For as long as I can remember, I have loved color and my passion for it has only become more powerful over time.  But now it has taken on a new meaning, with the increased polarization in our society, in our politics, even in names and slogans like, “white supremacists,” and, “black lives matter.” I do not pretend to be colorblind; but I have no desire to live in a monochrome world. I believe we are all born with a divine spark, though it can be damaged, hurt, distorted, maybe even extinguished. White supremacist ideology is, to me, literally hate-ful.

Am I white? Yes, I suppose, though I hate such labels since they only divide us. I am a “white” Jewish woman who grew up in Fairfield County Connecticut in the 1950s and early 60s. The town had a statue of Nathan Hale and notices in the local newspaper about the Daughters of the American Revolution, which made me feel like I didn’t exactly fit in. What was I? What was my identity in this little town?

Fairfield County, especially where I lived, was WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant). That is where social status resided, though in the next town over there were a number of Puerto Ricans, Italians and blacks.  Jews were not considered quite white, but neither were Catholics back then. This is partly why Isabel Wilkerson’s’s brilliant new book “Caste” hits home for me, though I’d add that the caste system in America has always included ethnicity and religion—and still does. My friends in high school were Italian Catholic, Irish Catholic, Polish Catholic, one or two what we now call “black,” and two Jewish girls. We were all, I guess, the outsiders.

These days, they say Jews are part of the white majority. But don’t tell that to white supremacists who don’t consider Jews white at all—To them, Jews are part of the “Other” that threatens their white, Protestant America. Jews can also get demonized from the other side when some Blacks consider Jews a part of the white oppressors. The problem with identity politics is that it forces one into a category that may not fit, that discounts some of the things that make us richer, more diverse, more interesting, and (in my opinion) more human.

We in America live in an increasingly polarized world. Things are being reduced in so many ways to an “either,” “or,” and to a binary, or a dichotomy, which always leads to conflict, resulting in an Us vs Them environment. Paradoxically, this is happening under a president who has been undoing the notion of “truth,” calling news “fake,” Coronavirus (and other things) a “hoax,” and peddling false conspiracy theories in the service of dividing the nation into two.

It is a muddled, frightening mess, framing a world without clarity or beauty. So much has been stripped of color and vibrance and grace. So, the best I can do for myself—besides teaching tolerance and critical thinking-- is to surround myself with color, creating a spectrum that brings into my world as much color as I can to represent the kind of universe I want to live in.

When I was young I lived in a house of gloom and doom with a father always forecasting the final apocalyptic war. So, I always had a fantasy that when I grew up, I would create my own place. I would design and make my own wallpaper, my own fabric and paint the walls different colors. Every room would be distinctive and radiant. To this day, I sometimes even dream in color.

Our first house after we got married was a modest little yellow cape cod with white trim and black shutters that Tony, my husband, gave me free reign to alter. I spent hours at a local store, looking at wallpaper books and bringing home samples. I needed paper for the living room, the dining nook, the hallway and stairway to the second floor. I wanted it all to flow as you went from room to room. I spent so many happy hours thinking, shopping and changing. I still remember that house like a first love. For the living room, I found a soft blue/green/grey paper with one-inch white diamond lattice-work. The adjacent breakfast room that looked out to the backyard had colorful songbirds sitting on branches. The ivory wallpaper in the center hallway and continuing up the stairway had delicate crimson rosebuds that picked up the color of the burgundy wool runner on the stairs. The morning light coming in made it feel like a garden, even in winter. Then, I thought of painting the outside of the front door, but couldn’t find the exact color I wanted. A woman at the paint store agreed to mix a sample to my specifications, which turned into something between soft crimson and deep magenta. No one had a front door like that. It made for a unique look and truly became a home that was me inside and out!

Sixteen years later, we had to move, and though our next house was larger and newer, it wasn’t interesting, and to this day, it’s the little yellow house I dream of. But I rolled up my sleeves, ripped out the dull beige wall-to-wall carpet in the living room and hall; replacing it with a dusty rose that was simply beautiful. Not everyone’s idea of a neutral color, but it is! I couldn’t find wallpaper I wanted for the boring long hallway. But a few years later I was in London, and one beautiful day, instead of going to the British Museum to do research, I walked down Kings Road in Chelsea and discovered Designer’s Guild. Walking into one of the stores overwhelmed me with happiness. All those amazing fabrics and wall papers, which were absolute works of art with so many intense colors. They were just what I sought, but admittedly expensive. I took home some swatches of material that were on sale. Maybe I’d make a pillow, or a wall hanging. I waited five years, saved up, and finally Designer’s Guild had exactly the wallpaper I’d been waiting for: Ivory with slightly darker ivory medallions stamped on it. It was perfect against the rose carpet.

Yes, I confess, I am obsessed with all colors (except grey or beige unless it’s got warmth and intensity). Even my walls aren’t stark white, but linen white. I try to even eat colorful food to liven up my plate, because to me, color is life.

Sixteen years ago we moved to New York City. It’s only a rental apartment, but I’ve made it more mine than anyplace I’ve ever lived. I remember walking into it and thinking, “all white walls; how boring,” but then thinking they could be my canvas. My apartment home is eclectic. A few things I moved from our house, but also old furniture from the home I grew up in, all given new life once cleaned and polished. Tables, stands and chairs that originally were from China and the Middle East, in dark rosewood, mahogany and maybe walnut. A chair dating over a century old from England (who knows how it ended up in my family home?) has been rebuilt and reupholstered in magenta velvet. When I have traveled to conferences in other countries over the last fifteen years, I’ve brought back colorful things that remind me of those places and the people I met while there. Cobalt and emerald green glasses from Venice and Finland, a small glass painting in various shades of blues of the meeting of sky, mountains and sea on the coast of Wales.

Sometimes I feel like I’m living within my own painting. Gabbeh rugs with desert images. Overdyed blue-green Persian runners. Two small Moroccan rugs, one in coral with black large diamond lines, the other various shades of purple and plum. An old threadbare red Persian runner. A multicolor oriental rug for the dining room, a larger one for the living room. Those two rugs don’t match, but they get along. I look around and I see so many colors: sea-green, grey-blue, sage, navy gold, burgundy, deep red, rust, rose, lavender, pink, yellow, grey. Colors of sky, sea, clouds, earth, trees and sunsets. A few crystals hang in the windows. At certain times of the year, rays from the setting sun strike the crystals, and create rainbows on the walls and ceiling. They move and then disappear, much like our lives, but for the moment, it’s magic.

All those colors speak to each other and the conversation fills me with joy. There is a feeling of balance and harmony. Two colors might clash or be boring (at least to me), but lots of different colors together can create beauty. My dream environment inspires me, lifts my spirits, but it also gives me hope that such a thing could exist in the outside world… but only if we want it badly enough, and if enough of us want it to be, then I’m confident we can make it so.

Because I have to get around to ordering a monument for my husband’s gravesite, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the connection between names and being remembered.

Tony was buried on December 15, 2019, and the next month I started looking into what I always called a “tombstone,” which apparently they now refer to as a monument (kinda like how garbage trucks are now “sanitation trucks” and “used cars” are “previously owned”?).

But “monument” is good because a tombstone is a memorial that is also a monument to the person who died. Something to honor them as well as to have them remembered, identified for the future.

 In Jewish tradition, having a tombstone is important, which I suppose is why anti-Semites destroy or desecrate tombstones in Jewish cemeteries—it’s as close as they can come to killing the person, blotting out their memory, as if they never existed. You are supposed to have a tombstone on the grave before the end of a year and there is an “unveiling” at the cemetery when it’s ready.

Tony’s birthday was July 31st. I still hadn’t made the arrangements, so I decided, time to get on with it before time  runs out. Tempus fugit!

I’d been hesitating. Other things had taken over my life due to Coronavirus. I was grateful to be working, but it was demanding, especially when I had to teach online. I was also compulsively ordering food and supplies and wine, obsessing with staying safe, not wanting to get sick and die. I took care of all that bureaucratic work that comes with death, including having to fight a mistake where Social Security thought I too had died when my husband passed! But thank God Tony died before this horrible virus. He went out in peace; he was buried with dignity.

Now, it is time to do that last rite of honor. To get him that monument, engrave his name in stone and erect the granite tombstone where I can leave a small stone on top whenever I visit his grave. Another mark that he has not been forgotten.

Monuments are so much in the news these days in America. Many people want to pull down public monuments to people who were slave-owners, confederate “heroes,” or racists. The removal of Confederate flags is not enough. The statue of General Robert E. Lee is coming down in Richmond, Virginia. A statue of Christopher Columbus in Boston was beheaded; one in Virginia was spray-painted, set on fire, and thrown into a lake. Christopher Columbus was also toppled in St. Paul, Minnesota. Jefferson Davis was taken down in both Kentucky and Richmond, Virginia. Buildings and schools at elite universities are being renamed (as in the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University) to erase the names of people from the past who were famous, but now infamous. One impulse to preserve; another impulse to blot out. I think of the prayer on Yom Kippur where we pray that we might be “inscribed in the book of life.” I think of Milton’s Paradise Lost where we are told that “Satan’s real “name” in heaven before the Fall has been permanently blotted out.

Many of the seventeenth-century poets I teach and love were anxious about having their names and words survive. Shakespeare tells the unnamed “young man” in his Sonnets he will forever “grow” in the poet’s “eternal lines” (Sonnet 18). The poet confers a kind of immortality, although the irony is that we do not know the name of that young man. It is Shakespeare, the poet, we remember. Robert Herrick ended his volume of more than a thousand short lyrics with a poem declaring that, despite the appearance of their fragility (like flowers), they “never shall / Decline or waste at all,” even though, “kingdoms fall.” Some people hope to find an extended life in having children. But we all want to feel that something of us will last, something material, yet more than material, a book, a poem, an engraved image of our name, as if our name expresses our self.

But I also think of those seventeenth-century writers who mused on the futility of our efforts to be remembered. George Herbert’s beautiful poem, “Church Monuments,” meditates on tombstones and monuments in the church and graveyard, some of them elaborate artifacts, and reminds us of their futility. He imagines the time in the future when even those monuments will become dust. Nothing lasts. 

Then there are those sonorous sentences in the final chapter of Sir Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia, an essay about his attempt to identify ancient burial urns that recently had been discovered in Norwich, England. “There is no antidote against the opium of time, . . . our Fathers find their graves in our short memories, and sadly tell us how we may be buried in our survivors.” He continues, “The iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy.” And lastly, “Darkness and light divide the course of time, and oblivion shares with memory, a great part even of our living beings.”  The beauty of his words, lifting the spirit, almost outweighs the sadness of the thoughts.

But we are alive now, in the present, treasuring and loving life as best we can, even in difficult times, and making monuments. Even knowing that nothing is permanent, we need to mark the significance of a life, make sure to have it remembered by those who still are living or will come after. I am not depressed and I am not morbid. For Tony’s birthday last week, I made a fragrant spaghetti sauce with garlic, onion, ground turkey, olive oil, chopped tomatoes, fresh basil, oregano; an apple crisp; and an arugula salad. Things Tony loved (well, not the arugula). I ate them in pleasure. Though I sat alone at the rosewood table, I had the company of good memories, thinking of our shared meals as I looked out at the dark sky streaked with scarlet, orange and yellow over the Hudson River. I felt grateful for the day, for being here and alive right now and relished a little more wine than usual.

I guess I’m ready to proceed with getting a monument. I love the Jewish prayer, “May his (or her) soul be bound in the bond of life,” though its meaning has always eluded me. Maybe it is up to each of us to figure out what it might mean, the ways a person’s soul could be “bound up in the bond of life,” or how we who survive might help it happen. Yes, gravestones, tombstones, monuments of granite, are one way, but only when engraved with a name, with words.