Wallis Blue

“Whatever happened to Wallis and Edward,” my son asked, “I mean after he had abdicated?” We had just celebrated our son’s seventeenth birthday by taking him to see the “The King’s Speech,” which is about the constitutional crisis in Great Britain attendant upon Edward VIII’s abdication and the accession of his younger brother, Bertie, who overcame a speech impediment to become George VI.

“Were they happy together? He gave up everything for her. Did he have regrets?”

I confessed that I was no Duke and Duchess of Windsor maven. I knew some gossipy details, most of which I’d gotten second-hand from my mother, who was a girl of eleven in 1936 and would have been much affected by what H.L. Mencken called “the biggest news story since the Resurrection.”

My mother never referred to Mrs. Simpson as the Duchess of Windsor but always by the heavy-baggage, tri-partite Wallis Warfield Simpson, her voice erupting in a spitting, dyspeptic rage, which somehow made me think of Adolph Hitler ranting about the Jews.

Wallis had many failings, according to my mother, the first of which was that she was not pretty. Why this could be construed as a fault, I never quite figured out. Given that my mother was pretty herself—she had been a model in New York before her marriage--you would think she would have had more compassion for those less blessed in the looks department. But in the shopworn Keatsian manner, my mother equated truth and beauty: Wallis Warfield Simpson’s mannish looks served as an embodiment of her inner ugliness and duplicity.

“She had the morals of an alley cat,” my mother said, explaining that Wallis was divorced not once, but TWICE. Long before Wallis had started carrying on an adulterous affair with the Prince of Wales, she had “stolen” second husband Ernest Simpson away from his first wife, not long after Wallis had divorced HER first husband.

“She was a gold digger,” my mother continued, explaining that Wallis was descended from an old Southern family that had fallen on hard times after the Civil War, and that she thought nothing of manipulating men to get what she wanted. But if she was so plain, what was her power? How did she get the most powerful man in the western world to fall in love with her?

There was no ready answer to this question, but it came up often at our dinner table when I was a child, with my father never failing to point out that Wallis must have been “some piece of work” in the bedroom, that she had supposedly picked up certain “techniques” in China in the 1920s, and that once she tried these tricks on poor Edward, he was a goner.

“Honestly, what drivel you talk!” my mother said, kicking him under the table and shooting him a look that could have boiled an egg.

My parents’ differing opinions about the Windsors spoke volumes about their own irreconcilable differences, which would lead, some years later, to their divorce. To my father, Edward’s giving up the throne “for the woman I love,” as Edward put it in the famous radio speech delivered on December 11, 1936 showed existential courage, proving that the heart abides by its own laws, and that these supercede duty to country and family.

Divorced once before he met my mother, my father didn’t see a problem with Mrs. Simpson's divorces; it simply meant that she had been “around the block,” that she wasn’t a virgin ("and no one," he said, "could lock her up for that"). Mrs. Simpson embodied the tough-minded heroine who gave convention the middle finger, who followed her heart.

Who were Wallis and Edward, or W.E., as they referred to themselves in their pre-abdication correspondence? Why did they evoke such passion from people who had never met them? Wallis was so famous that “Time” Magazine named her woman of the year for 1936, the first time the publication had ever given that honor to a woman. The Duchess of Windsor also had a color named after her, “Wallis Blue,” a pale tourmaline shade that matched her eyes and was coined by the Parisian couturier, Mainbocher, who designed her wedding dress.

Obsession with the Windsors continues, decades after they have been laid to rest side-by-side in Frogmore cemetery at Windsor Castle, Wallis’ stone still missing the HRH title that her royal in-laws stripped her of in 1937 (changing the English constitution to do so). Madonna is rumored to be making a movie about the lovers, claiming that both have been pilloried by history. English Heritage recently considered installing a blue plaque on the apartment building in the West End of London where Mrs. Simpson lived in the 1930s. The government-sponsored agency finally vetoed the plaque for Bryanston Court because of Mrs. Simpson’s alleged Nazi past.

Was the Duchess of Windsor really a Nazi? I don’t remember her politics coming up at our family dinners, but any Nazi association would certainly account for my mother’s antipathy to Mrs. Simpson. My mother had lost her first love, Harold, a Norwegian flyer, who was stationed in England during the war and who perished somewhere over the English Channel; she never shared any of the details with me, only that it happened during the summer of 1943, that she had been a girl of 18, that one day the tissue-thin blue airmail letters he had written to her stopped coming, that she had been so distraught she hadn’t been able to go east to college, and that she’d taken to her bed for months.

Perhaps, in some inexplicably convoluted manner, my mother attributed the senseless death of her beloved Harold to the shallowness and self-centeredness of people like the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. (In 1937, Wallis and Edward made a much-photographed trip to visit Hitler at Berchtesgaden. Wallis was also rumored to be the mistress of Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Nazi Foreign Minister to London, at the same time as she was seeing the King. Von Ribbentrop, who was later hanged at Nuremberg in 1946, supposedly sent Mrs. Simpson 17 carnations every day to express his gratitude for the seventeen times she had slept with him.)

“Answered prayers cause more tears than those than remain unanswered,” wrote St. Theresa of Avila, whom Truman Capote quoted in his last, unpublished novel. (Capote often partied with the Windsors when they came to New York in the nineteen sixties.) According to two biographies of Mrs. Simpson, Wallis did not want Edward to abdicate, and hoped to remain the King’s mistress while staying put in her marriage. “I intend,” she wrote to her aunt, “to keep them both.”

But the King’s slavish devotion to her (she called him “the Little Man” but his passion was hardly diminutive) proved as unstoppable as Hitler’s desire to annex all of Europe. “How can a woman be a whole empire to man?” she confided in bewilderment to her uncle. Years later, she said that it was not possible to “abdicate and eat it,” and that she would rather be “the mistress of a king, than the wife of the Governor-General of The Bahamas.” (Churchill had posted the Windsors to the Bahamas in hopes that they would not interfere with the war effort.)

“You can never be too rich or too thin,” the Duchess of Windsor is meant to have said, a maxim that she had stitched onto throw pillows in the living rooms of her homes in France and New York. Thanks to the largesse of Great Britain as well as the French government (the Windsors leased their Paris home in the Bois de Boulogne for decades for only a nominal fee), the Duke and Duchess were very rich. They spent their days shopping for the 100-plus dresses the Duchess purchased each year (when asked in an interview how he passed the time, the Duke confided that he had spent his morning helping the Duchess pick out a hat), with time out for the Duchess to have the tiny layer of fat on her tummy massaged, and the Duke to putter in his gardens.

There was a song that my father used to play on the phonograph in his study in the declining years of his marriage to my mother. The song was by Peggy Lee and it was a moody mix of melancholy and gaiety: “Is that all there is? Then let’s keep dancing…”

When I think of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, together and together and together in their rooms of Wallis blue, I think of that song.

What Color is the Sky?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Year's Resolutions & Blue Devils

This was the first year in midlife that I did not make New Year’s resolutions to lose weight, drink less, or exercise more. Which is not to say that I couldn’t stand to reduce my avoirdupois, just say no to that second, O.K. third, glass of Fat Bastard Chardonnay, or take the dog for the mile loop through the neighborhood instead of to the yellowed patch of snow at the end of the driveway beneath the mailbox where all the neighborhood dogs lift their legs. But New Year’s Resolutions are easy to make, and even easier to break. Some time around the end of January or the beginning of February, the nagging bad habits reappear; they come back like grainy scum around the bathtub, like the Christmas cactus of dust above the chandelier, like the facial hairs that grow at the cleft of one’s chin, no matter how much nightly tweezing they are subjected to.

In the second decade of the twenty-first century, I therefore resolved to make resolutions I could keep. I decided to embrace my blue devils. I’m not talking about rooting for Duke University’s football team. Or bidding for back issues of Blue Devil comics on E-bay. I’m not talking about smoking pot or having an affair or consuming an entire Sachertorte, all of which is way too much work for this post-menopausal princess, whose idea of debauchery is taking a scalding hot bath and retreating to bed with E.H. Gombrich’s A Little History of the World…I’m talking about something more mysterious and possibly more dangerous: I’m talking about letting myself go.

Where would a woman go, syndicated columnist Ellen Goodman asked in her final column on January 1, 2010, if she gave herself permission to let herself go? Goodman explained that she planned to spend a lot of time hanging out, sans make-up, sans shoes, sans Blackberry, on her front porch in Maine. This lowly blogger, who stopped wearing high heels in the ‘90s, who has never owned a Blackberry or coastal Maine real estate, has humbler aspirations: to let herself go into cyberspace to learn the secrets of blue devils.

Here are seven salient facts about blue devils that you never knew you needed to know: (1) The marauding Celts and Germans, intent upon terrorizing their enemies, painted their bodies blue when making war upon the Romans, which may explain the origins of blue devils; (2) Blue devils may alternatively be connected to the ill effects of woad dyes, which, when mixed with the mordant of a drunken man’s urine, made their dyers bad-tempered; (3) Blue devils were all the rage in the Middle Ages, and popped up on stained glass windows of French cathedrals, as well as in the crowded canvases of Hieronymus Bosch, where they worked overtime to convince people it was not a good idea to engage in excessive amounts of fornicating, drinking, eating, and lounging around ; (4) Blue Devils enjoyed their run through the Enlightenment, appearing in illustrations by Isaac Cruikshank, jeering in groups of two or more around one sorry figure suffering from too much of the aforementioned bad behavior; (5) By the 19th century, the phrase had become a cliché, with Henry David Thoreau boasting that his solitary mornings at his cabin overlooking Walden Pond were filled not with “the blue devils” but with “the blue angels,” while one of Edith Wharton’s characters, the adulterous metropole Gus Trenor, claimed that “dining alone gave him the blue devils.” (6) In the twentieth-century, blue devils underwent a makeover worthy of the late Michael Jackson, deleting their surname and becoming synonymous with the haunting African-American music called, “The Blues." (7) Blue devils continued to morph from bad boy to hero-icon, becoming “Les Diables Bleus,” the nickname for the Alpine infantry unit of French soldiers who fought in the First World War, as well as other American military groups, such as the 88th Infantry Division, “The Fighting Blue Devils,” who served in both world wars. Athletic teams took up the blue devil mantra, with Duke University grabbing the moniker for its football team in 1920, and prompting other universities and secondary schools to play copycat, which, in turn, encouraged the mass marketing of blue devils to sell everything from wines to comic books to blockbuster movies. If you doubt the truth of this analysis, consider the recent enthusiasm for the cute skinny Blue People in Avatar.

But lest you think that embracing your blue devils is all fun and games, and not without its risks, consider the case of Carl Jung. In 1913, Jung was a world-renowned psychologist and lecturer, having realized at the age of 38 nearly all of his worldly ambitions. But he was like one of T.S. Eliot’s Hollow Men, having lost connection with some wild wolfish part of himself. While traveling on a Swiss train, Jung was overcome with a vision of the world being overrun with blood, which he would come to see as a metaphor for his own spiritual crisis as well as a kind of clairvoyant channeling of the First World War. The vision was so powerful that Jung could not let it go: after a busy day of seeing patients at the sanitarium Burghozli and lecturing at the University of Zurich, Jung sat down at his desk every evening from 6 until 7 p.m. struggling to fix, in watercolors and words, the bizarre creatures and shapes galloping around in his imagination.

An accomplished painter and calligrapher, Jung began to transcribe the words and images from a series of black notebooks into a large, over-sized red journal with thick parchment pages, which he called Liber Novus, or The New Book. He would spend the next fifteen years on this work, amassing some 1,000 pages, which stretched into two volumes, Liber Primus and Liber Secondus. With its calligraphic writing and colorful images, Jung’s evening pages are reminiscent of illuminated manuscripts from the Middle Ages. But the Red Book is no pastoral idyll of peasants and nobles engaged in the parallel play of planting and jousting. Crammed with monsters, dragons, and serpents, as well as figure eights and mandelas, Jung’s “method of active imagination” resembles some forbidden work of alchemy, for which its author might have been imprisoned or burned at the stake. The blue devils in Jung’s work, fish-like piranha creatures snarling in the waves, don’t much resemble the jokey satyrs in Bosch or Cruickshank; these devils are dead-serious, intent upon their ends as manufacturers of nerve gas; this is the underworld of Jung’s secret self, blue in tooth and claw, nothing but devil between the devil and his deep blue sea.

The images in Liber Novus were so bizarre that Jung decided not to let them see print, fearing that his critics would think him mad. For the next thirty years, Jung kept the Red Book locked away in his study. After his death in 1961, he willed the behemoth to his six children, who secured it in a safe deposit box in a Zurich bank. Forty-years after Jung’s death, thanks to the efforts of Jungian scholar, Sonu Shamdasani, the Society of Heirs of C.J. Jung finally agreed to release the Red Book to the public, and a facsimile, coffee table sized edition of The Red Book can now be had from W.W. Norton for $195.

Jung’s Red Book, pages of which are currently on display at The Rubin Museum in New York, is one of triumph, but for every Carl Jung, there are thousands of men and women whose journeys into their unconscious will lead straight to the locked ward of mental institution or federal penitentiary. I think of the inmates of Mattawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, in Beacon, New York, whom I taught years ago when I was a student at Bard College. These men had never heard of C.J. Jung, and they certainly didn’t look like him. (“Jung looks exactly like my grandfather,” said my friend, Christine, after studying the full-page black-and-white portrait in the museum’s catalogue of an unsmiling fiftyish burgher in three-piece suit, sporting gold waistcoat watch and pearl-studded tie pin.) My students at Mattewan were mostly black and covered in tattoos: serpents crawling down their arms and biting their wrist bones, Jesus or Satan spread-eagled upon their hairy chests; big-breasted mermaids diving from their shoulders. These were men who had committed horrific crimes, crimes so unspeakable that they could literally not be spoken of, and everywhere my co-teacher and I went, there were big-bellied guards with nightsticks to ensure that we weren’t subjected to any funny business, verbal or physical. (Several times during our earnest discussions of T.S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men, the guards had to remove one soft-spoken bald-headed man, who never said a word as he sat in a middle row and masturbated.)

There was one Hispanic fellow who kept a lined notebook filled with drawings and poems, the energy and detail of which were not unlike the effluvia that spilled forth from Jung’s hand. This man, and I’ll call him Carlos because I confess I have forgotten his name, was a born-again Christian who had gotten Jesus long after he’d done whatever he’d done to get into Mattawan. His face was covered in pimples and his hair was short and dark, slicked back from his forehead like a 50s-style greaser. He wore a gold-plated crucifix, which gleamed menacingly from his hairy chest. He was short and slight, the kind of guy who was picked on when he was in middle school. No doubt he also suffered from the unwonted attentions of child sex predators—a history that was pretty much standard issue for these men. Carlos was obsessed with the Book of Revelations, and he sat glaring in the back row, several desks between himself and his fellow inmates. His beliefs were never going to win him friends or influence people, and even my co-teacher and I sometimes ignored his raised hand, since he tended to dominate discussion and/or incite shouting matches with the other inmates. And yet, I have never forgotten the precision and passion of his drawings—a blue-penned, flowing-bearded Christ rising up in a haloed cloud like an a-bomb exploding over the New Mexico desert. How I wish I might have told him that his artwork reminded me of the Red Book.

Embracing the blue devils is clearly not an occupation for the faint-hearted, and yet as any artist, or artist manqué, can testify: it is something to which one feels driven. I was thinking about this recently while watching The Last of the Blue Devils at my local art house cinema. Now I should explain that I don’t know squat about Jazz. When my husband found out that I was going out alone on a weeknight to catch this documentary of Kansas-City musicians from the 1930s, his only comment was, “Since when have you been interested in Jazz?” And I really had no credible explanation, except to explain that ever since starting this blog, I am like a dog with its bone, compelled to masticate on anything connected to my blue theme.

The theater was full that night—it was a one-night-only showing, hosted by Tom Raney, our local Public Radio’s Jazz a la Mode host, and drawing the Pioneer Valley’s pasty-faced kooks and spooks, most of whom looked like they never went to bed before midnight. I felt like I’d turned up at the race track when I should have been at the dog track, and secretly imagined that my seatmates knew perfectly well that I couldn’t tell Cannonball Adderly from Hot Lips Page and were planning to throw me out and make me go next door to watch Coco Before Chanel, a very entertaining movie which I had already seen and wouldn’t mind catching again, but not tonight, because I really needed to get the skinny on blue devils.

The lights went down, and the movie started, and no one threw me out. And even though I was moderately bored, and didn’t burst into applause when Eddie Williams and Big Joe Turner appeared on screen, there was one scene that made me sit up a bit straighter in my seat, and that was of Count Basie, a huge bear of a man in his 70s sporting a captain’s cap, who needed help as he negotiated the icy steps of the club in Kansas City where the old Jazz greats were gathering, someone to carry his pearl-handled cane, someone to take him by his elbow, someone to call 911 if the good-natured ribbing (“Hey, Captain, where’s your ship?”) made his heart go fluty. But when he sat down and played the piano, the frailties dropped away, and he was like a man who gets the news that he’s cancer-free, or that his life sentence has been commuted, that he’s free to let himself go. And all I could think of was: Sweet Lord, give me some of that joy juice, because if anything will make me feel like I’ve dropped ten pounds, dropped ten years, this is it.”

“And now Jazz is exported to the world, “ mused Martin Luther King, Jr. to the Berlin Jazz Festival in 1965. “For in a particular struggle of the Negro in America, there is something akin to the universal struggle of modern man. Everybody has the Blues. Everybody longs for meaning. Everybody needs to clap hands and be happy.”

Clap hands and be happy. Another New Year’s resolution I could actually keep.