Birthday Blues

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Blue Hospital Bracelet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But I’m here for, what, an hour?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No Blue Without Yellow and Orange

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You said that,” I snapped.

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

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

“I don’t know, maybe an hour ago.”

“Well, it’s done.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Blue Zones of Hartwell Priest

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.