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 Bluebird of Happiness

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

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

“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

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

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

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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