The Blue Hospital Bracelet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But I’m here for, what, an hour?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Blue Zones of Hartwell Priest

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Easter Gladness and Lupines

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 Blue Candles of Chanukah

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!

Tangled up in Blue: The Sermon

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.

The Color of Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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