There's hardy a hue that I don't find attractive in some way, but for as long as I can remember, I have been drawn to the color cobalt blue in its countless natural and people-made incarnations.
This proclivity began at an early age when I would visit my maternal grandparents, who had lost just about everything they had of value in the 1929 stock market crash. One of the few reminders of the good old days was an antique Colonial corner cupboard with paned glass windows over drawers and a cabinet. I loved to stand on my tippy toes and look at Grandma's exquisite cobalt blue Wedgwood dinner china set with gold leafwork.
The cupboard and china migrated to my parents house after Granddaddy died and Grandma moved out of the apartment, and the china would come out on special occasions signaled by both dining room table leaves being up. I thought that it was almost a sacrilege to plop meat, mashed potatoes and string beans on the cobalt blue plates, and considered it to be something of a privilege to wash and dry the china, which was much to fine to go in the dishwasher.
I have never bought an automobile because of its color, but I did mention to a friend who sold and serviced Audis that if he ever found a relatively rare cobalt blue Avant (station wagon) with a manual transmission, I'd be interested. He located one in great condition with low mileage. I chalked up 218,000 relatively trouble-free miles before selling the car, which was a bitch to keep clean.
Using Tokyo as my base, I worked throughout the Far East during the Vietnam War. I rented a place from the Myoshis, a wonderful and quite elderly couple. Mrs. Myoshi was one of the first Japanese women to attend Oxford University in England. We became friends, and one evening after a farewell dinner with she and her husband in their upstairs apartment, the conversation turned to World War II.
Mrs. Myoshi said that she wanted to show me something special before I returned to the States. She explained that she had brought back a Wedgwood dinner china set from England before the war. It had been buried it in the backyard of their home early in 1945 when the U.S. advance up the Pacific enabled B-29 bombers to reach the Japanese mainland.
The Myoshis lived out the closing months of the war in the countryside and returned after the surrender to find their neighborhood decimated from firebombings.
Mrs. Myoshi told this story as she opened the doors to a cupboard and took out one of the Wedgwood plates.
"It was a lovely ivory white," she explained as she handed the plate to me. "But you can see what the intense heat of the firebombings did."
Indeed. The plate had turned cobalt blue, as had the entire dinner set.
There are myriad ways that cobalt blue appears in the natural world as is witnessed by some of illustrator Maxfield Parrish's works. This includes early morning and evening skies when the light is just right and in sunlight reflected water.
This has been reinforced time on my many trips to the Colorado Rockies. I have been particularly enthralled to watch my favorite color appear on many-faceted 13,000-foot Mount Sopris in the Maroon Bells-Snowmass wilderness near Aspen in the interplay of rock, ice and light. I climbed Sopris twice, but the cobalt blue was coy and could only be seen from afar.
I guess that I also should mention that my eyes are blue and the shades change depending upon setting and mood, although I'm told that they are reliably cobalt blue after lovemaking. Sigh.
Photos by Ethan Tweedie (top) and Robotography
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