The Blue Doors

Depressed people tend not to notice details; for us, the season is always deep winter; the hour groggily post-prandial. We don’t “see a world in a grain of sand,” as William Blake rhapsodized, but simply sand, about which—whether it contains mica or feldspar or bits of broken shells--we are incurious. Which brings me to confess something I noticed as I walked into the red brick Greek Revival Unitarian Church on Main Street in Northampton this past Sunday morning. I had just removed my bike helmet (when the weather is good, I ride my ten-speed to the services, which reduces my carbon footprint, and allows me to repair my body’s temple) and was hurrying up the stone steps when, perhaps because it was spring or maybe because I was uncharacteristically early, I looked up. Then I saw what I had never noticed before: The big double front doors are blue, each paneled door topped with a square window of leaded glass divided into eight, fan-like triangular sections. The blue is a lovely azure color, Virgin Mary blue, Saint-Denis Blue, Chartres Blue, the blue that for centuries--from the late Middle Ages to the Renaissance to the Reformation and beyond--has been one of God’s favorite colors.

I have been going to UU services for over a year; I have sipped coffee in the parlor, praised the organist, shaken the hand of the interim minister, and used the transgender bathroom in the basement; I have belted out my favorite African-American hymn, “This Little Light of Mine,” with the other white, mostly gray-haired congregants, spaced out during readings of "Frog and Toad" for the children before they leave for their RE classes, brought visiting guests and friends to the services (though I have never been able to convince my husband or teenaged son to attend, as my husband contends that religion is a “crutch” and my son would prefer to sleep); I even have my own name tag, which hangs on a ribbon in the entryway, which I sometimes remember to pin to my jacket…I have faithfully performed all these acts, but I have never noticed that the front doors are blue.

Inns of Molten Blue

My first husband, Leonard Feldstein, who has been dead almost a quarter of a century, used to say, when I was feeling blue, “Make a study of your depression, Beck. Learn everything you can about it.” Len was a psychiatrist and philosopher as well as a relentlessly cheerful polymath: he was interested in aesthetics, alchemy, astronomy, Alexander the Great, Anglo-Saxon England, and Aristotle…and that’s just a sampling of his passions beginning with the letter ‘a.’ I am neither so accomplished nor so erudite. But I have suffered from depression for most of my adult life, and have learned a good deal about it along the way. And I love the color blue: practically every item of clothing I own is blue, leading one acquaintance to ask whether my underwear is blue! My friends think I’m dotty, but I point out that Emily Dickinson wore only white in her latter years. In middle life, if one can’t have one’s idiosyncracies (what my mother, who died four years ago of complications from Type II Diabetes, called “idiotsyncracies”), then what can one have? Certainly not that third glass of Blue Label Chardonnay, that oversized blueberry muffin, or multiple snack packs of Terra Blue Potato Chips, which used to be given out liberally on Jet Blue Airlines. These days, in the midst of the Second Great Depression, even a blue-chip stock will barely cover a latte at Starbuck’s. But blue, which has so many poetic shades—robin’s egg, acquamarine, teal, cyan, navy, midnight, sapphire, turquoise, lapis lazuli—blue, which is both a synonym for the most common of mood disorders as well as “the most spiritual of colors” (according to Russian painter Vassily Kandinsky), yields nothing but delight. So herewith I parse and probe my passion, with every hope that you, dear reader, will be lifted out of whatever ill humor you might be suffering from and into what Emily Dickinson (no stranger to mood disorders herself) called “inns of molten blue.”