Blue Light

I remember her on her haunches in the upstairs hall banging her butt one hundred times on the cherry-planked floor, getting red in the face and not stopping her counting, even for a second, when my sister or I would interrupt to ask her a question. She also performed an exercise where, dressed in nothing but her bra and panties, she would clench her right fist and beat it against her right thigh; then she would take her left fist and beat it against her left thigh. Each fleshy thigh received fifty lashes. I never asked where she had learned these spot-reducing techniques—no doubt she picked them up at the Harry Conover Agency, where she worked as a model in the year before she married my dad.

“Have you checked your weight today?” a flat, computer-generated voice asked, interrupting the movie-in-my-head of my mother, circa 1965. I was passing directly in front of the General Nutrition Center storefront with its pyramids of vitamins at the Mountain View Mall. Most of the time I ignored the talking scale, but on that rainy July afternoon, chafing beneath my tightening waistband, I feared that I had put on a few pounds. (I had thrown out my bathroom scale years ago after having been advised to do so by FAT IS A FEMINIST ISSUE.) I duly removed my cotton jacket, sneakers and shoes: such outerwear could add two to three pounds, and I wanted to keep the number as low as possible.

I mounted the scale, fed two quarters into the slot, punched in some data regarding my age, build, and height, held my breath, and stood very still as the screen instructed. In thirty seconds, a square slip of paper popped out, imprinted with various numbers and letters, including the date, my weight, and whether I was within my ideal weight range or not. (For another twenty-five cents, I could receive a diet/fat analysis as well as a biorhythm outlook, but having signed up for these less-than-useless extras some time ago, I passed.)

Reader, I don’t expect you to regard this as a tragedy, but I had gained seven pounds! Seven pounds since I last weighed myself two summers ago on this very scale. Seven pounds in two years is three and a half pounds per year, which is about what a middle-aged woman can expect to gain after she reaches 50. The metabolism of the middle-aged is as notoriously sluggish as a gunk-filled bathtub drain: if you don’t reduce your daily calorie intake by 300-500 calories or begin a vigorous exercise plan, you’re going to start looking like a Shaker barn before Obama comes up for re-election.

What was this fat-lady-to-be to do? I had long given up my morning-glory muffin habit, and I was already riding my bike several miles a day. I wasn’t about to start banging my butt on the floor.

Surfing the Internet the next day, I pulled up a web page giving information about a Blue DietLight Refrigerator Appliance Bulb. For the low price of $9.95 plus $6.95 for shipping and handling (Ohio residents must add sales tax), you can receive this magic blue bulb, screw it into your refrigerator, and “watch the munchies disappear.” (For $19.95, you can also receive the weight loss hypnosis compact disc.)

Apparently, the color blue works as a natural appetite suppressant, which is why restaurants used to offer low-cost Blue Plate specials. The most ancient hunter-gatherer part of the brain associates blue with moldy, spoiled food, and naturally recoils. With the exception of blueberries, mussels, and eggplants, there are actually very few naturally occurring blue foods, which may account for this ancient pairing of blue and inedibility. The blue-plate diner morphs into the proverbial picky-eater, and the crazed refrigerator-raider whose Blue DietLight bulb glows over that cheesecake will think twice about forking into it.

Five thousand years of color therapy culled from ancient Chinese, Egyptian, Tibetan, and Native American cultures has shown that the color blue is balm to the soul, explained the website. And lest you still think the Blue DietLight and Hypnosis CD is a scam, read on: the Harvard Business School-- and here the blue type was magnified into screaming 20-point font--reports that blue light promotes positive decision making, and strengthens resolve.

I didn't order the Blue DietLight: I know from exhaustive experience that diets and diet-related products don't work. When I was a teenager working at my first paid job of ski instructor, I was called “Rotunda,” by some of my jokey male co-workers. I didn’t find this funny, nor was I amused when they said: “You don’t have hips, you’ve got ships.” I cried all the way to the candy machines in the base lodge, where I becalmed myself with an Almond Joy, and vowed to start Atkins the next day.

On the Atkins diet, you can eat unlimited amounts of meat and bacon and cottage cheese, but you must stay away from bread, pasta, cookies, cakes, and, of course, candy. I lasted about a week, and moved on to the Scarsdale Diet even though I’ve never been crazy about grapefruits. But only a Trappist monk could stick to the 700-calorie-a-day regime. When Jean Harris gunned down the diet’s creator, Hy Tarnower, because he was two-timing her with his young nurse, I could never take the Scarsdale diet seriously again.

Several years later, I signed up for Weight Watchers, but I always felt exposed at the group weigh-ins, and it was way too much work to keep track of my food points, though I did develop a fondness for Weight Watcher’s two-point English Toffee Crunch bars. I briefly joined Overeaters Anonymous, which works on the same 12-step principles as Alcoholics Anonymous, but everyone in the group was about 100 pounds overweight and I felt a teeny bit self-conscious.

After my son was born, I managed to hover about ten or twenty pounds above my ideal weight, but the prospect of ballooning back into “Rotunda” lodged like a burnt-out bulb in the most ancient part of my brain.

My mother also tried various diets, but they were no match for her ever-enlarging shape. By the time she was sixty-five, she was forty to fifty pounds overweight (she was mortified about the actual number and would never reveal it to me). She had also developed adult onset Diabetes, which is a truly nasty disease. If untreated, it can lead to foot amputations, blindness and heart disease. She started taking Glucovance, but continued to sneak junk foods. Under her bed and in the glove compartment of her car, she hid bags of Fritos, potato chips, and cans of mixed nuts.

During the last three weeks of her life, in one of life’s stranger-than-fiction ironies, my mother became as slender as the girl she had been decades ago. She was admitted to the local hospital for a mysterious infection, which the doctor said was related to her Diabetes and which she had suffered from intermittently for the past several months. My mother had always hated hospitals, and had been fortunate never to spend much time in them. Other than the two weeks she passed in the maternity ward after giving birth to my sister and me, my mother had never been admitted to a hospital, not even to an emergency room.

In any event, being confined to a hospital meant being forced to eat hospital food, which she deplored. The overcooked packet-of-cards-sized pork chop went untouched, as did the puddles of mashed potatoes and creamed corn. She waved away the tiny servings of butterscotch and rice puddings, and sometimes I ended up eating them when I visited. This would prompt me to narrate my favorite Woody Allen joke about the two elderly ladies in the resort in the Catskills: “‘Boy, the food in this place is really terrible,’ one says. ‘Yeah, I know,’ the other says, ‘and such small portions.’”

My mother laughed, praised me for being such a card, then begged me to go out to the supermarket and bring her back a bag of Fritos. I refused, and pointed out that being deprived of 24/7 access to junk food would prove a blessing in disguise. She would get down to the weight she had always dreamed of, go off the Glucovance, and live to see 100.

It was not to be. She suffered a massive heart attack twenty-six hours later. She spent the next five days in intensive care and the following week she was shifted into the hospice ward. I gave her a back rub on the last day of her life, and I was shocked at how the ridges of her spinal column stood out against her pale, age-freckled flesh. She probably weighed less than she did when she was a tomboy of twelve, before the onset of the fleshy thighs and buttocks that would prove such a lifelong torment.

“We’re right here,” my sister and I whispered to her over and over in those last moments when we stood on either side of her bed, gripping her limp fingers and telling her that we loved her. The hospice worker had explained that even though she appeared to be unconscious, she could still hear our voices, still sense our presence. Over and over until it became a mantra that slowed the beating of our own hearts, we said, “Everything’s going to be O.K.”

If only she had been able to say this to herself, fifty times for the right ear, fifty times for the left ear, how different her life might have been: no Fritos, no Diabetes, nothing to dim her resolute blue light.

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What Color is the Sky?

I’m told that when you get really old, death doesn’t bother you anymore. You get accustomed to it, in the same way you get used to brushing off the dried wasps and blue bottle flies that gather on the windowsills in early fall. Death loses its power to hurt you, its sting leaving only the faintest swelling, the tiniest bull's-eye upon your age-spotted flesh.

I am far from such equanimity. Death still cuts me, even the death of my 93-year-old mother-in-law, who had been suffering from Alzheimer’s for the past decade, who had not recognized me, or her youngest son and grandson, in a very long time.

She was 76 when I first met her, still living on her own, still driving her own car, still working part-time in an antiques store on the coast of Maine. She lived in low-income housing for the elderly, directly off Route 1 in Wells, Maine, across from a Market Basket, a Wal-Mart and a Dunkin’ Donuts. It was a humble address for a direct descendant of a Mayflower ancestor, an engineer’s daughter who had grown up in a sea captain’s house in Marblehead, Massachusetts.

But if she had fallen from upper-middle-class gentility, there was nothing sorry about her or her surroundings. She tended a small flower garden that snaked around the edges of her condo; hollyhocks, delphiniums, and bachelor buttons grew in well-watered profusion. Hydrangea and rhododendron bushes stood on either side of her small stone terrace; a marble cherub invited one to savor the delights of all things horticultural.

Inside the dusted and polished spaces of her tiny home, she made sure no one rucked the oriental scatter rugs layered like patchwork quilts in her living room. She invited callers to sit on the creaky-springed sofa bed that was covered with a hand-crocheted throw; or in one of the two wing chairs, whose arms and backs were protected with freshly laundered antimacassars. A glass-fronted grandmother clock in the corner kept time, tolling, to the agony of anyone who camped on that pullout sofa bed, the quarter, half and full hours. A tasseled Chinese porcelain lamp stood sentry on the flute-edged mahogany end table. Glossy magazines--Coastal Living, Smithsonian and National Geographic, a testament to her weakness for entering Publishers’ Clearinghouse Sweepstakes—were stacked on her antique coffee table.

(A twin of that coffee table, with its brass fittings and foldable sides, stood before the sofa in our living room in my childhood home in western Massachusetts, which partly explained why my mother had nothing but praise for my mother-in-law. The two women, both conservative and proper, unskilled in the business of making money, loved elegant things.)

My mother-in-law was a still-handsome woman, with a broad forehead, distinguished Roman nose and dazzling smile. One could see that she had once been beautiful, and she carried herself with the sureness of someone accustomed to fielding compliments about her looks. She had been a dancer as a girl—the story was that she had been invited to join Martha Graham’s company in New York but that her father wouldn’t permit it; he needed her at home to help care for her three younger siblings during her mother’s protracted illness from cancer, a condition that, in the days before anyone had health insurance, drained the family’s fortunes.

Hemingway says that all of us are broken by life, but some are strong at the broken places. My mother-in-law was strong in many broken places. Her beloved first husband, Woodrow Wilson White, was killed in Italy in World War II, leaving behind an infant daughter. My mother-in-law, then a drop-dead gorgeous widow in her twenties, remarried an Army veteran who had survived the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The couple forgot about the evils of Nazis and Japs, and had two children.

The second husband, whom everyone called Smoky, was as humble as the first one was grand. Smoky, who repaired musical instruments for a living and played the trumpet in a band, doted on the fatherless little girl, and tried to be a good dad to his own two boys, though my mother-in-law once confided that she had never loved Smoky, and had only married him to provide a family for her little girl. My mother-in-law also claimed that Smoky was an indifferent father, and spent every family vacation at the beach shut up inside their rented cottage, working on his music. Like so many things she told me over the years, including why she later divorced Smokey (she was convinced he was having an affair), it was hard to know what was true and what was the ashy residue of her fury for all the men who had betrayed her.

The greatest tragedy of my mother-in-law’s life was something she never talked about. When she was still in high school, she had gotten pregnant; once she started showing, she was sent to upstate New York to a home for unwed mothers. She named the baby girl after her mother, and then gave the child up for adoption. Shortly before my husband and I married in 1993, this baby girl, now a sturdy woman in her fifties with two grown children, tracked her birth mother down. I can only imagine the relief, regret, guilt, and gladness my mother-in-law must have felt when she first embraced this lost girl, who had been blessed with her mother’s good looks and radiant smile. My mother-in-law confided many things to me, but she never discussed the details of how this child was conceived.

In her early eighties, my mother-in-law started behaving strangely—accusing neighbors of breaking into her condo and stealing her things, turning upon her family and friends (she called the child she had given up for adoption a “rat” and me, her mild-mannered daughter-in-law, a “mouse”). Her children moved her from Maine to New Hampshire, to another condo in the complex where her daughter lived, but the rages and midnight calls to the police continued. Something had to be done: her sons took her to court to become her legal guardian, upon which they placed her in an assisted living facility, and then, when the dementia worsened, into a nursing home.

Alois Alzheimer was the German doctor who treated the first patient who started showing symptoms of the disease after which he is named. The woman, referred to in patient records only as Auguste D., first entered Frankfurt Mental Institution on November 25, 1901. She was 51 years old, the mother of one daughter. Her husband, Carl, a railway clerk, had brought her there because he didn’t know where else to take her and because he could no longer endure her bizarre behavior —the delusions and night wanderings where she dragged her bed sheets across the apartment screaming.

Dr. Alzheimer conducted interviews over several weeks with Auguste D. (Her married name was Deter, but Dr. Alzheimer never recorded her maiden name in his otherwise meticulous notes.) Dr. Alzheimer asked her what year it was, and she said, “Eighteen hundred.” He picked up a pen from his desk, and asked her to identify it, and she said, “pencil.” He asked her what color the sky was, and she said blue. But when he asked her to write her name, she could only get out the first few letters of her first name. In a heartbreaking moment of lucidity, she cried, “Ich mich haben verloren (I have lost myself).”

Auguste D’s conditioned worsened; she had periods where she sat motionless for hours, where she could not eat. She never returned to her apartment on Waldenstraat, and five years later, she died. Dr. Alzheimer then performed an autopsy on her brain, and found, in her cortex, the telltale amyloidal plaques and neurofibrillary tangles that have become the signature of Alzheimer’s disease.

The blue cardboard file folder in which Alzheimer kept his 32 pages of notes was discovered in 1995 in a basement at the University of Frankfurt. The notes, recorded in the outdated German “Sutterlin” script, were remarkably intact, having survived the Allied bombings of 1944 and 1945, which destroyed much of Frankfurt Am Main, including the entire medieval city center, as well as the Municipal Library with its collection of Cairo Geniza documents, which included some 280,000 Jewish manuscripts found in 1895 in a Cairo synagogue.

There is no cure for Alzheimer’s disease, and though there are theories as to why some older people get it and others don’t—obesity is a risk factor, as is high blood pressure, Type II Diabetes, extreme sedentariness, intellectual incuriosity, and depression—these theories shed little light upon my mother-in-law’s condition. Although she was slightly overweight and didn’t exercise, she was otherwise risk-free. She took the drug, Aricept, but it did little more than retard the ravages of the disease.

The last time I saw her was on Mother’s Day. It had been a habit of ours to visit on this holiday. We would drive to Portsmouth, New Hampshire; my husband would go into the nursing home to fetch her, while my son and I stayed in the car, clearing out the front seat and making space in the back for her walker. We would drive to The Works Bagel Café on Congress Street, and get take-out: sandwiches for us and hot tea and a cookie for her because she had already eaten her lunch.

My husband would drive us to Sea Point beach in Kittery, not far from the Rachel Carson Nature Preserve and a favorite destination for dog owners. In the early years when she was in assisted living, she would climb out of the car and walk slowly along the beach. But as her condition worsened, she preferred to stay buckled into the passenger seat, watching from behind the windshield as Golden Retrievers, Poodles, and Portuguese Water Dogs leapt for Frisbees and tennis balls.

This past Mother’s Day, because of roadwork along Route 1, we never got to Kittery, but stayed in Portsmouth, driving to a park near the Wentworth–Coolidge Mansion which overlooked Little Harbor. Our destination was of no consequence to my mother-in-law; she wanted merely to sit in the car with us, to sip her milky tea and break off pieces of her chocolate chip cookie and smile that winning childlike smile, which was remarkably unchanged in all the seventeen years I had known her.

Our routine never varied: my son and I would get out to walk the dog, then return to the car, upon which my husband and son would head out to collect shells, and I would climb into the driver’s seat, keeping my mother-in-law company. I never knew what to say to her; the days were long gone when she railed against Smoky and his shortcomings. I filled up the silence with random musings; pointing out this or that wet dog; this or that freighter on the horizon. Whether I spoke or was silent didn’t matter; she smiled and nodded and made these rhythmic humming noises that came from deep inside her thorax and seemed almost like a cat purring.

Nothing seemed final about this last time we sat watching the water. The weather was warm, the sun was out; the tide was low. After she had finished her cookie, I offered her a square of shortbread that I had baked the day before. She took it, and murmured, "Thank you, Honey," and made a satisfied "Ummm," sound while she slowly, bird bite by bird bite, ate it. And though she could not have told you what year it was, though she could not have named the color of the sky or identified the snowy-haired man who presented her with a quahog clam shell when he returned to the car, she was happy, content simply to be.

And now she is gone, and the clamshell sky seems paler.

Birthday Blues

“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.