Wild Blueberries

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blue Bloods

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

Marry in Blue

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.

Inns of Molten Blue

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.”