The grocery store sends a carton of blue eggs instead of the ones I usually buy. These blue eggs are more expensive, but the store doesn’t charge me the difference. The packaging celebrates the blueness, but the reality is disappointing. Blue chicken eggs only appear blue in contrast to the brown and white chicken eggs. They are not like robin’s eggs which are so distinctly blue that a shade of blue is named for them. Nobody paints their walls Chicken Egg Blue. Eggshell paint, like nude stockings and stilettos, is assumed to be a shade of white.
I look this up to confirm and learn that while, no, there is not a paint called “Chicken Egg Blue,” there is one called “Duck Egg.”
I feel about the blue eggs the same way I felt about the Blue Spruce, which I read about before I saw, imagining a sparkling ultramarine tree. Years ago, I filmed a TV show in the hangar where Howard Hughes built a plane that couldn’t fly. When telling this story, I invariably mix up the plane’s name with the tree’s name.
Goose eggs are always white, but now I have an idea for my sculpture.
A few days after her visit, Ilana texts to say she forgot her prescription sunglasses in my studio as she was leaving for the airport, explaining that it was raining when she left so there was no need for them. I promise to ship them to her house in Edinburgh, already feeling a tinge of guilt because I know it will take me weeks to get around to it since I am allergic to the US Post Office. I’d rather wait until her next visit in February, but she went out of her way to find and ship me a copy of the Esquire UK issue with Paddington Bear modeling his blue toggle coat on the cover so I definitely owe her. I still ask why she even needs prescription sunglasses in a place where there is barely even any daylight. (The first time I visited her after she moved there, it was August and I packed expecting it to feel like what I understood of August, which was of course very incorrect.) She says the sunglasses are mostly for when she is “on holiday.”
While doing dishes, a heavy Mexican blue-rimmed glass slips out of my hands onto a ceramic vase and shatters the bottom of the vase. The cheap glass is fine, but the significantly more expensive vase is broken. I tell Eugene not to throw out the pieces so that I can glue it back together and at least use it to hold dried eucalyptus or peacock feathers or some other thing that doesn’t require water. I put the broken pieces in a bowl and keep them on the counter for a week until he moves them to a cabinet where I will absolutely forget they exist.
On the morning of Election Day, I wear a blue DVF dress to work and talk about microwavable blue corn tamales. Adam Lambert is also there promoting his Cabaret run, wearing a bright ultramarine suit. The makeup artist tells me that his rule is nobody is allowed to mention or ask him anything about American Idol. I pass this bit of gossip onto my mother-in-law who is a fan. She doesn’t know that next week we’re surprising her with tickets to the Broadway show for her birthday. I am suspicious of anyone in the studio wearing red today.
The election results come in and there isn’t enough blue.
While updating this list, I glance at my Echo and notice the song playing is called “Blue Garden.” It’s a spa playlist I leave on nearly 24 hours a day, even to sleep. I wonder how many blue songs I have slept through.
At Thanksgiving dinner, my mother prays. She says: “There are no accidents. There are no coincidences.” I make a note to add it to this list of accidents and coincidences.
I print out a series of quotations and excerpts I’ve been collecting about the color blue and then dip them in a bath of thinned blue acrylic paint to dye them. An hour later, Papá texts me to say he drove my brother and his wife and their dogs back to their home in Philadelphia so that they would not have to take the train. He follows this message with a photo of a framed Carl Sagan quote hanging in the bathroom in my brother’s house. It is the same quote about “The Pale Blue Dot” that I have just dipped in blue paint and placed on top of my radiator to dry.
I search my hard drive for instances of the word blue and find a poem I do not remember writing. I find several I do remember writing.
I drop a blue eyeshadow palette and the mirror on the lid cracks. The pigments don’t break, so I continue using it, but I feel a sense of dread each time I open it and see the shattered lines snaking across the grass. I think of a professor who used to say, “superstition infects like a virus.”
Mamá and I go to The Met because I need to write about a Mughal era painting of a lion at rest in a grove. Before leaving, I looked up the painting on the website and took a screenshot of it so I can find it more easily. When I arrive, I’m surprised to find that the version hanging in the gallery has been re-framed with a large plain white mat instead of the original azurite and gold-leaf border. Looking closely at the new mat, I see a sliver of blue on the top and bottom, indicating that this new mat was placed over the original border. From everything I’ve learned about these miniature paintings, these decorative borders were considered part of the original works. I don’t understand why it’s been covered, but I’m also excited to have noticed the change since the observation will enhance my paper. I wonder if I would have missed it had I not spent so much time thinking about blue things
I mix a batch of paper-mâché glue and stir in ultramarine acrylic paint to dye it blue. While sitting on the floor dipping strips of paper into the blue glue I notice a face has appeared inside the bowl. Or at least one very prominent eye. Panicked that it will disappear, I run to grab my phone, dripping blue paint and glue all over the floor. I take multiple photos and videos of the eye. I call Eugene over to look at it but he’s in the middle of an online chess game and is uninterested. I keep shouting, “there’s a face in my paint!”
Finally, I bring one of the photos over to him so he can see the eye. “Oh yeah. Cool.” He goes back to his game and I can’t understand how he doesn’t see that this is of course the most magical thing in the world. I pass my hands over it thinking that perhaps it’s reflecting something from the ceiling, but even in shadow, the eye remains. I work up the nerve to dip the next slice of paper in, and am relieved it doesn’t affect the eye, which continues staring up at me while I work. I finish my work, and move the sculpture to another room to dry. When I come back, I see the eye has finally disappeared. I’m sad to see it go, but also feel a deep gratitude for the time we had together. It feels like a conclusion.
The blue looked back at me.