AGE QUOD AGIS: REMEMBERING SEAN SHESGREEN, 1939-2021

Can you grieve for someone you haven’t seen in twenty years, haven’t communicated with, save by letter, email, and Facebook? Yes, and yes, and yes. Not like Molly Bloom uttering this word at the end of Ulysses but more like a medieval penitent praying that grief, which scorns optics and physics, will wrap you in divine love.

“Can you write about him, Mom?” my twenty-seven-year-old son, Oliver, asks, when I tell him about Sean Shesgreen, the Irish-born professor who died of pancreatic cancer two weeks ago and whom I had loved before he, Oliver, was born. 

In my journal, I make a list: Lessons from Sean Shesgreen.

(1) Age Quod Agis. I don’t remember when it was that I first heard Sean, in his playful Irish brogue, repeating this Latin phrase, first attributed to founder of the Jesuits Ignatius Loyola, which means, “Do what you are doing.” Possibly it was shortly after we met in Oxford and he was leading a summer program of undergraduate students and I recovering from the recent death of my first husband and taking an adult education course on Chaucer. I had been trying to complete a paper on “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” and was forever getting distracted by elevenes in the common room, strolls to watch the punters along the River Isis, explorations to secret, walled gardens.

Or maybe Sean repeated this maxim when I moved to DeKalb, Illinois, to live with him and was beginning a memoir on widowhood, and I couldn’t settle down to work, getting up to pee or run out to “The White Hen Pantry” for coffee or take my dog Hector for a walk along the Kishwaukee, anything but sit still in the office at Northern Illinois University he had found for me. “All you have to do is write one paragraph a day and pretty soon you’ll have a book,” he said. “Age quod agis.” 

These Latin words made such an impression that I repeated them to all the men that I loved after Sean, including Oliver’s father. 

2) Run (or Walk) Every Day. At Oxford, Sean and I met for jogs around Christ Church Meadow, and he explained that he ran forty-five minutes every day, ran even in the rain, an antidote to his sedentary, scholarly life, a salve for the depression that had dogged him for most of his life. He confided that his father, a laborer, who rarely held a steady job and who never lived with Sean’s mother and sisters in Letter Kenny, had been a hopeless alcoholic, and that running had helped him, Sean, keep moving forward, beating back the demons of his past. 

3)Butter and Olive Oil are the Only Cooking Ingredients You Need. I was recovering from an eating disorder when Sean and I met: food was the enemy, something I had to control and apportion in order that it would not get the better of me, leading me to binge on an entire packet of Digestive Biscuits. Sean loved food, loved to splurge on expensive restaurants, even when alone, a titular party of one, ordering an appetizer, bottle of good wine, ending with a chocolate mousse. When I moved into 1331 North 13th Street, his modest prairie-style farmhouse with its kitchen just big enough to fit his hand-made oak dining table, I discovered that he loved cooking as much as eating out. On his stove was a jumbo can of Italian Olive Oil, which he was always pouring into cast iron pots, sautéing onions and garlic for his famous Tomato Saffron Soup, made with fat, late summer tomatoes from local farm stands. Liberal amounts of butter were used to baste roasted chicken, pork tenderloin, roast leg of lamb. A tall wooden pepper grinder that lived beside the olive oil was drafted into service throughout the preparation and presentation of these dishes. Sean was famous for feeding colleagues and students, singletons who hated cooking for themselves, academic couples who admired his culinary expertise as much as his scholarship. 

4) Work Works. Sean did not begin his career as an 18th century literature professor. An indifferent student in Ireland, he was expected to train for a career as a pharmacist.  Instead, he became a monk, not because he was religious but because the Catholic Church offered a way out of Ireland. The order he joined as a teenager would send him to Chicago, where he would receive both his B.A. and M.A. from Loyola University, and finally his PhD from Northwestern. Life in America in the 1960s was full of sensual pleasures, and when Sean realized he couldn’t commit to a future of poverty, chastity and obedience, the order offered him a choice: a plane ticket back to Ireland or $100 and a suit.

        He took the $100 and a suit.

It was an iconic story and one of which I was in awe--I, whose people had been in this country for generations, who had never had anyone make fun of my accent, who had never wanted for money or clothing.   

“You’ll turn into a paper clip,” I once joked when he took over the Director of Graduate Studies office at NIU and refused to chat with me on the phone. Failure was not an option, and he went at this job with the same brio that he brought to his teaching and scholarship. He wrote six books, the last three of which focused on the street people of 17th century London, the fruit and fish hawkers, the rag-and-bone peddlers, rope dancers, and beggars whose cries filled the London streets, the poor and the outcast whom he resurrected from history’s middens. 

5) Buy Fresh Flowers. The Jewel supermarket was within walking distance of Sean’s house in DeKalb and every Friday he bought flowers—daffodils in the spring, irises in the summer, snapdragons in the fall. When I observed that this expenditure seemed extravagant, especially since he was otherwise so penurious—turning the thermostat to 60 at night and installing a timer on the hot water so that it would only be available at certain hours of the day—he said you had to budget for treats. Flowers, fountain pens, chocolates, croissants from a bakery in Chicago: small pleasures provided zest to daily life. If you didn’t have anyone to give them to you, you needed to give them to yourself. 

6) Words Matter.  Like his fellow Irishman, Samuel Beckett, Sean believed that “words are all we have.” His favorites were Anglo-Saxon words with storied histories, short, one-syllabled words like zest, sweet, and verve that connected you to the pleasures of this world rather than the mysteries of the next. My friend, Sarah, who accompanied me on one of my road trips from Redding, Connecticut, where I had lived with my late husband, to DeKalb, Illinois, remembered that Sean took down a volume of Yeats and read us his favorite poem, “When You are Old” the evening we arrived. Sarah said that she had never heard that poem before, and that it’s now one of her favorites and that whenever she reads or hears it, she thinks of Sean. 

7) Family (and Friends) Are Everything. When I met Sean, I was recovering not only from the death of my first husband but from my parents’ bitter divorce that had gone to trial. I was wary--both of making a new family and of my trusting my family of origin. Sean, who had raised his teenaged daughter Deirdre as a single father and who maintained cordial relations with Deirdre’s mother and her family, embraced my mother, father, brother, and sister. At blended family Thanksgivings with my father’s partner, Janet, and her four children, Sean delighted the group with his impromptu wine tastings: “Here’s to the man across the water who civilized his youngest daughter,” my father joked at one of those gatherings. My mother, whom Sean and I visited one Christmas at her bungalow in Florida, where she took out her best china to entice Sean to marry me, was delighted by Sean’s wit, despite his telling her, when she went on about her Irish ancestors, the titled Wyses, that “ancestors were like potatoes, the best thing about them was underground.” 

“Is the party really over?” my dad asked after yet another break-up, my leaving Sean to attend graduate school in D.C., his leaving me to marry a psychiatrist he met through a dating service, that marriage ending after a year, upon which Sean and I began seeing one another again, our final break coming when I married Oliver’s father in 1993 and he married his third wife, Sarah, some years later. In the end, our incompatibilities—"of age, intensity of feeling, disposition, temperament, and character,” as Sean put it in a letter to me, proved too much. We were more constant friends, and we remained friends until the end when, too weak to email me himself, he dictated a message through Deirdre, saying that he would “always think of me with esteem and affection.”    

“I’m just grateful we had him for as long as we did,” my sister, Heidi, said when I called to tell her Sean had passed and she could hear me crying over the phone.

One of the hardest things about getting older is how you must accustom yourself to losing people you love. I repeat to myself the things I have written to others: how death is not the end, it is merely a passing into the next room, how the dead live on in our hearts. And then, there is the text from my friend, Sarah, sent close to midnight and headed with a star emoji: “Sean’s in the stars. Look up."

 

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The Blue Hours of Coronavirus

Everything is the virus. I have become the virus, beginning my day with my phone, checking the latest quarantines, the latest emergencies. Everything that kept at bay the depression I have suffered from all my life—thrice-weekly spinning classes at 50/50 Fitness, breakfast in my local café, writing groups in nearby towns, biweekly dinners with my grown son in New Hampshire—has been cancelled. Everyone I know, depressed or not, is staying away from one another so that we don’t spread the virus. I text, call, e-mail, or instant message family and friends. The only person with whom I am not practicing social distancing is my partner, Stan, whom I see every night and without whom I could not imagine this life in Corona.

         I am 65, in the at-risk group for people vulnerable to this strange disease named after a crown and originating in a bat half way around the globe. And yet, there are others who are older who model hope: Dr. Anthony Fauci, the infectious disease specialist who addresses our nation frequently and is now the most respected man in America. Dr. Fauci is 79 and runs three and a half miles every day; he says this pandemic “will get worse before it gets better” but that we can defeat it. All we need to do is stay home, “flatten the curve,” our generation’s act of self-sacrifice.

I survive by meditating. 10 minutes every morning, before I make coffee: “Body/Mind/Spirit in perfect oneness” is the mantra I whisper again and again, the mantra my primary care doctor taught me in a wellness visit months ago, B.C., Before Coronavirus, when all I worried about was fighting depression and controlling my high blood pressure. My doctor confided that he meditated for up to forty minutes every morning—RPM, he jokingly called it, Rise, Pee, Meditate--and that it made him a better doctor, more able to focus on his patients instead of worrying about them. Meditating hasn’t lowered my blood pressure—I still take 5 mg. of Lisinopril every day—but it has made me less depressed. Less anxious. Able, if not to embrace the apocalypse, at least to face it.

I survive, too, by writing, or at least sitting down to write--from nine until noon, a ritual that has recently become sweeter with Stan spending the morning with me before returning to his home in Northampton. Before Coronavirus, I was making good progress on my memoir about my parents’ divorce, a landmark case in Massachusetts law that went to trial and rewarded a woman’s unpaid work in marriage. In the best of times, this story was challenging to write. Now, though I still dream about it, I have put it aside. Instead, I jot down quotes and facts: how Shakespeare rode out the plague in the summer of 1592 by writing poems, “The plague is banished by thy breath”; how, in the 1918 Flu Epidemic, thousands of lives were saved when the city of St. Louis elected not to hold a parade. How the doctor-hero of Camus 1941 novel, The Plague, observes that even though pestilence reveals life as random and unfair, we must still work to save others, that heroism is what makes us human. In my journal, I note that Camus was one of my dad’s favourite writers, a maybe-not-so-random detail that will, tomorrow morning or the next, lead me where I need to go.

In the afternoons, I walk my Standard Poodle, Puddle, or ride my bike along the Norwottuck Rail Trail. Now that the schools are closed and most people are working from home, the paths are crowded. But we keep our distance, and sometimes we greet one another, chat about our dogs’ personalities or share how we are holding up. As in other national crises, such as after the attacks of 9/11, people are open, porous, ready to bow before a larger world that is no longer “all about me, but about us.” There are exceptions: the older man with a miniature poodle who greeted me with an f-bomb-laced invective. All because I had let Puddle--a certified therapy dog who usually brings a smile to everyone she meets--temporarily off leash. But when I narrated this tale to the young couple I met ten minutes later, they commiserated and said, “It’s hard. People are on edge.”

Yes. People are on edge. But we will get through this. The warmer weather will come and the virus may wither, as SARS did in 2003. And even if it lasts longer, most people who get the virus will recover. This scourge cannot last forever. As Robert Frost said, “In three words, I can sum up everything that I have learned about life. It goes on.”

All posts copyright© 2020. All rights reserved. No part of this blog may be reproduced or distributed without attribution and/or permission of the author

Blue Healer: The Suicide of Dr. Judith Eve Sandick

“There are no words.”

Of all the comments on Facebook which appeared in the days after Dr. Judith Eve Sandick—doctor, wife, mother of four grown children, volunteer physician in Haiti and Pakistan, former Olympic-level ski racer--took her own life, the ones that appeared the most, after “Sorry for your loss,” and “Sending our thoughts and prayers” were, “There are no words.”

         I should know. I wrote them myself. Wrote them despite having been a professional writer for most of my adult life. Wrote them despite having known Judy all my life, known her longer than anyone else in the virtual or actual world, save for her two siblings.

         The last time I saw Judy was four summers ago. She and her husband, David, drove down from their home in Edgecombe, Maine to watch the World Cup finals at a bar in Brunswick, Maine with me and my then-partner, Charlie. I can’t remember who was playing—I’m not a soccer maven but Charlie, David and Judy were stoked up about the match and I wanted to hang with all of them, but especially with Judy, whom I hadn’t seen in over a year—and so we came up with this plan so that everyone could get what he or she wanted, not an easy thing to accomplish in this life.

         Judy was in fine form that afternoon. Charlie and I got there first and saved Judy and David seats. Gordon, Charlie’s Brunswick neighbor, an academic mucky-muck who taught political science at Georgetown University, also sat with us, each seat sporting a cup-holder and fold-out moveable tray so that you could drink your beer and eat your nachos while watching the game, an agreeable way to pass a hot July afternoon.

At half-time, we got another round of drinks and Judy and Gordon got into a dust-up about health care. It was all very good-humoured, even flirty; Judy had been a beauty in her youth, and she was still, with her strong-boned face and athletic body, a woman of whom men took notice. But Judy, who’d practiced emergency medicine for thirty years, who’d raced down mountains all over the world before becoming an MD, wasn’t about to let some policy wonk lecture her about the problems of Medicare for all.

         I didn’t say a word.

Part of me was appalled at Judy’s chutzpah at taking on this guy she’d never met and the other part of me admired the hell out of her. Judy had principles and she wasn’t about to abandon them in the interests of making nice.  

I’ve been in awe of Judy Sandick’s chutzpah for most of my life.    

 We met in Mrs. Moore’s kindergarten at the Berkshire Country Day School, and were inseparable for the next nine grades, both of us spending a good deal of time in the hall for various infractions: talking out of turn, not putting our books in our cubbies, failing to sit still. At recess, our problems multiplied; we eschewed the girly-girls who stood around comparing ruching on their dresses and played kickball with the boys, games that would often end with Judy beating the crap out of some kid because he’d accused her of throwing like a girl or seeing her underwear when she ran: “I see England; I see France; I see Judy’s underpants.”  Once, our fifth-grade teacher, Mr. Marks, had to pick Judy up by the sash on the back of her dress and remove her from the flailing body of some fleshy nerd she was pummeling.  Judy spent rest of the day in the principal’s office.   

Today, we would be diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, medicated with Ritalin and segregated into “special” classes; back then, we were just trouble and everyone—from bus drivers to substitute teachers—gave us a wide berth.

 A trio of girls—together so much they made one formidable social animal CandyMollyFran—hated us. In retaliation, we started our own secret society, the Buddy-Buddy Club. We had secret handshakes, secret greetings, secret meeting places; when we wrote one another letters, we put “The Buddy Buddy Club” as our return address, as if we were some junior branch of The Porcellian Club.

How can you have a club with two members? my dad teased. Because, we said.

Looking back now, I can see that there were signs, even then, that Judy suffered from depression. My father’s mother lived within walking distance of Judy’s house on Spadina Parkway in Pittsfield and Judy would often walk over to meet me when I was visiting. My grandmother, who came from a family of seven and loved to regale us with tales of her childhood, would often drive us to the Howard Johnson’s on Route 7 for afternoon treats of banana splits. Judy would sit in the back seat, as grim as if she were trapped in the principal’s office. Fiddling with the sugar as we waited for our food, Judy would continue to give us the silent treatment until my grandmother would smile and say “Judy, why do you scowl so?” Judy's face would get all red and scrunched up and I could tell she was about to cry.

When we were teenagers, Judy invited me to France to attend a week-long ski training camp in the French Alps, followed by a trip around Europe in a van with several other ski racers. Judy didn’t say a word for an entire week. At the time, I thought it odd, even irritating—I was the only one who wasn’t a competitive skier, and would have appreciated some verbal checking-in--but the others knew that the best thing was to let Judy be. And hope that her mood, like days of fog on Mont Blanc, would pass. By the time Judy and I split off from the others, spending a night in Grenoble before we flew home, she was back to her zany self. We spent our last night gorging on French pastries and gossiping.

“Judy was always hardest on herself,” a fellow ski racer wrote on Facebook.

Of course, I thought. Judy was hardest on herself. Which is why she drove herself to homeschool her four kids while sailing with her family around the world. Which is why she worked double shifts in the emergency room at Miles Memorial Hospital to support her family when they returned to Maine, working even on Christmas. Which is why she went back to school in her fifties to complete a Master’s in Public Health so that she would be qualified to work as a doctor in third-world countries. Which is why, when she couldn’t shake the old, dark feeling of being unworthy, she couldn’t let it go, couldn’t forgive herself.

 “Sorry I haven’t been in touch,” she would write in an e-mail or text, as we tried to get together in Maine, where Charlie had retired, or Massachusetts, where I still lived and worked. When my relationship with Charlie ended, I intended to tell Judy, explain why I was now the one who hadn’t kept up. But like Judy, I was hard on myself, felt humiliated to have failed at another relationship. Widowed, divorced, single again—“You could check every box on your tax return,” Judy had once joked--I felt like a loser.  

“I’m sorry I wasn’t a better friend to her,” I wrote to David in a private message on Facebook. “I should have seen the signs, should have worked harder to stay in touch. I was too wrapped up in my own shit.”

In Judy’s obituary, which David and their four children wrote together, mourners are asked not to send flowers but to hug their loved ones.

It’s a singular request: my arms ache from trying to honour it.

                                    ***

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The Serendipity of Blue

Depression, psychologists tell us, is not merely a neurological impairment; it is also a cognitive deficiency, a stubborn insistence upon seeing the glass as half-empty rather than half-full. The sun rarely shines in the dust-bunny-ridden halls of the melancholic mind; the depressive goes about his business mechanically, grumpily, a veritable Scrooge, begrudging others their joy, asserting with the preacher in the Book of Ecclesiastes, (without doubt the bleakest book in the Bible, so depressing that it should have its own category in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) that “there is nothing new under the sun.”

Imagine, then, my shock, my delight, my childlike wonder, when I read about the accidental discovery of a new shade of blue! Full disclosure here: having been raised as a Scientist (i.e. Christian Scientist), my acquaintance with chemistry, and indeed all forms of lower case science, is minimal. I can safely assure my reader that I am not smarter than a fifth grader when it comes to matters scientific. So I had to reread the article in the Science section of the New York Times at least five times before it stuck in my feeble hippocampus: in the course of an experiment in the chemistry lab at Oregon State University, which had to do with testing the properties of manganese oxides to determine whether they were both ferroelectric and ferromagnetic at the same time (you get a gold star if you know the difference), a graduate student happened to remove one of the pieces of manganese from a furnace—heated to a temperature so hot (2000 degrees Fahrenheit) it would scald the devil himself—and discovered that the material had turned bright blue. The student (not mentioned by name and not likely to get credit in the scientific journals) summoned his professor, and both were struck dumb as Paul on the road to Damascus: Lo and behold, the universe had made a whole new shade of blue!

But wait, it gets better: This new manganese blue was a better, safer, and more durable blue. Ever since the early Egyptians developed the first synthetic blue by grinding copper shavings with sand and potassium, the color has been difficult to create. Indeed blue was so rare in ancient times that the Greeks did not have a word for it. (Homer never refers to the sea as blue, only as “wine-dark.”) The Celts and Germans used woad, an herb of the mustard family, to create blue (and indeed the word blue is Germanic in origin); Indian peoples, since Neolithic times, have dyed with indigo; but both these blues tend to fade with time. The semi-precious stones of lapis lazuli, mined from mountains in the Far East, were often ground down to create a blue paste used in fine arts painting, but this brighter blue is costly. Cobalt blue, developed in France in the 1800s, was often carcinogenic. And Prussian blue, developed about the same time in Germany, releases the deadly chemical of cyanide. But this new manganese blue—featuring ions patterned in a trigonal bipyramidal coordination worthy of a Cubist painting—releases no evil carcinogens and will not fade with time. The new improved blue is expected to turn up in everything from inkjet printers to house paints.

And to think that the entire business was an accident, just as so many of the great scientific discoveries were accidents: Isaac Newton grasping the theory of gravity after being struck on the head by a falling apple; Henri Becquerel discovering X-rays after leaving his equipment in a drawer and noticing that a uranium rock had imprinted itself upon a photographic plate without being exposed to sunlight; Alexander Fleming discovering penicillin after failing to clean up his work area before going on vacation and noticing, when he returned, that a culture plate containing bacteria had developed a layer of mold which killed the bacteria around it.

Such serendipity is almost enough to make you believe in the prime mover, the author of all holy books, the maker of the periodic table himself.

Of course, if She exists, She’s got to be wearing blue!

Into the Wild Blue Ocean

“There are two things you will never regret,” writer Mary Gordon once observed, “a swim in the ocean, and the birth of a baby.” I recite this like the rosary every time I consider plunging into salt or fresh water, every time I list the usual reasons why I shouldn’t—the water is too cold, the air colder, I’m too tired, too depressed, I don’t want to get wet, I look like a Henry Moore sculpture in a bathing suit. Sometimes I talk myself into a swim; sometimes I don’t. One simple fact remains constant: the older I get, the less inclined I am to embrace the labor of plunging into cold water, especially ocean water, with its breakers and riptides, its potential to fling me about like so much sea kelp.

On the second-to-last day of September, on Crescent Beach in Block Island with the wind blowing so hard that you had to shout to make yourself heard, I repeated this homily to my three friends, hoping to convince them to join me in what would likely be the last swim of the summer. My friends are writers as well as mothers (actually, all are grandmothers, but don’t tell anyone because it makes them seem ancient as the Mohegan clay cliffs). We met years ago in a writing group in Westchester, and have mostly stayed in touch, through moves, divorces, and remarriages.

We were spending five days on Block Island, courtesy of Mary-Ann’s agent, who had generously offered to let us use her vacation home with its many bedrooms, porches and gardens in Rodman’s Hollow. We had divided the day into sessions of writing, biking, hiking, and gossiping. A swim in Block Island Sound seemed just the thing to make already unforgettable day even more so, before we headed home to drink wine and watch the sunset.

But no argument would sway Sarah, our southern belle from Virginia, who ironically was the only one wearing her bathing suit beneath her biking clothes. Sarah said swimming was a good idea in theory but that she had dipped her toes in the water and it was just too (expletive) cold, that her scrawny limbs were turning blue at the mere thought of plunging into Block Island Sound. If we were at Cape Hatteras in August, or Bermuda in March, but we weren’t, we were in the Bermuda of the North, thirteen miles off the coast of Rhode Island a week into fall and nothing would make her get wet, no matter how blissed-out she might feel afterward.

So Sarah huddled against her backpack, promising to record the polar swim on her Nikon, while we three nutty New Englanders made our way to the Crescent Beach bathhouse, which was unfortunately closed for the season. Draping a towel over a railing on the outer deck, which provided only the flimsiest cover against the gazes of passersby, including an old geezer with a metal detector some twenty feet away, as well one fortyish fellow in a golfing hat, who later approached us and confessed to watching us swim, pointing out that the water couldn’t have been that cold because we didn’t even use a towel to dry off. (The truth was, which we didn’t share as there was no need to discourage his plans to go swimming, we had packed only one towel!)

But changing our suits, we were hardly aware of him or any other idling beachcomber, shouting into the gale that we wouldn’t have dreamt of doing such a thing twenty years ago, but that now we didn’t give a hoot. Or, as Mary-Ann put it, quoting from a slogan on a tee-shirt that she picked up in Old Saybrook, a slogan that became a kind of shorthand for our island idyll,“Frankly, Scallop, I don’t give a clam!”

It probably won’t surprise you that my bathing suit was blue—with tiny white polka dots that a saleslady assured me some ten years ago were meant to provide a visually slimming effect, enhanced by the old-lady skort that reached to mid-thigh. It was the sort of suit that my mother would have approved of, would have worn herself had she been inclined to swim in the ocean in September.

But here’s what made me sad: when she was my age, my mother was not inclined to swim in the ocean—not in September or any other month of the year, even though she lived within a few miles of several beaches on the Gulf of Mexico in southern Florida. In the summer months, when she headed north to her summer cottage in Canada on Georgian Bay, where she had spent nearly every summer of her life since she was a child of five, where, in fact, she had first learned to swim, she didn’t go into the water either. She always had her reasons: she had just had her hair done, she was getting over a cold, the water wasn’t warm enough (even though Lake Huron was considered the warmest of the Great Lakes, a fact which she always proudly cited to friends), she didn’t want anyone to see her in a bathing suit as she had recently put on a “few tons.”

“Did your mothers stop swimming when they got to be a certain age?” I had asked my friends earlier, as we made our way from the Greenway Trail down to Mansion Beach, scouting a spot in which we might take our swim.

“Yeah, even when we were kids going to the Connecticut shore every summer, my mother rarely went in the water, she always said she didn’t want to mess up her hair,” Mary-Ann said, explaining that her mother reported that your skin gets more sensitive as you get older, and that she had never been able to bear the cold even when she was younger.

“My mother swam a lot when she was young growing up in England,” Sarah remembered, “but now that I think of it, she hardly ever went in as she got older.” Sarah’s mother had been a smoker, and had died of emphysema at the age of 78.

“My mother doesn’t swim as much as she used to, but she still does a kilometer in the pool almost every day,” Christine offered brightly. Christine’s mother was the only one of our mothers who was still alive, and maybe, I theorized, there was a connection; maybe when you stop swimming, stop submitting yourself to the baptism of cold water, something shuts down and you start preparing to die.

“On the other hand,” I continued, “we can’t forget that it’s only been in the last hundred years that women have been encouraged to swim, or engage in any other sport, for that matter. There was no women’s swimming competition at the Olympics until 1912.”

“And when they did go in the water,” Mary-Ann said, “think of the bathing costumes they had to wear—bloomers, caps, trousers. Who would want to get wet wearing all that stuff?

When we reached Crescent Beach, we agreed that we were the lucky beneficiaries of feminism. If it hadn’t been for pioneers like Annette Kellerman, the woman who designed the first one-piece suit that she wore in attempting to swim the English Channel in 1905 (and was, in fact, arrested for wearing on a Boston beach two years later), and Gertrude Ederle, the first woman to swim across the entire English Channel in 1926, completing the feat in 14 hours and breaking all previous records, we might not be here today, plunging, in our one-piece Spandex suits, into Block Island Sound.

Then, with Sarah capturing our posteriors for posterity, we charged into the surf, whooping and hollering, repeating that it wasn’t all that cold, except when the wind scattered bits of cresting wave on our goose pimpled arms. We counted to ten, asked each other who was going to be first. In seconds, Mary-Ann, the oldest and gutsiest among us—and what you should know about Mary-Ann is that she has earned enough money from the ten books she was written to buy a condo on the Connecticut shore--dove into the surf. Christine was next. I was last, breaking out into a lusty, mangled French version of La Marseillaise—“Allons, enfants de la patria, le jour de gloire est arrive”--that would have given my high school French teacher a mini-stroke. (“Rebecca,” she used to say in a voice that let me know I was going straight to the guillotine, “You don’t roll your r’s.) But I digress: in a quieter moment between breakers, I explained that singing the French national anthem was what my first husband, Len, had done when he went swimming, and that belting out the rousing verses never failed to warm me.

“Three cheers for Len,” they cried. All these dear ladies, including Sarah on the beach, had known Len. All, if I asked them which I did more than once during our reunion on Block Island, could tell me one funny story about him that I had forgotten. Then Christine and Mary-Ann screamed out their own mangled versions of La Marseillaise, and it made my heart sing like a barking harbor seal. How many friends could I go back with twenty-five years and have it be as brief as the lull between one breaking wave and another?

Sarah, who shared the dozen pictures she had taken of us that evening after an Indian dinner of Mary-Ann’s lentil dahl, remarked that what was so amazing about watching us was that we went into the water as droopy-butt middle-aged ladies, but that once we got wet, we became girls again, our oldest, deepest selves suddenly laid bare, like sandbars at low tide.

“The experience of swimming is both sexual and spiritual,” observed Annette Kellerman, who continued swimming just a few weeks before she died in California at the age of 88, “The sensation of water flowing over the body is dynamic, erotic, enlivening, and yet it awakens, at every moment, our consciousness of the fragility of our breath.”

Tangled up in Blue: The Sermon

My mother, who had a great sense of humor when she wasn’t suffering from depression, used to say about Unitarians: “The only time they use the word, God, is when the janitor falls down the stairs.” Mom was a fervent Christian Scientist, and she brought up my sister and me to be fervent Christian Scientists, in which endeavor she clearly failed or I wouldn’t be standing here before you this morning quoting the likes of Bob Dylan in a sermon called Tangled up in Blue.

Well, OK, she didn’t fail completely to pass on the gene for Mary Baker Eddy, the discoverer and founder of Christian Science, because I can still recite the Scientific Statement of Being, which I learned at the age of 10 in the spanking white, mock-Federal-style First Church of Christ, Scientist on Wendell Avenue in Pittsfield, which never really looked like a church to me, but more like a bank. “There is no life, truth, intelligence or substance in matter/ All is infinite mind and its infinite manifestation…” I can remember standing straight as one of those Ionic front columns as I rose in Sunday School with all the other immaculately dressed kids—the boys looking like little bankers-to-be in their three pieces suits, the girls like wedding-ready flower girls in their puffy tulle dresses—all of us well-behaved as circus dogs as we recited these big, fat, ten-dollar words.

Between you and me and the chalice, I didn’t have a clue then what the words of the Scientific Statement of Being meant and I still don’t. The phrases all circled back on themselves like the Queen of Heart’s imperious pronouncements in Alice in Wonderland or Gertrude Stein’s maddeningly tautological, “A Rose is a rose is a rose.” What did it mean to say that, “God is all in all,” or that “Spirit is immortal truth/matter is mortal error.” What, moreover, was so wrong with the material world—my pretty royal blue velvet dress with its lace collar, matched with my navy patent leather Mary Janes--that it was a mistake? And if the visible world was an illusion, where did that leave evils like slavery and the Holocaust, and what were you supposed to do about them? These were the questions with which I pestered my patient Sunday School teachers as I sat with folded hands at one of the round maple tables in the basement of the First Church of Christ, Scientist, whose robin’s egg blue walls were decorated with plaques with quotes from Science and Health and The Bible.

The most important question, which I never could have formulated, much less have been brave enough to ask was, why was Mary Baker Eddy’s God not helping my mother? Why was she spending increasing amounts of time in bed—not getting up to see my sister and me off to school, and still huddled beneath her burial mound of comforters at 3:00 in the afternoon, the shades pulled tight against the bright afternoon sun. Beside her in bed, in ravines on either side of her body, were navy-blue hard-bound copies of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, the Christian Science Concordance, and Robert Peel’s multi-volume biography of Mary Baker Eddy. There was the small, heavily underlined pamphlet called The Lesson, which came each week in a brown wrapper and included daily readings from The Bible and Science & Heal. There were rolled-up, rubber-banded copies of The Christian Science Monitor; under the bed were copies of The Christian Science Sentinel, which included testimonies of healing from ordinary Christian Scientists about how they had been cured of broken bones and impacted wisdom teeth, how they had prayed their way through job losses and financial reversals.

Years later, taking college courses in women’s history, I would learn that Mary Baker Eddy, thrice-married and often short of cash, had been an invalid herself. Like many smart, undereducated middle-class women in the nineteenth century, Mrs, Eddy suffered from a menu of mysterious ailments—headaches, fatigue, anxiety, hypersensitivity to noise—that would now be diagnosed as a mood disorder and treated with the latest serotonin-reuptake inhibitors like Prozac and Zoloft. But in the years after the Civil War, American medicine in general, and psychiatry in particular, was still in its infancy, and people who suffered from mental disorders were left to their own devices, becoming agoraphobic like Emily Dickinson, who was born a year after MBE, or seeking relief from the latest faddish healers—like those who peddled phrenology, mesmerism, and magnetism. Mary Baker Eddy, after studying with the famed healer Phineas Quimby, and taking to heart his central idea about the power of mind over matter, began, well past the middle of her life, to take up her bed and walk. She became a healer herself, and developed a following to rival Qimby’s. People came from all over New England to Lynn, Massachusetts to study with her; by 1886, when her contemporary Emily Dickinson had died of Bright’s disease at 55, Mary Baker Eddy had already published Science & Health, and was busy soliciting funds for the massive Mother Church in Boston. By the time Mrs. Eddy passed away at the age of 89 in 1910, she had become, according to Mark Twain, one of the most powerful women in America.

Christian Science saved Mary Baker Eddy, but it failed my mother. In the years after her divorce, she continued to read The Lesson every day, her depression and anxiety piggy-backing onto other health problems, such as high blood pressure and Type II Diabetes.

For my part, I became the archetypal angry young woman, despising all religion—not only the God of Mary Baker Eddy but also the God of the Unitarians and the Congregationalists and the Catholics and the Jews. My creed became the existentialist lyricism of Bob Dylan and the lassitudinous blues of B.B. King. It was the mid-seventies, and the country was suffering from the malaise brought on by the political betrayals of Watergate and Vietnam. A hard rain was gonna fall on all the sacred cows the older generation had worshipped—organized religion, Repbublican politics, conventional marriage, the military-industrial complex, everything was going to be destroyed and made again, in our image.

Then, a curious thing happened in my middle forties. The periods of depression and lassitude, which had begun in my teen years and dogged me all my life, began to worsen. On the surface, my life, like that of the country’s which settled down into the feel-good platitudes of Fleetwood Mac and Bill Clinton, seemed normal, if unremarkable. After losing my first husband to brain cancer, I had married again, and given birth to a much-longed for baby son. My family and I were living in northern Vermont, where my husband taught writing at Johnson State College. I had two Master’s Degrees and a modest success as a freelance writer, having written a memoir and several articles for national women’s magazines. But nothing seemed to fill the hollow in my deep heart’s core, the sense that, when all was said and done, I was lost, tangled up in blue, a driver bearing down hard on the accelerator, moving further along the highway to nowhere.

Like Mary Baker Eddy over a century before me, I searched for the key that would unlock my despair. I played hours of tennis until every muscle was bursting with lactic acid, baked apple cakes and chocolate-chip cookies for the PTA, wrote long letters to my agent with ideas for new writing projects, the enthusiasm for which I could never sustain past the first ten or twenty pages. I tried Prozac, Zoloft and Celexa, and nearly every night I self-medicated into oblivion with white wine, which my son jokingly observed should be spelled, ‘whine.’ Sometimes late at night when I couldn’t sleep, I even whispered the hocus-pocus tautologies of the Scientific Statement of Being.

Time passed; my mother moved from Florida to Virginia to New Hampshire, back to Virginia and back to New Hampshire, becoming increasingly dysfunctional with each uprooting. In 2005, she passed away at the New London Hospital in New Hampshire at the age of 80, my sister and I holding her hands as she took her last breath. One of the final bills that arrived a week after her death was from a Christian Science practitioner in Toronto, Canada. My sister paid it and sent her Mom’s obituary, which I had written and placed in newspapers in four states. The practitioner sent a kind note back:” You know you and your sister meant everything to your mom,” she wrote. It was the sort of thing people said to the bereaved, and yet we took comfort in the fact that our mother’s love for us was one of the constants in her life.

Meanwhile, my family and I moved to Massachusetts so that our son could The Hartsbrook School, a Waldorf school based on the alternative, educational principles of Rudolph Steiner, whose philosophy which places the spirit at the center of the learning process, is, in some respects, similar to the mind-over-matter creed of Mary Baker Eddy. One of my son’s friends at the new school turned out to be a Christian Scientist, and his mother was a Christian Science practitioner. It was as if fate was calling me to put all the pieces of my life into some kind of pattern, to make them make sense.

I could not bring myself to return to the First Church of Christ, Scientist, but I was hungry for some kind of spiritual connection. At the suggestion of P., my dear friend from graduate school and long-time member of UU, I joined the Society in Northampton. I came alone, as my husband contended that religion was a crutch (this didn’t really bother me, as I had said as much myself back in the day). My teenaged son preferred to sleep in on Sunday mornings. (To my great surprise and gratitude, both came to my August 2nd sermon.)

A small legacy from my mother permitted me to devote myself to writing full-time. But the depression followed me like fellow depressive Winston Churchill’s legendary Black Dog—I tied it up outside the Forbes Library in Northampton and the Jones Library in Amherst, where I worked most days, but it kept barking and yapping, demanding that I pay attention to it. Maybe I was kidding myself that I could revive my writing career, I was in my fifties now; most writers my age had several books under their belt. Instead of working, I would surf the Internet, Googling my out-of-print memoir and learning to my despair that it was going for one penny on Amazon, for one dollar on E-Bay. What if nothing came of all this time I was squandering, what if I ran through all my money, and had nothing to show for it? Maybe, in the end, I was simply a prisoner of my genetic heritage, neurochemically programmed to repeat my mother’s failures, destined to live forever tangled up in blue.

“Make a study of your depression, learn everything you can about it.” The voice belonged to my first husband, Leonard Feldstein, who had been a psychiatrist in New York, who had been dead more than twenty-five years. The words came to me during one of these long wasteful afternoons at the library. But the words were addressed not to me but to one of Len’s former patients, whom I hadn’t thought about in years, and whom I’ll call Terry.

Terry was a psychologist in her late forties, a former concert pianist who lived alone near Carnegie Hall and saw patients in the living room of her one-bedroom apartment. Terry suffered from depression, not just a sometime attack of the blues, but serious, crippling depression where she would be so distraught she couldn’t get out of bed. During her senior year at Bennington College as well as after the break-up of her marriage, she had made several suicide attempts, for which she had been hospitalized.

Terry was no longer Len’s patient—he had stopped seeing her several years before Len and I were married--but she still used to call, always at night and always in tears. Len had an answering service (this was well before the era of cell phones) so she never would interrupt our evenings directly, but the service would phone, and by the pinched features on his somber face, I would know that it was Terry, calling not just once, but several times within the last hour. Len would call her back immediately, and often he would be on the phone with her through the night, listening as she cried that her life was a mess, that there was nothing to live for, that she couldn’t go on.

Sometimes he would reassure her that whatever she was feeling was intensified by her solitude, by the lateness of the hour, by the wine she had drunk earlier. He would tell her that the despair would pass, that she herself was separate from and more than her depression. Sometimes, when her crying would subside, he would talk about his own dark periods after his own divorce, how he read the Bible. “Weeping may endure for a night,” he would quote from The Book of Psalms, “But Joy cometh in the morning.” When Terry, a lapsed Catholic, said she couldn’t abide anything having to do with scripture, Len talked about the existentialist writer Samuel Beckett, and quoted from him: “I can’t go on. I won’t go on. I’ll go on.”

Len reminded her that all the great artists had suffered from depression—Goya, Van Gogh, Picasso, Rilke, Eliot, Yeats, that no sensitive person could be immune from the atonal music of hopelessness and helplessness, the sense that one was utterly alone, the world a “booming, buzzing confusion.” He urged Terry to think of her condition not as a burden but as a gift, one that she could use in her own therapeutic practice to help others.
“Make a study of what you are feeling,” Len would repeat when Terry was finally calm enough to hang up the phone, “draw it, paint it, write about it, learn everything you can about it.”

Then, in a Eureka moment reminiscent of Archimedes in the bathtub, right there in the Forbes Library among various loafers and idlers playing computer games and staring at Internet porn, it occurred to me make a study of blue—blue, which was, in fact, my favorite color, and the favorite color of most people in the world, I would learn, blue, blue which was a synonym for depression.

“The test of a first-rate intelligence,” F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, “is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind and still retain the ability to function.” What I began to discover about blue was that contradiction and duality were at its very core. The Russian painter Vassily Kandinsky called blue the “most spiritual of all colors,” and yet it was also emblematic of a mood disorder that affected millions. It was the color of the sky, which Emily Dickinson termed the “inns of molten blue,” it was the color of her paradisal “blue peninsula” yet it was also the shade of the blue-bottle fly that was the very last thing one glimpsed before death. Color theorists contend that blue expresses dominance and power, and blue was indeed the color of Roger Federer’s shirt when he won the French Open for the very first time this year. At the same time, code blue was also the hospital’s alert for a patient going into cardiac arrest; blue was the color of the flesh turned before it turned gray.

Navy Blue was the color of the uniform of the Union’s soldier’s during the Civil War, just a shade darker than the blue-gray of the Confederate soldier, and the blues were the name of the music that African-Americans invented after the war was over, when African-Americans discovered that even though they had won their freedom as well as the right to vote, they were still second-class citizens, not fit to live in the same neighborhoods as whites or attend the same schools or sit in the same sections of the bus or even drink from the same water fountain as whites. Blue was the color of all the states that voted for Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election, and blue was the color of President Obama’s suit when he was inaugurated President of the United States.

So what does all this have to do with the god of the Unitarians?
I would like to conclude with another story.

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 several months ago as I walked into this very red brick Greek Revival Unitarian Church. 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 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, the Renaissance, the Reformation and beyond, has been one of God’s favorite colors.

I have been going to the UU services for over a year; I have sipped coffee in the parlor and praised the organist and 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 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; 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 things, but I have never noticed that the front doors are blue.

Parsing L'Heure Bleue

The delights of parsing blue are many: Not only do I muzzle what fellow depressive Winston Churchill called the “Black Dog” of depression, I also travel to exotic intellectual locations, places I scarcely knew existed before undertaking this singular journey. For instance, for my birthday, which came and went a month ago without much fanfare, my dear friend, C., who has been a generous midwife to this blog, gave me a bottle of L’Heure Bleue.

Entre nous, I have never been much of a girlie girl. For most of my adult life, I have rued the feminine niceties of perfume, lipstick, make-up, rouge, eye-shadow, eye-brow pencil, and mascara. I rarely even bother to accessorize my faded jeans and sea-blue shirts. I have a drawer full of colorful silk scarves, but I can’t be bothered to put them on, much less layer or wrap them fashionably around my throat or shoulders.

My mother, who loved to trick my sister and me out in frilly dresses with velvet collars from Best & Company, occasionally tried to cast the tomboy out of me, like some Old Testament prophet getting rid of Satan. From the time I was about 12 until my late thirties before my second marriage, with time out for the years when her own depression made it hard for her to care whether I looked like a shaggy pony that’s been rolling in manure, she filled my ears with fashion advice: how you should never wear black near your face, as it made you look washed out, how monochromatic colors, worn with artistry, could be flattering. She sometimes gave me presents of miniature bottles of perfume, with instructions to dab a little on my arms and around my neck. Like this, she would say, sitting upright as Aphrodite at her dressing table and misting the undersides of her wrists, the hollows of her elbow and dips along her collarbone with her favorite Chanel No. 5 before hurrying off to cast her perfumed glow like some mating firefly at a country club tea dance.

While I loved to look at her looking at herself in the glass, I thought it was gross to stink up my own sunburned flesh with any Frenchified potion, however aromatic. The only smells I craved were those of fresh-mown grass and the sweet stink of fresh manure piling up in the fields and drawing its lace curtain of tiny flies.

But in the twilight of post-menopausal pulchritude, with Mom’s fashion dictives as faded as 1940s pin-ups of Hollywood It Girls, I relish the prospect of misting my secret hollows with L’Heure Bleue. Of course, were it any other perfume, I wouldn’t be the least bit jazzed, but L’Heure Bleue, a mix of roses, iris and jasmine created by celebrated perfumier Jacques Guerlain in the summer of 1912, and meant to evoke the pleasures of Paris at dusk when the roses in the Jardin du Luxembourg and the Bois de Boulogne are said to be at their most aromatic, well, L’Heure Bleue is hardly a perfume at all, but un pays, a Zeitgeist.

“What scent are you wearing,” demands the hapless heroine of another stronger, prouder young woman in Jean Rhys’ first novel, Quartet.

“L’Heure Bleue of Guerlain,” answers the self-possessed young woman.

“Guerlain! Listen to that!” mocks her sometime male companion, as if the idea of linking such a fine perfume with this denizen of the Moulin Rouge is a joke.

“You get on my nerves,” retorts the young woman calmly.

Jean Rhys loved L’Heure Bleue and wore it all her life, according to Lillian Pizzichini, who has just published The Blue Hour, a harrowing account of Rhys’ rootless, alcohol-and-perfume soaked existence, which mirrored the fate of one of her melancholy heroines. Growing up in the British colony of Dominica and sent off to England at the age of 16 to attend the Perce School for Girls, Rhys once acknowledged that she didn’t know a thing about mathematics or machines. But like many young girls who came of age before women received the right to vote, Rhys knew how to captivate men.

There was an early first marriage to Jean Lenglet, a Polish journalist who dabbled in stolen antiques and who served time in a French prison. There was Rhys’ celebrated affair with the older, richer Ford Madox Ford, who gave Rhys money and published Rhys’ first short story in the transatlantic review. (When Ford dumped her, Rhys got her revenge by putting him in Quartet, as the self-centered English picture dealer H.G. Heidler.) There was second husband Leslie Tilden Smith, an English literary agent who met Rhys after her first two novels were published and who was fervently devoted to the pretty novelist, correcting her proofs and looking after Maryvonne, Rhys’ only child. After Smith died suddenly of a heart attack, Rhys took up with his cousin, Max Hamer, who became husband number three.

And yet, despite the manic changes of addresses and lovers and husbands, despite the gin, white wine, and sweet vermouth downed without restraint in cafes all over Paris and in bed-sits all over London, despite a vicious temper that landed her in court facing charges of abuse and disorderly conduct from neighbors, Rhys still managed to write five critically acclaimed novels, still published--at 76, after all her books had gone out of print and she was virtually unknown throughout Great Britain--her masterpiece, Wide Sargasso Sea.

“I must write,” she once confided to the American novelist, David Plante, whose essay about her in Difficult Women is a little masterpiece, “If I stop writing, my life will have been an abject failure. It is that already to other people. But it could be an abject failure to myself. I will not have earned my death.”

The Color of Life

She wore green the way I wear blue—quirkily, comically, compulsively.

Her bedroom closet was stuffed with lime green button-down shirts, emerald green turtlenecks, pea green sweaters, Kelly Green polyester pants—all grouped according to their hue and hanging neatly on molded plastic white hangars. Sometimes she paired these shades with pinks and purples, but mostly she wore her greens monochromatically—light with dark, dark with light, giving her a checkerboard effect, as if she were a walking display of every wavelength along the green color spectrum. Her grandchildren, who called her by her childhood nickname, Gigi, made up a special color just for her: Gigi Green.

If you asked why she loved green—and even her puffy down parka from L.L. Bean was chartreuse, as was her malachite-colored raincoat, rain hat, and matching umbrella, making her look like some bloated, aging Elmo whenever she bundled herself up for a trip to the Piggly Wiggly, and she never went anywhere, even in the heat of Florida, without bundling herself up—she would tell you that green was the color of life. She would not talk about Greenpeace or Green buildings or “greening your routine” because these things were as foreign and newfangled as e-mail and I-pods. But she would tell you that her father was Professor Emeritus of Forestry at the University of Michigan and that he was “way ahead of his time,” and that one tree—and she was good with the names of trees, could point out evergreens, firs, blue spruces, silver beeches and sugar maples—one tree could produce more cooling air than ten air conditioners running 20 hours a day. She would have made a face if anyone had called her a tree hugger, and yet she often said that trees were like people, and that cutting one down—even though it was rotting and sick with Dutch Elm disease, like one very old moss-covered Elm in our back yard that she kept going long past its time--was like killing someone.

When she moved into a condo in the retirement community near my sister in New Hampshire during the last year of her life, she was asked to fill out a form, giving information about herself that would be published in the monthly newsletter. She had to include where she was born, where she went to college, what her profession had been, how many children and grandchildren she had. Proudly, she listed her graduation from Smith College in 1948, as well as the names of four other family members--her aunt, two cousins, and niece—who had graduated from Smith.

“But what do I put down for profession?” she asked. The other residents included retired doctors and college presidents, and she was worried about not making the grade, about making a fool of herself. “The only job I ever had,” she said, “was when I worked as a model at the J. Conover Agency in New York before I married your father, but if I put that, they’ll think I’m a birdbrain, a lightweight.”

“Just put housewife,” my sister advised, and Mom agreed, adding that it was the truth, and there was no shame in that.

A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Waste, yelled the message on a billboard that I passed riding the bus to school every day. It was for the United Negro College Fund, and the child pictured was an inner-city kid with a tear rolling down his cheek and huge, bright eyes, who was poor and couldn’t learn all the things I was learning, such as how to spell chlorophyll and why it made plants green. But whenever I passed the billboard’s screaming message, all I could think of was Mom, and how she was home alone with the shades pulled in her upstairs bedroom, sunk beneath a burial mound of Hudson’s Bay green-and-white blankets. Downstairs, Mrs. V. did the laundry and the cooking and the cleaning, and sometimes she and Mom chatted when Mom padded down in the middle of the day to boil an egg or eat a bag of potato chips, but mostly Mom stayed upstairs in the dark room, getting over a bug.

The bug was her depression, which no one had ever named, and which would not be diagnosed until many years later. Mom was a Christian Scientist, and so she rarely went to doctors. She had her Christian Science practitioners, to whom she talked for hours on the telephone, but they gently instructed her to think of herself as a perfect child of God: If she imagined herself to be such an emanation of Divine Love, then the illness would disappear, just as if she’d taken a course of powerful antibiotics. The practitioners said that Mary Baker Eddy herself had suffered from many ailments before discovering Christian Science. Mrs. Eddy had injured her spine after falling on an icy sidewalk in Lynn, Massachusetts in 1866, and was briefly hospitalized. But once she discovered the Truth, the practitioners reported breathlessly, which was that all sickness was an illusion, the manifestation of error, once she had written Science and Health and founded the Mother Church (“And did you know,” they would marvel, “that she was 87 when she founded The Christian Science Monitor?”), why she went on to live a long, healthy and productive life. Mom could be healed too, they promised, if only she knew the truth.

Mom tried to know the truth, or ‘k the t’ as she quaintly put it, her whole life—seeking help from practitioners through her divorce, her moves from Massachusetts to Connecticut, Florida, Virginia, and New Hampshire, her trips north every summer to Canada. As she grew older, she finally supplemented her CS treatments with doctors’ visits (Mrs. Eddy said that Christian Scientists could seek medical help in certain extraordinary circumstances). In her early sixties, Mom discovered that she had Type II Diabetes as well as high blood pressure and depression. Her doctors prescribed Sinequan, Ambien, and Glucovance; they also advised her to lose twenty pounds and start exercising, advice which she largely ignored, though she did purchase a three-speed English bike, along with a fluorescent green Avanti bike helmet, both of which she stored in the attic of her summer cottage in Canada.

But even though Mom took her medications, she never respected doctors of medicine the way she did her non-degreed CS practitioners. The Latinate, multi-syllabllic, oft-repeated abstractions of Science and Health gave Mom comfort, the way mantras pacify students of transcendental meditation. Mary Baker Eddy permitted Mom to tell the story of her life not in psychological, medical or sociological terms—Mom’s mother, a housewife and amateur artist, had suffered from depression and neglected her two girls, much the way Mom neglected my sister and me, passing on the legacy of depression—but in the high-minded, neo-philosophic language of 19th century American Transcendentalists, giving Mom’s all-too-female, multi-generational tale of underachievement and blight a gravity and purpose that was as fictional as any bodice-ripper.

After she died, my sister and I went through Mom’s closets and gave away all the green turtlenecks, sweaters and pants to the local hospice shop. But I kept the fluorescent green Avanti helmet, which was in excellent condition, mostly because it had rarely been used. At first, I stored it on an upper shelf in the closet, thinking superstitiously that it might be bad luck to wear it (having inherited her depressive illness, I have always been afraid of becoming like her). But after I lost my blue helmet last summer (in a typical Attention-Deficit-Disorder lapse, I left it beside a computer in the library), I started wearing the green Avanti Helmet.

And here’s the big surprise: I get compliments about it all the time. Just last month, as I was pedaling furiously along Elm Street in Northampton, late again for my writers’ group, a man started honking. I assumed that he was angry because I had failed to use a hand signal when turning into the oncoming traffic. Imagine my chagrin when he rolled down his window and shouted, “Cool helmet, Dude!” and then gave me a thumbs-up. And just last Monday, which would have been Mom’s 84th birthday, I was unlocking my bike from a rack on Green Street near the campus of Smith College, when a spry, elderly woman walked past.

“My dear girl,” she said, “Where on earth did you get that helmet?”

“It was my mom’s,” I said, “She always said green was the color of life.”

The Blue Eagle & Edward Hopper

Ever since I first started learning about clinical depression, I’ve always thought it curious that we use the same word to describe a protracted economic downturn and the neurochemically based mood disorder. But perhaps there are deeper connections that beg to be elucidated. In both states, people have lost their livelihood, their confidence, that animating spark that lights up their brain, that propels them through the world. In both conditions, they feel isolated, locked inside the prison of self, struggling to connect. Every depressive state, the British psychoanalyst D,W. Winnicott once observed, has within itself “the germ of its own recovery,” and yet the nature of the depressive and the person who has lost his job or his home is that he feels down with no way out. Traveling in the wrong direction down a one-way street, and regardless of whether he turns around or keeps going, he feels a sense of dread.

In the middle of the Great Depression, FDR created the National Industrial Recovery Act, which was designed to do something that had never been done before: regulate the marketplace. NIRA, which was also called the National Recovery Act, set wages, production quotas, and price controls, measures that were called “communistic” and even “Hitler-like” by Republicans. Its symbol was a blue eagle (technically a thunderbird but that bird was not as emblematically patriotic). With its wings outspread, its right talon clasping a sprocket wheel, its left resting upon a thunderbolt, the creature was a force not to be trifled with. Above its head blazed the word, member, in blue letters; the red letters of the acronym NRA filled the top of the poster, and the slogan ‘We do our part’ blazed at the bottom. The bird was blue because of a practice originating in World War I where soldiers wore a bright blue badge on their shoulders to prevent being fired upon by other American soldiers. Like that impossible-to-miss blue insignia, the Blue Eagle would signal to others—the jobless, the broke, the hungry--that they were not alone, that someone was looking after them.

When the Blue Eagle flew in shop windows and factories across the country in the summer of 1933, Edward Hopper was in his early fifties, having finally achieved financial as well as critical recognition. The classic “Early Sunday Morning,” of sunlight falling on a deserted brick storefront on Seventh Avenue in Greenwich Village, was purchased by the Whitney Museum a few months after it was completed, proof that Hopper, who had eked out a living as a commercial illustrator, had finally arrived. But this good fortune was sadly no protection against Hopper’s continuing periods of despair and a lethargy so great that he often could not work. Hopper once said that all he really wanted to do was paint “sunlight on the side of a house.” But when Hopper couldn’t generate the focus and passion to paint, his existence felt random as a hobo’s all-night ride on a boxcar, other people as untrustworthy as the figures hunched over their coffee in the diner of “Nighthawks.”

In 1935, the U.S. Supreme Court declared the Blue Eagle and its hundreds of bureaucratic codes unconstitutional (there were 765 codes that regulated even the production and sale of dog food). enH The mighty thunderbird, which Henry Ford had derisively called Roosevelt’s ‘buzzard’, was banished to the dust-heap of history. But FDR was a fighter; he was not about to abandon the battle to end the Depression. (He once observed that after not being able to wiggle his toes for a month--he had contracted polio in 1921 at the age of 39--everything else was easy.) FDR continued to create jobs for the unemployed through programs like the CCC, the CCV, and the WPA. In 1935, he also signed into law the historic Social Security Act, guaranteeing an income to older Americans. Under FDR’s watch, child labor laws were instituted, and the work-week was reduced from six days to five days.

Edward Hopper, like FDR, was a problem-solver. (Oddly enough, Hopper did not approve of the WPA program, which employed many out-of-work artists, as he felt it encouraged mediocrity. No doubt Hopper would have felt differently if he had needed the money or the work.) Hopper was flush enough in the Depression years to purchase an automobile as well as build a summer home and studio on Cape Cod. A change of scene helped the artist’s dark moods, as did frequent automobile trips out West and to Mexico. Hopper also filled his unproductive hours with reading and movie-going.

Throughout all these restless changes of scenes and activities, his marriage to fellow artist Jo Nivison was often tense, no doubt worsening his depression as much as alleviating it. Husband and wife were together constantly in New York, in Truro, and on their car trips. So much closeness drove them crazy; they fought over everything from Jo’s devotion to her cat, Arthur, to Hopper’s lukewarm support of Jo’s work as an artist (he said she possessed a “pleasing little talent”). In her diary, Jo confided: “if I’m on the point of being very happy, he sees to it that I’m not.” Once, according to Hopper’s biographer, Gail Levin, Jo got so mad, she bit her husband’s hand to the bone.

And yet Jo Nivison, who acted as artist’s model for nearly all of her husband’s paintings that included human figures, remained devoted to her mate, claimed that he was the center of her universe and often spoke of Hopper’s paintings as their “children” (the Hoppers had married in their forties and were childless). When Hopper died in 1967 at the age of 84, Jo donated all his works to the Whitney Museum. Ten months later, she passed away herself. “We don’t know what she died of,” says Barbara Novak, one of a very small number of their close friends, “I think she died for lack of him. And he would have died for lack of her. It really was a folie a deux.”

One of Hopper’s most famous works, “The Long Leg,” was painted in 1935 and is done almost entirely in blue. It features a solitary, wooden sailboat racing against the wind across Cape Cod Bay, its wooden hull leaning into the water, its crew obscured by the full sails. In the distance Long Point Lighthouse perches in solitary grandeur at the foot of a headland, surrounded by dunes. What dominates the painting, which is absent of human beings, is water and sky—the blue of the sea a few shades darker than the sky, which is washed pale with clouds. But unlike other Hopper landscapes, where the absence of people evokes a quiet gloom, here one feels only the presence of energy and possibility, as if we could sit for an afternoon in the cockpit of that boat, we could sail away from all that was petty and contrary within ourselves.

“The Long Leg,” was recently chosen as a stamp for the U.S. Postage system (it will be available later this summer), and it’s easy to see why. In this era of job losses, home foreclosures and government bailouts, Hopper’s lone boat sailing effortlessly in the bay suggests that we need look no further than nature itself for the answer to our anomie. The blue of water and sky will heal us, if only we take in their presence--like sails filling with wind.

Ode to a Blue Bike

“Life is like riding a bicycle,” Einstein once wrote to his younger son, Eduard, a brilliant but troubled student who would soon be hospitalized for schizophrenia, “You have to keep moving or you lose your balance.”

As I pedal my blue Motobecane along the bike paths of the Pioneer Valley during the lengthening days of May, I ponder Einstein’s words, which have been much quoted by biographers and bloggers. Not that they helped poor Eduard, nicknamed Tete, by his doting mother, Mileva Maric, from whom the physicist was divorced in 1919. Einstein hated being separated from his two boys and visited them on holidays (he was teaching in Berlin and they lived with their mother in Zurich), but their day-to-day care fell to Mileva, who suffered from depression herself. The older son, Hans Albert, would become an engineer and follow his father to the United States, but Tete would not be so lucky. In 1932, the 22-year-old abandoned his studies—he had hoped to become a psychiatrist—and entered Burgholzi, a fin-de-siecle, palace-like pile on a wooded hill in southeastern Zurich, where some of the most celebrated psychiatrists of the age were gathered, including Carl Jung, who worked briefly as the assistant to Director Eugen Bleuler, who first coined the term schizophrenia. But all these brilliant practitioners were like all the king’s horses and all the king’s men who couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again. Eduard Einstein would return to the Zurich sanitarium many times over the next decades, residing there full time after the death of his mother in 1948. He died at Burgholzi at the age of 55, his life over before it had ever really begun.

I can only imagine the singular hell of schizophrenia—the world fractured and distorted as if one were stuck inside a Surrealist painting, voices yelling in the head like a violent rap song one can never turn off. But I know the immobility of depression, and I know it’s almost impossible to feel sad pumping along a bike path, skunk cabbage growing in velvety profusion in the marshes, long-tailed squirrels and the occasional rabbit hurrying into the bushes.

My blue Motobecane is very old, and I have known it longer than either of my two husbands. My first husband, Len, bought it for me in a bike shop on Martha’s Vineyard during one summer we spent there in 1978. We got it at R.W. Cutler’s in Edgartown, and I remember this only because a gold sticker with the shop logo, two silhouetted figures on a tandem bicycle, is still miraculously affixed to a lower corner of the frame near the rear derailleur.

Len loved France and all things French (I can still hear him singing La Marseillaise as he plunged into the cold waters of Menemsha Sound). He convinced me to get the Motobecane, which had Made in France in block letters along the down tube, Mirage in fancy script on both sides of the crossbar, and the red, white and black Motobecane shield beneath the front reflector. Len said that the French were particular about anything mechanical—they were the ones who invented the bicycle and they also developed the first high-speed trains in Europe; I couldn’t go wrong with the Motobecane. I would have been happy with a cheaper Japanese model (I was and am still a thrifty Yankee who hates to pay top dollar for anything), but Len was the archetypal Jewish mensch who wanted only the best for his shiksa. Nothing but this stylish French Mirage with its low slung handlebars, skinny tires, and light-as-a-branch steel frame would do for his Beckala.

I suppose there must have been other colors—silver, red or orange--but I chose the metallic blue because even then I loved all things blue. The paint is now faded and scarred with rust, but three decades ago it was a lovely, cerulean blue with darker blue bands around its down tube, a dark blue brake cable running along the crossbar. The bike with its sparkle and flashes of navy reminded me of a certain vista that you could see from almost anywhere along Menemsha Beach or the Gay Head Cliffs: Vineyard Sound with the darkish shapes of the Elizabeth Islands in the distance, a wrap-around landscape of sea and sky, miles and miles of blue and deeper blue, so dazzling that on a sunny, summer day, you couldn’t look at it without sunglasses or, if you had none, without holding your hand over your forehead, couldn’t look without feeling dizzy with so much blueness.

Martha’s Vineyard is a biker’s paradise—much of the island from Vineyard Haven to Oak Bluffs to Edgartown is flat as a skipping stone with hillier terrain up island towards Chilmark. But once the metallic blue touring bike was mine, I rarely rode it—not at Martha’s Vineyard, not in New York City, not in Westchester County or in Fairfield County, where we lived after we married in 1981. The bike gathered dust in an upstairs back bedroom of our farmhouse in Bedford Hills, in the garage of our cape in Redding, Connecticut, its chain in need of grease, its tires in need of air. If anyone had asked, I would have said that I didn’t want to ride alone (Len couldn’t ride a bike, owing to a mastoid operation he’d had as a child, which caused occasional balance problems), would have said that I was too busy. I wouldn’t have said I didn’t ride because I was depressed, because I didn’t get that there was a connection between the two events: that if I had been less depressed I would have ridden the bike more and if I had ridden the bike more I would have been less depressed.

After Len died, I detached the spring-loaded front wheel of the Motobecane Mirage and boxed it up with the rest of the bike in a Bridgeport, Connecticut warehouse. Meanwhile, I struggled to find my way as a young widow, moving first to the Midwest to try to make a life with a man, and when that didn’t work out, down to Washington, D.C. for a graduate degree. When I married for the second time and moved to Vermont, the bike finally emerged from storage, red stickers dangling from its rusting chrome pedals. But I still didn’t take it out much, this time blaming the steep hills of the Green Mountains. It would be too simplistic to say that there was a one-to-one correspondence between the force field of my depression and the amount of time I spent on the Mirage, but what I did notice was this: whenever I got into a routine of riding the blue bike, in the morning before work or occasionally in the evening after dinner, singing to myself that silly ditty by Arlo Guthrie, “I don’t want a pickle/just want to ride on my motor-cy-cle…I don’t want to die, just want to ride on my motor-cy-cle,” something shifted. My body, perhaps because two perfectly constructed French derailleurs were levitating it, felt lighter, less burdened with the negativity that shuts down most depressives (you’re fat, you’re old, you’re a loser, you’re a nobody).

Three years ago, when my family and I moved to the Pioneer Valley so our son could attend the Hartsbrook School, the Motobecane got wedged into the back of the U-Haul with sofas and suitcases. We rented a duplex just half a mile from the Norwottock Rail Trail, and pretty soon I was taking mini-excursions to Whole Foods, Barnes & Noble, even to the Cineplex, proud to be saving money on gas as well as doing my bit to reduce global warming. Along with other bike riders, I grumbled about the bits of recycled glass that were mixed in with the blacktop when the trail was created in 1993 (you didn’t have to be an Einstein to figure out that this was not a good idea). That first year, I got five flat tires. But then Dorothy at the local bike shop on Railroad Street suggested I invest in heavier tires: I took her advice, and haven’t had a flat since. I’ve also found other ways to make the bike more user-friendly, adding a cup-holder, rear-view mirror and a wire basket attached to an aluminum frame over the rear wheel.

There’s a black-and-white photo of Einstein riding his bicycle that can be found on many blogs and websites: It was taken in 1933 in Pasadena, California, when Einstein was a visiting research associate at Caltech. The world-famous scientist is dressed up in tie, sweater vest, tailored pants, and fresh-shined dress shoes. He looks like he is preparing to deliver a lecture on quantum theory. He has no helmet (people didn’t wear protective headgear back then), and his mane of white hair is windblown. The 54-year-old genius, who once confided that he never really grew up, is grinning like a kindergartener. He’s smiling even though he is worried about many things over which he has no control: his boy, Tete, who has been diagnosed with schizophrenia; the Nazis, who have been firing Jews from universities and burning books, screaming that relativity theory is rubbish; his summer home outside of Berlin, to which he will not return.

The force field around Albert Einstein is dark and full of black holes, and yet he himself remains a conduit of shining, cerulean-blue California light. Einstein keeps pedaling because he still can, because he knows that if he stops, even for a second, he will fall.

Picasso's Blue Period

“I began to paint in blue,” Pablo Picasso wrote, explaining the origins of his Blue Period, “when I learned that Casagemas had died.” Carlos Casagemas was a painter whom Picasso had met in 1899 at Els Quartre Gats (The Four Cats), a café in Barcelona. The two Spaniards traveled to Paris in 1900 and opened a studio together in Montmartre, eking out a living as artists and visiting brothels where Picasso would paint murals on the establishment’s walls in exchange for services. But Casagemas lacked Picasso’s swaggering sense of self; when Carlos was rejected by a woman he loved, he shot himself with a pistol at The Hippodrome Café on February 17, 1901.

Picasso was in Barcelona at the time, but when he returned to Paris, he channeled his grief into his work, choosing the color favored by turn-of-the-century, avant-garde artists as well as that most closely associated with melancholy. Picasso’s subjects were outcasts: prostitutes, prisoners, beggars, drunks, laundresses, one-eyed old women, emaciated street musicians. But bourgeois Parisians didn’t want to be reminded of these ghoulish figures from the lower depths—despite the revolution of Impressionism, the art world still prized a prettified classicism—and so the melancholy, monochromatic pictures went unsold. Picasso became so poor he couldn’t afford to buy paints, and even had to burn his canvases in order to stay warm in his garret on the Rue Voltaire. But the young artist was not to be deflected from his quest. He continued to paint in blue, sometimes working the features of Casagemus into portraits of his friends, but rarely, for the next three years, adding other colors.

More than a hundred years later, JPEGS of Blue Period paintings can be downloaded from dozens of Internet sites, posters of The Old Guitarist turn up in coffee shops and college dorms. (My friend, Sarah, remembers putting up The Tragedy, which depicts a poor, desolate family on a seashore, in her dorm room at Mary Washington College in Virginia in the 1970s, and recently my friend, Christine, noticed The Tragedy on the walls of a jewelry store owned by an Indian couple in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.) The pictures haven’t stopped speaking to us. It seems astonishing that a young man barely out of boyhood—he was only 20 in 1901—possessed the empathic intelligence as well as the technical artistry to portray such feeling.

Of course, a young man’s melancholy is a different animal than an old man’s disaffection. And while scholars believe that Picasso probably suffered from a mood disorder for most of his life—which he battled by adopting a killing work ethic as well as a dizzying parade of serial mistresses, who got progressively younger as the decades passed—he never again painted exclusively in blue. In 1904, when he fell in love with Fernande Olivier, a dark-haired model and artist who would bear him his first child, he began to add red to his canvasses, initiating the Rose Period, which, in turn, gave way to the African Period, to Cubism, Classicism, Surrealism, and Neo-Expressionism.

Picasso died on April 8, 1973 at the age of 92, having produced over 50,000 paintings, sculptures, ceramics, drawings, prints, tapestries and rugs. He remained lucid until the end—his last words at a dinner party that he and his third wife, Jacqueline Roque, hosted at their château in the south of France were, “Drink to me, drink to my health, you know I can’t drink any more.”

His astonishing productivity was stunningly evident in “The Last Years, 1963-1973” at the Guggenheim Museum in the winter of 1984. My first husband, Len, and I were among the crowds jostling for spaces to view the exhibit of paintings, drawings, etchings, and sculpture, which filled most of the museum. In my memory the date feels several years earlier, 1978 or 1979, but perhaps this is because Len and I were both so lighthearted afterward, shedding our cares like winter coats as we bopped down Fifth Avenue to catch the bus to our studio apartment in Greenwich Village, where we stayed in town during the week. (If anyone had said, “In two months, Len will be diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor and by the end of December, he’ll be dead, I would have thought they were joking.)

As we dodged patches of snow and ice on that darkening February afternoon, Len and I talked animatedly about what we had seen: the cartoonish line drawings of huge figures with massive breasts and swollen penises engaged in all manner of transgressive activity: peeing, shitting, and copulating. In another era, they would have been branded pornographic, the demented effluvia of a dirty old man, and yet the work had a childlike playfulness that compelled us, energized us. We were amazed that a man in his eighties and nineties still possessed this kind of creative urgency. But maybe not so surprising, Len observed, when you consider what Picasso said after observing a group of schoolchildren in 1956: “When I was as old as these children, I could draw like Raphael, but it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like them.”

As I meditate upon that winter afternoon twenty-five years ago, I keep thinking of Bob Dylan’s lines, “Ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.” Could it be that just as youth is wasted on the young, so depression is mostly a younger person’s affliction, a monochromatic, cyan-colored cloak that the very old, facing the prospect of losing everything including the memory of loss, cannot afford to wear?

Awake for the Blue Hour

One of the curses of middle life is sleeplessness. The brain produces less melatonin, breathing is shallower, dreams are fitful, the bladder cannot hold. One wakes many times, shuffling to the bathroom, or to the kitchen for a midnight snack (sleep experts say that a man of 50 wakes 20 times in the night; a man of 25 only 10 times). Delta sleep (the deepest level of non rapid-eye-movement sleep, where the sleeper cannot be easily roused) becomes as rare as a remembered dream. One turns off the light, and prays for sleep like a child hoping to be visited by the tooth fairy.

But every curse carries its own blessing (at last the midlife mind gets that nothing is ever one thing, that contradiction suffuses every enterprise): one of insomnia’s gifts is the reverie of the blue hour. The blue hour is that time which belongs neither to the night nor to the day; it is when the sky is born again into soft pinks and blues, when the light in the east is as clear as a baby’s urine, when flowers, moist with dew, are said to be at their most fragrant. The French call this time L’Heure Bleue, and even created, in 1912, a perfume called L’Heure Bleue by Guerlain. (Odd to think of this legendary perfume, which is still available at $68 for a 1.7 ounce bottle, being created just two years before the outbreak of World War I, when Europe would stink with corpses rotting in the trenches in The Ardennes, Mons, and The Somme.)

Sylvia Plath loved this part of the day, “that blue, almost eternal hour,” as she put it in an interview with the BBC a few months before her death, “before cock crow, before the baby’s cry, before the glassy music of the milkman, settling his bottles.” Plath was writing some of the best poems of her short life during this time. She was living with her children in a flat in London (after Ted Hughes had left her for Assia Wevill) in the house where William Butler Yeats had once lived. There was a blue plaque to mark the spot, a detail Plath records with great excitement in a letter home to her mother, Aurelia, in Massachusetts. Sylvia, who had never failed at anything in her life, was trying to be upbeat, even though her heart was broken. The poems came fast as Plath’s horse, Ariel, and Plath knew they were good, as good as anything by Yeats, but that certitude wasn’t enough to keep her tethered to this world.

She killed herself very early on the morning of February 11, 1963, thrusting her head in an oven, while her two young children slept. History repeated itself forty-six years later during the afternoon of March 23, 2009 with the suicide of her son, Nicholas Hughes, an accomplished fisheries biologist who hung himself with a rope in his home in Fairbanks, Alaska. Hughes was 47, outliving his mother by 17 years. In her announcement to the press, Frieda Hughes said that her brother had been battling depression for many years.

On a memorial website page that the University of Alaska created, one of Nick Hughes’ students recalls how her professor would go out with his students at three in the morning during the summer solstice to observe the salmon and grayling fish in the Chena River.

It is twilight now, evensong instead of matins, the return of the blue hour. The sky is slightly darker like the inside of a mussel shell, the bare branches of the trees wispy as an old woman’s hair, the light clear as a glass of white wine. I say a prayer for Sylvia Plath and her son, Nicholas Hughes, who might still be with us, had they received proper treatment for their depression, whose love for the blue hour endures.