How to Name a Colour

My sister subscribes to a decorating magazine that features a monthly contest in which readers are invited to submit a name for a new paint color. The prize is relatively insignificant, something like twenty dollars, but the winner’s name and a brief rationale for her (generally) name choice is included in the next month’s edition of the magazine.

Looking at one of those magazines recently had me wondering how good I would be at thinking up paint names. Actually, it’s not the first time I’ve wondered how difficult it would be. I consider it as I stroll through fabric stores imagining how certain colors would look juxtaposed against each other in a quilt. I wonder if I could do it better when I stand in the paint section of stores like Home Depot looking at paint strips and thinking about why some colors appeal to me while others make me cringe. This is true for other people, I know. Color is a powerful emotional stimulant. When I was choosing colors for my recently-purchased 1900-era house, both the woman mixing the paint and a woman waiting in line commented on the mix of colors I’d chosen. My dining room is Precious Olive, a green I will never grow tired of. The trim is palest butter—Candelight Yellow—which I also used in the Monarch Gold living room and staircase. The kitchen has three Sunporch yellow walls and one painted Florida Mango. My son thought it sounded terrible, but my daughter assured him that it works.

So the other day, while visiting my sister and perusing her stack of decorating magazines, I once again came across the paint color contest. This time I paid closer attention to the top three color names and the winning name, trying to figure out how the contestants created the names they did and why the editors chose the color name they did. The most recent color is a deep pink. It is not as bright as a bubble gum pink, but it’s not the color of natural flowers either. It is definitely a color that has been chemically manufactured. Having said that, I realize that there are hybrid flowers whose colors are not something seen even in the remotest jungle. They mimic, instead, the colors of neon lights and brightly-colored crayons designed to appeal to children.

I would have named that particular pink Strawberries and Cream or perhaps Creamed Strawberries. Maybe Luscious. Nothing that stands out. I have yet to see the winning name, but I did spend some time looking at past winners and the colors they named. Cloud Cover. Geode, the palest gray. Papaya. Jute. Fig, a medium purple. Toffee. Watermelon. Thistle, the palest lavender. (There are some thistles growing in the lot next to my house, and the color of the flowers is lovely even if the plant itself is noxious.) Pink Eraser. Jadite. Vibrant Day Lily. (The most astounding yellow daylilies grow in a pot by my front door, left by the former tenant. What a welcome they were this spring.)  Tangerine Dream. Dark Eucalyptus Leaf. Gloaming Green. (This name appeals to me, though the gloaming hours of the day seem acutely sad.)  Blue Ground. Nanking Blue. Silver Mist. Margarita, lime green. Poppy and Invigorate, both orange. Skylight, dark gray-blue. Swiss Coffee. Enchanted Eve, dark gray. Clunch, cream with a hint of green. (This is one of the few nonsense names I’ve seen.) Gilded Pesto. (Pesto is already wonderful. Gilding it might be like gilding the lily.) New Day. Tickled Pink.

And here are the finalists of a previous month’s contest: Limoncello, Colonel Mustard, and Rain Slicker. And the winner is: Colonel Mustard! I prefer Rain Slicker because of the associations of that bright yellow. It makes me think of my time living in Japan. A departing teacher gave me a lined, yellow rain slicker that was a godsend. It not only kept me dry, it was a great windbreaker while riding my bike in the cold, damp months of winter.

Those colors and their accompanying names were playing in my mind one day shortly after reading the winners in the magazine. I was driving through the rolling hills of the Palouse, a region that lies in southeastern Washington and north-central Idaho. It is immensely fertile land created by blown-in soil. Here is some of the deepest topsoil in the world, the perfect venue for growing wheat. In the spring, that wheat is a green that makes you grateful to have survived the winter. It glows. But it is in the late summer, as the wheat ripens and the sun begins its slow slide toward the southern hemisphere, that those same hills fire the emotions.

What would I name the color of ripening wheat as it moves in waves with the ever-present wind? It is not yellow, but it’s not quite gold, either. It lies on the spectrum between Queen Yellow and Plateau. I would name it Palouse Hills. When, on a cloudy day in late summer, as the sun is making its inexorable journey south, and it breaks through the clouds to light up the still standing wheat, the beauty of it can break your heart. I hope it is my last view of Earth as I make my way through the vale into whatever lies beyond. 

There are times when a response to natural beauty threatens to overwhelm me. It defies explanation. When it happens, I try to set down those rare moments, one of which happened recently. It was almost like passing from this familiar realm into one not of this world. If there is another life, another world beyond this one, perhaps this is what it is like.

I was driving home from the Lewiston, Idaho-Clarkston, Washington Valley to Genesee, where I live. It’s a relatively short drive, one I make daily during the regular school year. Occasionally, something out of the ordinary happens on the commute—a coyote paces along the highway, a deer escapes a deadly collision due to an alert driver, a shaft of sunlight pierces a cloud, a yellow bi-plane flies arabesques across newly-sprung wheat fields as a photographer follows the action with a video camera. But this particular day offered an extraordinary glimpse into the divine. The closest I can come to defining what I felt was what partakers of certain mind-altering drugs claim to have experienced. Never having dropped acid, I can only surmise that the heightened awareness of colour and texture reported under its influence might be similar. The day was drawing toward its end as I left the valley. Minimal showers had dampened the area during the course of the afternoon, and the air was clearer than normal, considering the local pulp and paper mill generally blankets the area with moisture and a sulfurous odour. Only after a strong wind does the valley sparkle. Since it is unusual to see the valley clearly from the top of the surrounding hills, when it happens, it provides a photo-worthy view of the conjoined rivers and irrigated greenery that is stunning.

Near the top of the hill, I noticed clouds building in the west, the origin of most of our local weather. These weren’t clouds that lie over the area like a damp blanket, bringing drizzling rain. These were massive piles, mountainous, like something out of Norse mythology. I expected gigantic bolts of lightning to begin discharging into the nearby fields. I both wanted to get home before a massive storm broke and to stop and capture the clouds with my phone camera. The last time I recall seeing such tremendous clouds was driving across Kansas just ahead of a tornado which was flooding roads behind me and dumping rain like I’ve never seen. At the same time, I didn’t sense these were malevolent clouds. Rather, they carried a kind of majesty, as though some powerful god was reminding his subjects of a power he chose not to unleash.

Just as the valley sometimes comes into sharper focus after a strong wind has cleared the air of particulates, in spite of the darkening effect of those clouds the air at the top of the hill was astoundingly clear. As the sun slipped toward the western horizon, the fields were bathed in a light that would make a photographer weep. The green of the spring wheat was electric. The brown of the newly plowed fields I can only describe as sable. There was a depth to the colour that can only be seen in the pile of a sable’s coat. It was hard to focus on driving. The intensity and depth of the colours and the power of those clouds was almost mind-altering.

The closer I got to home, the greater the sense that something momentous was about to happen. The sky seemed to have grown exponentially to accommodate the clouds, which were looming like mountain ranges, one behind the other. Where were they coming from? What precipitated their formation? As I reached the cutoff to Genesee, I looked north and saw a rain scrim, a phrase that I have only recently learned and which I find evocative for its relationship to the curtain at the back of a stage that hides the workings of a play but which also provides a screen on which to project silhouettes. What lies behind a rain scrim? Is it the liminal space where we can cross into another dimension?

On Cow Creek Road I stopped and took photos of the clouds before they dissipated. I felt like the only person aware of their “terrible beauty,” of the hyper-clear air, of the depth of colour overlaid on the fields. As I passed the grain elevators, I stopped again to snap a photo of the shadows playing across the metal silos. Then like a devotee incapable of conscious choice, I drove on through town, following the clouds, not wanting to stop marvelling at their power and beauty.

Through that entire drive, I felt as though I was on another plane of reality. I was glad I was alone, as I am not certain I could have expressed the emotional reaction engendered by the enormity of those clouds, the sense that the sky had grown larger, that the colours of fields and plowed ground was more intense than I had ever seen. Even as I write this in a weak attempt to articulate a response that defies words, I recognise such experiences are rare gifts. At the same time, I wonder if it was the result of an alteration in my brain chemistry from medication or a lack of sufficient sleep. Whether it was a glimpse into another realm or simply my brain working overtime, the awe produced by seeing the power and beauty of Nature will stay with me.

Two days later, traveling back down to the valley, I noted with a certain sadness that the surrounding hills are turning brown, sage and thistles filling in the spaces formerly occupied by Yellow Salfsify and Common Sunflowers. The newly-plowed fields are dry and dusty. The wheat is an ordinary green. The landscape reflects its high desert classification. There is no depth of colour, and no towering clouds mimicking massive mountain ranges. Those transcendent moments that allowed me to experience another plane of reality are only memories. Even the photos are insufficient reminders of the grandeur that I saw such a short time before. What is left is the emotional experience of seeing that beauty, now simply part of a map of memories folded away in my brain.

Memory is something that is on my mind a lot lately, both the bio-chemical process we call memory and the artifacts that result from that action. I don’t know if I can put a finger on any particular event or moment that has started this reflection. Rather, it seems to be a gradual accretion that has, like the formation of memories, awakened remembrances of past events and the cataloging of new ones.

Perhaps it had its genesis in a conference I attended in Spokane about a month ago. The entire conference was dedicated to the works of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the famous Uncle Tom’s Cabin among other, lesser known but perhaps better written, texts. Presenters were also invited to consider ancillary ideas and people that informed the author’s works as well as the historical events and people that Stowe knew and influenced during her lifetime. My presentation focused on Anna Leonowens, the Anna of the stage and film versions of The King and I. Leonowens’ “memories” of her life before her arrival in Siam (now Thailand) were the stuff of great fiction. Most of them, according to her biographer Susan Morgan, never happened. Born of lower middle-class parents, with a grandmother who was of mixed Indian-European blood, she grew up poor on military bases in India. She was largely self-taught and became a competent linguist, learning to read and write several languages, including Sanskrit. Her talent for using language extended to creating a new self: parents from a higher social class, a history that gave her an English birth (even though she had never set foot in England), and a husband whose death was far more exciting that the reality. Her invented story had her husband dying from heat exhaustion on a tiger hunt; the reality was that he was a petty official who died in Malysia of a commonplace disease. She was so convincing in this presentation of her past life that she was accepted by the British ex-pat community in Siam and was hired as the English teacher for the king’s children and wives. Furthermore, she apparently came to believe her own press. It was the story she told to her grandchildren, and it was believed by the woman who wrote the novel on which the stage and film versions of her life were based.

Leonowens eventually traveled to the United States and was introduced at some point to Harriet Beecher Stowe, herself an author who created characters for her most famous novel from stories she had read or heard. After its publication, there was not a little questioning of the originality of her work. One of the possible sources of her portrayal of Uncle Tom, for example, was a narrative by a former slave who referred to himself later in life as “Uncle Tom.” The lives and events of other characters in the novel have significant parallels to newspaper accounts, abolitionist pamphlets, and other slave narratives that Stowe would no doubt have read. So the question becomes, how much of what she wrote came from her own imagination and knowledge of the treatment of slaves in antebellum America, and how much was an unconscious resurfacing of the texts she had absorbed? Because she was morally opposed to slavery, there is no doubt that any of the accounts she read and the experience of traveling in the South, seeing the effects of “the peculiar institution” of slavery, would have had a profound effect on her emotionally. From such traumatic experiences—for these accounts were traumatic—memories are generated.

This is one of the reasons memories, although they can seem undeniably accurate to us, cannot always be trusted. We tend to think of them as being carved in stone, indelible, unchangeable, but the truth is, they are more like clay that stays malleable for an extended period, where a mark can be rubbed or scraped out and re-drawn or re-tooled into a different pattern. Over time, the clay hardens, and the memory becomes fixed. At that point, it is all but impossible to believe an event or a person’s face or the clothes a suspect was wearing could possibly be anything but what our “memory” tells us it was.

It might help if we thought of memories as being somewhat porous, easily manipulated, especially by a talented sculptor. He or she can imagine a figure or a pot hidden in clay and can work to bring that shape to life. The product may be completely realistic, leaving the viewer without a doubt about what the object is. Another artist may see a figure or object by the same name in a more abstract way that takes a greater leap of the imagination for the observer to see. But to the artist, it is as real as the object we call real. In much the same way, memories can appear to be accurate representations to the person who creates and houses them, but to other observers, those same memories appear to be fantasies at best and outright lies at worst.

So how do we deal with this elusive chimera—memory—that we need, that we are lost without? The neuroscientist Oliver Sacks relates in one of his books how people who were hypnotised and told they had no future were perfectly happy. When those same people were hypnotised and told they had no past, they became catatonic. We need our memories. They are who we are, the history of our past, the people and events of which we are a part. While some, like Anna Leonowens, manage to create a new history and maintain its veracity for the rest of their lives, most of us hang onto the memories of our past as a way to ground ourselves in the world.

For example, my oldest son has been going through a tremendously stressful year that was recently made worse by the death of his cousin’s wife and his great-aunt within forty-eight hours of one another. The first death was not unexpected, as Patricia had been diagnosed with breast cancer seventeen years ago and given a grim prognosis. My son knew she was in hospice care and that her death was not far off. The death of her mother-in-law, Mildred Ann, my son’s aunt, was a different story. Although in her early eighties, she had been in good health. But she was scheduled for a medical procedure that required she discontinue a blood-thinning medication. The night her daughter-in-law died, she became sick enough to need a trip to the emergency room. There the diagnosis was inconclusive. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. However, the doctor decided to prescribe a CT scan to eliminate a cause potentially missed in the initial exam. The scan revealed her intestine had been without blood flow for an extended period of time, and without immediate surgery, she would die within two days. When told she might not survive the surgery, she opted to forego the procedure and enter hospice care. She was taken to the same facility where her daughter-in-law had died hours before and there spent the next few hours sharing stories and laugher with her family. Given medication for the increasing pain, she dozed off and never woke up. 

What happens to the memories Mildred Ann and Patricia carried? If they didn’t share them with others, are they lost forever? What if the stories they shared of their earlier lives are not remembered accurately by those who heard them? Are there pieces of the history of places, of  people, of events that simply disappear? Of those memories that Patricia and Mildred Ann shared, how many will become a part of the catalog of memories of those who heard them? In what ways will those stories change as they are told and retold in the coming years?

Those are questions that I asked as I read my son’s Facebook post several days after Patricia’s and Mildred Ann’s deaths. He was driving to Great Falls, Montana, to attend classes toward his Bachelor of Science in Nursing degree. He records that the initial hundred miles of the drive from Walla Walla, Washington, to Lewiston, Idaho, were boring. But as he crossed the bridge at Arrow Junction and “reached the south side of the Clearwater [River]” he began to come alive. This, finally, was familiar territory, laden with memories. A thousand times he has traveled that same stretch of highway, riding with others as a child or driving himself as an adult. Here are the familiar landmarks by which he gauged how close to home he was—his former home in Pierce, Idaho, or his early adulthood home in Lewiston. As he neared the bridge at Greer, the turnoff to head up the grade toward Pierce, he found himself replaying memories of his childhood years in Pierce. He remembered riding his bike with his younger brother, spending entire days in the Whispering Pines housing addition and the woods behind his dad and step-mom’s house, exploring until it was nearly too dark to see but knowing exactly where they were and that they were safe.

In his post, he relates being overwhelmed with the memories of those days, remembering them as endlessly long and happy, the years since filled with too many losses of those he loved most: grandparents, dad, step-mom, great-aunts. As he remembered the past, that land that we can never return to except in our memories, he found tears running down his cheeks.

I read an article recently that addressed the power of memories that are created when we are young. They become our most potent memories, perhaps because our brains are nearly empty when we begin collecting them. Everything is new. It is only as experiences begin to etch a map into our brains, a map that serves us well as we encounter similar events or people or objects, that our memories become less powerful. Those early memories are vital, as they allow us to  draw instantaneous conclusions about what we are seeing, smelling, tasting, or hearing that may save us from danger. Conversely, a place or person or event that inscribed a pleasant association on our brains can just as quickly bring a smile or tears of joy when a similar experience or person is encountered. What is harder to understand is how encountering a person, place, or event that holds fond memories for us, while simultaneously realising that those persons or places are gone forever, can have such a profoundly emotional impact. We can intellectually understand the sadness associated with such loss, but emotionally we are at sea. Our only help is to recognise the need to grieve the losses and celebrate the joys that are all part of the fluctuating map of our memories.

Other than those memories that potentially save us from dangerous situations, animals, food, or people, would it be easier to go through life without memories? If those we loved and lost to anger or disinterest or relocation or death revisit us, accompanied by emotional pain, would we be happier without them? Or would we be like robots, capable of functioning, of going about our daily tasks, but lacking substance, sort of two-dimensional versions of ourselves, flat and uninteresting?

Some time ago I binge watched the first season of the television show Grey’s Anatomy. The eponymous character, Meredith Grey, has a patient who has a brain tumour that is lodged mid-way of the brain in the area where most of our memories are lodged. As the attending surgeon explains to the patient and his wife, it is the area of the brain where the essence of one’s personality is seated. Removing the tumour would undoubtedly result in a loss of most of the patient’s memories and would most likely change his personality. The other option, gamma knife surgery and radiation, would give him half as many years to live. The patient and his wife opt for the more invasive procedure.

Dr. Grey, who is dealing with her mother’s early-onset Alzheimer’s, tries to convince the wife that her husband should choose the option that would allow a shorter life with less memory loss and the retention of his personality. The wife refuses. She will stand by her husband’s choice, giving them more years together even if it means he will not remember the memories they have created. She would rather have more years with him, even in an altered state.

“What about his memories?” Grey asks.

“I will remember for both of us,” the wife replies.

In the end, maybe that is what we do for one another. We store our own memories as well as those of the ones we love. We pass them on to those who follow us so there will always be a record of those we loved who are now gone. We may not always get the story exactly right, but the shape of the person or event is still discernible in the essence of the memory. Stories always have an element of truth after all.