My favorite color is blue; no, not “Forever Blue,” which was the name of an almost neon version of turquoise blue eye shadow that the girl in high school, who said she was my friend but tried to steal my boyfriend, wore. Thankfully, “Forever Blue” was retired after the 70s fashion craze passed.
I am irresistibly attracted to cobalt blue – a deep, true, arresting color. It is peaceful and yet always in motion. Blue is the river that runs through my city, a river that is widest when it splits the downtown and the city in half flowing rapidly north to the ocean. The tops of its constantly bobbing waves catch in the sun and glisten like diamonds.
Blue is the wide skies above accentuated by fluffy white clouds always in motion and changing shape. The river and the sky seem full of hope and free my soul. I remember my awe when I first saw that sky and river. I had never seen so much water or a sky so big and uninterrupted by mountains.
Blue is the beautiful glass bowls in the museum art gallery, mixed in swirls of golden yellow and white and begging to become part of my growing collection of glass objets d’art.
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison is one of my favorite books that I read in my English graduate studies. I related so strongly to Pecola, because I, too, felt like I didn’t belong when I was growing up, though my story might have to be titled The Most Perfect Family.
I have blue eyes, inevitably, because both of my parents had blue eyes. My husband also has blue eyes; of course, my daughter does, too. What I didn’t have were idyllic, iconic June and Ward Cleaver parents, like the parents who it seemed that every other child who lived in the nearby town where I went to school had.
None of the children on the country road where I lived had the 50s definition of a perfect family either. All of the families were struggling financially with husbands working blue collar jobs or farming their own land. Most parents had done well to finish high school and almost none had gone to, much less completed college. They were the products of local farmers and small business owners, not college professors as almost all of my town schoolmates’ parents were.
Except for me, the neighborhood children mostly stayed with their “own kind,” not mingling socially with the town kids. It was my mother’s unrealistically high standards for her first child, her daughter, that placed me, at least during the school year, in that seemingly perfect university town world where I didn’t belong.
When summer came, I had no easy transportation or invitations, for that matter, to visit town classmates, so I rejoined by neighborhood friends. They always took me back, so readily and friendly that I was grown and attending a high school reunion before I realized that some of them resented the way I seemed to ignore them once school started. I didn’t mean to ignore them. I was just trying to keep pace and not embarrass myself.
Blue has saved and comforted me many times. Blue is a deceptive color, full of hidden meaning and secret yearnings. It doesn’t demand attention like red, yellow and lime green. It sits quietly, thinking deeply, dreaming broadly and yearning for the day when it can run alongside yellows and greens or immerse itself in red and become a royal purple that others admire.
I survived the lie of my perfectness as a child; but, it took me years to accept my imperfections. In truth, I’m still not there. I am proud of one accomplishment in my life. At least my daughter loves herself and knows the joy of appreciating life as it is, not constantly plagued by nagging worries of what life “should” be. I knew she would be OK, more adjusted than I am, when she chose “Starry, Starry Nights” as the theme for her wedding. Van Gogh’s blue sky was wild with swirls of stars, as was our beautiful, delightfully different daughter the night of her wedding. Her happiness is enough for me.
Karen J. Rieley 