze. (The first time I ever saw an antimacassar was in Mrs. Maby’s darkened living room in Lee, where freshly laundered squares of crocheted ivory and white lace stood guard over the backs and arms of sofas and armchairs.)

Dad was Betty Maby’s only adult student—he got to call her by her first name—and she was patient with him, his lack of rhythm and pitch, his middle-aged, arthritic fingers which were as clunky and intractable as corkscrews. But what he lacked in timing, tone and finger dexterity, he more than made up for in will. He even agreed to play in her spring and autumn student recitals in the antimacassar-ridden living room in Lee, performing at the end after all the children had finished, massacring simplified arrangements of Fur Elise and Air on a G String, despite the tranquillizers he took to still his shaking fingers. But no one but me, his daughter in a frilly dress shrinking into a sea of doilies in the back, seemed mortified by his performance. All the parents complimented him afterward over punch and cookies, confiding that they admired his courage.

When Dad played alone, with no one listening, he was at ease. There were two pieces by Chopin—the short Prelude in E Minor, which was fairly easy, and the Nocturne Opus 9 in E Flat Major which was more advanced--that he practiced over and over again, swaying on the piano bench as he leaned into and away from the keys, an expressiveness that Betty Maby, who insisted on an erect, still posture at all times, never permitted her younger charges. Dad rarely got through either piece without a mistake. The Nocturne, in particular, included several trills that were challenging for even the most experienced of players. But he played on, repeating the troublesome measures where he faltered, often waking me from the guest room above the back stairs where I had retreated to get an uninterrupted night’s sleep. When the house would momentarily grow quiet, I would turn over groggily in my bed, relieved that he was calling it a night. But he had just stopped to turn on the metronome or crack his fingers back into shape. Within minutes, the mournful chords would roll out all over again.

Dad played the piano for forty years. He played long after I gave it up, through his separation and divorce, purchasing an upright Spinet when he moved into a two-bedroom bachelor’s cottage on Lake Onota. He continued to perform in Betty Maby’s student recitals in Lee, his longtime companion, Janet, and his elderly mother in the audience, though his mother confided to me, her granddaughter, that she really didn’t see why he kept at the darned thing, and why, for Pete’s sakes, couldn’t Betty get him to stop POUNDING on the keys. After his mother’s death in 1982, he purchased a second-hand Baldwin that had been used in summer concerts at Tanglewood and moved it into his mother’s living room, now his living room, in a sunny corner overlooking the back gardens. When Betty Maby retired and moved to Florida, Dad found a new teacher, who urged him to tackle more modern composers such as Scott Joplin and George Gershwin.

At Thanksgiving gatherings, which had become festive noisy affairs of a large blended family, Dad would preside over impromptu musicales, where the theme song from the Titanic, the Ashokan Farewell, Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring, and Erik Satie’s Gymnopedie’s would be picked out by various grandchildren and step-grandchildren. At the end of each performance, regardless of whether it was heartbreakingly beautiful or simply heartbreaking, Dad would clap and shout, “Encore! Encore!” When the other performers begged him to take his place at the piano bench, he obliged with a halting but lively rendition of Scott Joplin’s The Entertainer.

Dad moved his piano to the two-bedroom condo he shares with Janet on the grounds of their assisted living facility in Maine, but he rarely plays much anymore. Instead, he reads The New York Times, walks on the beach, watches television, and does crossword puzzles. Last winter he broke his hip while walking on the ice, and while he has made a remarkable recovery, he has become more cautious, less driven by the need to fill every moment with purposeful activity, more content to sit of a warm afternoon on his terrace and nap.

He’s ninety. He’s entitled to sleep in the sun. But I would give anything to hear him play that Chopin Nocturne again.

Leaving Blue Hills Road: The Suicide of Deborah Digges

2009-05-01T11:01:00.003-04:00

“The suicide doesn’t go alone, he takes everybody with him,” wrote the novelist William Maxwell. When prizewinning poet and Tufts University professor Deborah Digges jumped from the upper bleachers of McGuirk Alumni Stadium at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst on April 10th, she took hundreds, perhaps thousands, with her: her children, brothers, sisters, ex-husbands, friends, students, colleagues, neighbors, and readers. She took the young women of Temple University’s Lacrosse Team who were practicing at the stadium that afternoon: they were the ones who called the police after finding her on the ground, badly injured, at the end of their practice. And she took me, a fellow writer and resident of the Pioneer Valley, who cannot pass McGuirk Stadium on Rocky Hill Road without grieving for her.

I never met Deborah Digges, though I was once invited to a dinner party years ago in Washington, D.C. where she and her second husband, poet Stanley Plumley, were to have been among the guests. The hostess was another writer, a fellow graduate student in the M.F.A. program at George Mason University in Virginia. I declined her invitation because I was feeling sorry for myself over a failed love affair and in no mood to make literary niceties. Now I am sorry I didn’t go, because if I had shared a meal with Deborah Digges, I might now possess some insight, however shadowy, into why she killed herself.

It had been a spectacular day, that Good Friday before Easter, unseasonably warm and sunny, more like mid-June than mid-April, with forsythia and magnolia coming into bloom, daffodils and crocuses sprouting up along the roadsides. As my husband and I inched east in bumper-to-bumper traffic along Route 9 to pick up our son, who had been let out of school early and was playing tennis at Amherst College, we noticed cells of college kids on lawns playing horseshoes, drinking beer, waving as we passed. Every other patch of muddy green seemed to host such a gathering—the boys shirtless, the girls in bikinis, everyone high on sunshine and the holiday (Passover and Easter came back-to-back this year).

Everyone except Deborah Digges, the 59-year-old widow in the driver’s seat of her VW Jetta, leaving the 1950s yellow Cape where she lived alone with her dogs and cat, passing the green mailbox she had painted herself, perched on its filigreed, white-painted stick like the welcoming smile of an old friend. The mail had already come, and she was driving to the end of Blue Hills Road, no husband in the passenger seat (her third husband, Dr. Frank Lowe, a former dean of the veterinary schools of Tufts and Cornell Universities, had died of cancer six years ago); no child in the back seat (her younger son, Stephen, was now a successful photo-journalist in Kenya; his brother, Charles, also a journalist, lived in Oslo and St. Petersburg); no one except a once-beautiful, gray-haired woman alone, turning left onto Amity Street, driving toward eternity.

But you’re a famous poet, I tell her in this strange, posthumous conversation I have been conducting over the past weeks. You have a great job; students who adore you; good health and dental coverage; a decent 401K retirement fund. You publish regularly in The New Yorker. (I know tenured professors with several books under their belts who will never be published in The New Yorker.) You have written four books of poetry, and your last, The Trapeze, is considered a “masterwork,” according to your obituary in The New York Times. You’ve published two acclaimed memoirs. (Last week, I checked out The Stardust Lounge from the Jones Library in Amherst, and inhaled it in three days, crying at the end when the 18-year-old Stephen Digges, after six years of drug addiction and delinquency, is delivered by his mother to college in New York City where he waves goodbye and says, “Thanks for a great childhood, Mom.”)

What’s more, you’re not some selfish, careerist poet boasting about your latest grants and publications, your most recent appearances at literary conferences in posh locations. You’re a good person; while your son was going through his crazy-making adolescence, you adopted a homeless boy, Trevor Clunes, and helped him negotiate Amherst Regional High School, helped him get his graduate equivalency degree. According to your biography at the Tufts University web site, you also volunteer at the Dakin Animal Shelter in Leverett, and travel frequently to East Africa to work with children at the Tumaini Orphanage near Mount Kenya.

I know you are still grieving the loss of your beloved Frank, whom you wrote about so movingly in “Seersucker Suit,” which your New York Times obituary quoted in full. When I read the lines, “O, the great ghost ships of his shoes,” I imagine you standing in Frank’s closet, smelling his trousers and suits and belts and shoes. I, too, have stared at my dead husband’s clothes, knowing I ought to give them away, and yet wanting to leave them right where they are because maybe he might come back, go to work among the living again. I know that mourning doesn’t follow some set pattern laid down in the grief books, doesn’t necessarily attenuate with time.

Still, how could you do it? How could you leave behind your own ghostly shoes for others to grieve? How could you leave those pretty, sweaty, big-boned girls in their goggles and headbands and red-lettered jerseys, girls who were looking forward to pizza and a good night’s sleep at the Econolodge, looking forward to playing UMass on Saturday afternoon, how could you leave them with images of your broken, bloody body, the wailing sirens of the Amherst Ambulance rushing to Cooley-Dickinson Hospital? How could you leave me, a middle-aged woman in blue jeans whom you never met, riding my bike slowly, at dusk, past your home on Blue Hills Road, wondering stupidly how I might have saved you?

Picasso's Blue Period

2009-04-17T12:14:00.000-04:00

“I began to paint in blue,” Pablo Picasso wrote, explaining the origins of his Blue Period, “when I learned that Casagemas had died.” Carlos Casagemas was a painter whom Picasso had met in 1899 at Els Quartre Gats (The Four Cats), a café in Barcelona. The two Spaniards traveled to Paris in 1900 and opened a studio together in Montmartre, eking out a living as artists and visiting brothels where Picasso would paint murals on the establishment’s walls in exchange for services. But Casagemas lacked Picasso’s swaggering sense of self; when Carlos was rejected by a woman he loved, he shot himself with a pistol at The Hippodrome Café on February 17, 1901.

Picasso was in Barcelona at the time, but when he returned to Paris, he channeled his grief into his work, choosing the color favored by turn-of-the-century, avant-garde artists as well as that most closely associated with melancholy. Picasso’s subjects were outcasts: prostitutes, prisoners, beggars, drunks, laundresses, one-eyed old women, emaciated street musicians. But bourgeois Parisians didn’t want to be reminded of these ghoulish figures from the lower depths—despite the revolution of Impressionism, the art world still prized a prettified classicism—and so the melancholy, monochromatic pictures went unsold. Picasso became so poor he couldn’t afford to buy paints, and even had to burn his canvases in order to stay warm in his garret on the Rue Voltaire. But the young artist was not to be deflected from his quest. He continued to paint in blue, sometimes working the features of Casagemus into portraits of his friends, but rarely, for the next three years, adding other colors.

More than a hundred years later, JPEGS of Blue Period paintings can be downloaded from dozens of Internet sites, posters of The Old Guitarist turn up in coffee shops and college dorms. (My friend, Sarah, remembers putting up The Tragedy, which depicts a poor, desolate family on a seashore, in her dorm room at Mary Washington College in Virginia in the 1970s, and recently my friend, Christine, noticed The Tragedy on the walls of a jewelry store owned by an Indian couple in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.) The pictures haven’t stopped speaking to us. It seems astonishing that a young man barely out of boyhood—he was only 20 in 1901—possessed the empathic intelligence as well as the technical artistry to portray such feeling.

Of course, a young man’s melancholy is a different animal than an old man’s disaffection. And while scholars believe that Picasso probably suffered from a mood disorder for most of his life—which he battled by adopting a killing work ethic as well as a dizzying parade of serial mistresses, who got progressively younger as the decades passed—he never again painted exclusively in blue. In 1904, when he fell in love with Fernande Olivier, a dark-haired model and artist who would bear him his first child, he began to add red to his canvasses, initiating the Rose Period, which, in turn, gave way to the African Period, to Cubism, Classicism, Surrealism, and Neo-Expressionism.

Picasso died on April 8, 1973 at the age of 92, having produced over 50,000 paintings, sculptures, ceramics, drawings, prints, tapestries and rugs. He remained lucid until the end—his last words at a dinner party that he and his third wife, Jacqueline Roque, hosted at their château in the south of France were, “Drink to me, drink to my health, you know I can’t drink any more.”

His astonishing productivity was stunningly evident in “The Last Years, 1963-1973” at the Guggenheim Museum in the winter of 1984. My first husband, Len, and I were among the crowds jostling for spaces to view the exhibit of paintings, drawings, etchings, and sculpture, which filled most of the museum. In my memory the date feels several years earlier, 1978 or 1979, but perhaps this is because Len and I were both so lighthearted afterward, shedding our cares like winter coats as we bopped down Fifth Avenue to catch the bus to our studio apartment in Greenwich Village, where we stayed in town during the week. (If anyone had said, “In two months, Len will be diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor and by the end of December, he’ll be dead, I would have thought they were joking.)

As we dodged patches of snow and ice on that darkening February afternoon, Len and I talked animatedly about what we had seen: the cartoonish line drawings of huge figures with massive breasts and swollen penises engaged in all manner of transgressive activity: peeing, shitting, and copulating. In another era, they would have been branded pornographic, the demented effluvia of a dirty old man, and yet the work had a childlike playfulness that compelled us, energized us. We were amazed that a man in his eighties and nineties still possessed this kind of creative urgency. But maybe not so surprising, Len observed, when you consider what Picasso said after observing a group of schoolchildren in 1956: “When I was as old as these children, I could draw like Raphael, but it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like them.”

As I meditate upon that winter afternoon twenty-five years ago, I keep thinking of Bob Dylan’s lines, “Ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.” Could it be that just as youth is wasted on the young, so depression is mostly a younger person’s affliction, a monochromatic, cyan-colored cloak that the very old, facing the prospect of losing everything including the memory of loss, cannot afford to wear?

Awake for the Blue Hour

2009-04-09T09:07:00.000-04:00

One of the curses of middle life is sleeplessness. The brain produces less melatonin, breathing is shallower, dreams are fitful, the bladder cannot hold. One wakes many times, shuffling to the bathroom, or to the kitchen for a midnight snack (sleep experts say that a man of 50 wakes 20 times in the night; a man of 25 only 10 times). Delta sleep (the deepest level of non rapid-eye-movement sleep, where the sleeper cannot be easily roused) becomes as rare as a remembered dream. One turns off the light, and prays for sleep like a child hoping to be visited by the tooth fairy.

But every curse carries its own blessing (at last the midlife mind gets that nothing is ever one thing, that contradiction suffuses every enterprise): one of insomnia’s gifts is the reverie of the blue hour. The blue hour is that time which belongs neither to the night nor to the day; it is when the sky is born again into soft pinks and blues, when the light in the east is as clear as a baby’s urine, when flowers, moist with dew, are said to be at their most fragrant. The French call this time L’Heure Bleue, and even created, in 1912, a perfume called L’Heure Bleue by Guerlain. (Odd to think of this legendary perfume, which is still available at $68 for a 1.7 ounce bottle, being created just two years before the outbreak of World War I, when Europe would stink with corpses rotting in the trenches in The Ardennes, Mons, and The Somme.)

Sylvia Plath loved this part of the day, “that blue, almost eternal hour,” as she put it in an interview with the BBC a few months before her death, “before cock crow, before the baby’s cry, before the glassy music of the milkman, settling his bottles.” Plath was writing some of the best poems of her short life during this time. She was living with her children in a flat in London (after Ted Hughes had left her for Assia Wevill) in the house where William Butler Yeats had once lived. There was a blue plaque to mark the spot, a detail Plath records with great excitement in a letter home to her mother, Aurelia, in Massachusetts. Sylvia, who had never failed at anything in her life, was trying to be upbeat, even though her heart was broken. The poems came fast as Plath’s horse, Ariel, and Plath knew they were good, as good as anything by Yeats, but that certitude wasn’t enough to keep her tethered to this world.

She killed herself very early on the morning of February 11, 1963, thrusting her head in an oven, while her two young children slept. History repeated itself forty-six years later during the afternoon of March 23, 2009 with the suicide of her son, Nicholas Hughes, an accomplished fisheries biologist who hung himself with a rope in his home in Fairbanks, Alaska. Hughes was 47, outliving his mother by 17 years. In her announcement to the press, Frieda Hughes said that her brother had been battling depression for many years.

On a memorial website page that the University of Alaska created, one of Nick Hughes’ students recalls how her professor would go out with his students at three in the morning during the summer solstice to observe the salmon and grayling fish in the Chena River.

It is twilight now, evensong instead of matins, the return of the blue hour. The sky is slightly darker like the inside of a mussel shell, the bare branches of the trees wispy as an old woman’s hair, the light clear as a glass of white wine. I say a prayer for Sylvia Plath and her son, Nicholas Hughes, who might still be with us, had they received proper treatment for their depression, whose love for the blue hour endures.

Blue Meds

2009-04-03T10:34:00.000-04:00

In the mornings, I swallow pills that cover nearly every hue in the color spectrum: there are oyster shell calcium tablets (green), fish oil supplements (yellow), a multivitamin/multimineral (indigo), a probiotic acidophilus capsule with “14 billion good bacteria” (speckled white, like an egg from a free-range hen).

And let’s not forget the meds: one half-tab of Adderall (cyan blue) and one half-tab of the antidepressant Citalopram (coral pink). The blue meds are a mixture of four amphetamine salts, which I take for attention deficit disorder. (I can be as hyper as a horse that’s been left in the barn all winter, as distractible as a two-year-old motoring from block to block.) ADD is probably the reason I haven’t been able to settle on a career—one week, I contemplate starting a dog-walking business (I’d call it “Who Let the Dogs Out”), and the next I fantasize about working as a clown in a hospital.

But ever since I started taking my precious blue meds (about a year ago), I’ve made steady progress in my off-again-on-again career as a writer. I haven’t earned a dime recently, which makes me worry that I will end up with no teeth living under a bridge, but until then, I’m a happy graphophiliac, writing for my local paper on topics ranging from AIG (where I used to work in corporate communications, years before AIG was called a P.I.G. by the New York Daily News) to the inauguration of Barack Obama to the 123rd anniversary of Emily Dickinson’s death (which, if you’re dying to know, is May 15th, 2009).

I looked up Amphetamine on Wikipedia and found that it was first synthesized by a Romanian, Lazar Edeleannu, in Berlin, Germany in 1887. He called it phenylisopropylamine (don’t ask how to pronounce that); apparently, it was one of a series of compounds from the plant derivative ephedrine, which the Chinese had been using for five millennia to treat a host of ailments. (I always knew that the Chinese were smarter than us westerners.) Amphetamines didn’t come into common use until 1929 when American pharmacologist Gordon Alles was searching for an artificial replacement for ephedrine, and tested it on himself. Then the drug company, Smith, Kline and French, got into the game in the mid-1930s and made a bundle marketing it under the trade name Benzedrine.

Amphetamines were the drug of choice for the military during World War II (both the Allies and the Germans liked how the drug lessened combat fatigue as well as increased alertness). It was also the favorite substance of Adolph Hitler, who received daily shots from his doctor of “vitamultine” a combination of methamphetamine and essential vitamins. (I was shocked to discover that der Furher and I liked the same drug; it’s creepy to think that he, too, might have had ADD…)

For nearly the past four decades, amphetamines have been a controlled substance in the United States, which means that my doctor can’t call or fax in the prescription to the pharmacy, but must sign a specially designated form which I must personally surrender to the pharmacist each time I renew the prescription, all of which makes me feel like a Nazi war criminal at Nuremberg whenever I slink into my local CVS.

Sometimes I cut the pills in quarters to make them last longer as well as to reduce their nasty side effects (tachycardia, diarrhea, dizziness, palpitations, arrhythmia--if you read everything on the print outs that accompany each orange vial, you’d be tempted to flush the pills down the toilet). But I am willing to shoulder the risks because my cyan-blue, double-scored meds make me feel, for the first time in my life, confident and hopeful. My blue meds make me believe, in the words of George Eliot (who did not have ADD), that “it’s never too late to be what you might have been.”

The Blue Doors

2009-03-24T11:48:00.000-04:00

Depressed people tend not to notice details; for us, the season is always deep winter; the hour groggily post-prandial. We don’t “see a world in a grain of sand,” as William Blake rhapsodized, but simply sand, about which—whether it contains mica or feldspar or bits of broken shells--we are incurious. Which brings me to confess something I noticed as I walked into the red brick Greek Revival Unitarian Church on Main Street in Northampton this past Sunday morning. I had just removed my bike helmet (when the weather is good, I ride my ten-speed to the services, which reduces my carbon footprint, and allows me to repair my body’s temple) and was hurrying up the stone steps when, perhaps because it was spring or maybe because I was uncharacteristically early, I looked up. Then I saw what I had never noticed before: The big double front doors are blue, each paneled door topped with a square window of leaded glass divided into eight, fan-like triangular sections. The blue is a lovely azure color, Virgin Mary blue, Saint-Denis Blue, Chartres Blue, the blue that for centuries--from the late Middle Ages to the Renaissance to the Reformation and beyond--has been one of God’s favorite colors.

I have been going to UU services for over a year; I have sipped coffee in the parlor, praised the organist, shaken the hand of the interim minister, and used the transgender bathroom in the basement; I have belted out my favorite African-American hymn, “This Little Light of Mine,” with the other white, mostly gray-haired congregants, spaced out during readings of "Frog and Toad" for the children before they leave for their RE classes, brought visiting guests and friends to the services (though I have never been able to convince my husband or teenaged son to attend, as my husband contends that religion is a “crutch” and my son would prefer to sleep); I even have my own name tag, which hangs on a ribbon in the entryway, which I sometimes remember to pin to my jacket…I have faithfully performed all these acts, but I have never noticed that the front doors are blue.

Inns of Molten Blue

2009-03-19T11:58:00.000-04:00

My first husband, Leonard Feldstein, who has been dead almost a quarter of a century, used to say, when I was feeling blue, “Make a study of your depression, Beck. Learn everything you can about it.” Len was a psychiatrist and philosopher as well as a relentlessly cheerful polymath: he was interested in aesthetics, alchemy, astronomy, Alexander the Great, Anglo-Saxon England, and Aristotle…and that’s just a sampling of his passions beginning with the letter ‘a.’

I am neither so accomplished nor so erudite. But I have suffered from depression for most of my adult life, and have learned a good deal about it along the way. And I love the color blue: practically every item of clothing I own is blue, leading one acquaintance to ask whether my underwear is blue! My friends think I’m dotty, but I point out that Emily Dickinson wore only white in her latter years. In middle life, if one can’t have one’s idiosyncracies (what my mother, who died four years ago of complications from Type II Diabetes, called “idiotsyncracies”), then what can one have? Certainly not that third glass of Blue Label Chardonnay, that oversized blueberry muffin, or multiple snack packs of Terra Blue Potato Chips, which used to be given out liberally on Jet Blue Airlines. These days, in the midst of the Second Great Depression, even a blue-chip stock will barely cover a latte at Starbuck’s.

But blue, which has so many poetic shades—robin’s egg, acquamarine, teal, cyan, navy, midnight, sapphire, turquoise, lapis lazuli—blue, which is both a synonym for the most common of mood disorders as well as “the most spiritual of colors” (according to Russian painter Vassily Kandinsky), yields nothing but delight. So herewith I parse and probe my passion, with every hope that you, dear reader, will be lifted out of whatever ill humor you might be suffering from and into what Emily Dickinson (no stranger to mood disorders herself) called “inns of molten blue.”