History tells us that heroes were initially demi-gods – part man, part deity – and that they gradually transformed downward from that into human characters who, under fire, show special courage and resourcefulness, mostly on the battlefield (think Achilles, Sir Galahad, Audie Murphy, etc.) where they end up slaughtering their foes like so many spring lambs.
Now, we’re pretty much left with sports figures like Roy Halladay as heroes, and despite what some might have wanted to see happen to the teenager who ran on the field at Citizens Bank Park last week in a red body suit, I don’t think the Phils’ ace pitcher would necessarily involve himself in a ritual disemboweling of that fellow simply to prove his mantle.
But I thought about my own hero recently while mingling with the cars parked on Level Seven of the Chester County Justice Center Parking Garage and Smoking Lounge. Allow me to explain.
Harold Wallace Ross (1892-1951) was the originator and first editor of The New Yorker magazine, and an editor whose vision, wit, and outrageous temper I have admired over the years, to the point of apotheosis. If there is a book about Ross, I’ve read it, more than once, and have used the descriptions of him as inspiration, in my own small way. He once gave a colleague of his on The Stars and Stripes, the U.S. Army newspaper during World War I, a page of commas as a Christmas present, and that predilection towards punctuation, one might point out, is something for which I have more than a fleeting affection.
James Thurber, another of my literary heroes, said in his book, “The Years With Ross,” that the editor had ways of looking at people and things that would stick in one’s head forever. He looked at a portrait of a banker and said, “That’s not a banker. That’s a butler,” and so the man became. Ross, according to Thurber, once complained of a blue sky, “There was never a sky like that. It’s delft, or Alice, or some goddam shade,” even though Thurber allowed that only blues Ross probably could have known were light, sky, and Navy.
So I thought about Ross and delft and Alice as I stood looking out over the West Chester landscape one day this month as the blue sky surrounded me overhead. We have had a string of days of blue skies in September here in Chester County that strikes me as remarkable, and each day it seems to me the shade changes, but by bit. It’s the sun and the clouds and the time of day, I tell myself, but it’s also nature having fun with color.
Here are the shades of blue that are possible in our world, a few of them at least.
Steel blue. Tiffany blue. Indigo. Dark blue. Sky blue. Deep sky blue. Han. Iceberg. Federal. Midnight. Cornflower, Alice (yes, it is there). Teal. Carolina (no Nittany). Palatinate blue.
There’s Bleu de France. Bondi Blue. Tufts Blue. UCLA Blue. Air Force Blue. Iris. Powder, Prussian. Ultramarine. Yale Blue. Duke Blue (still no Nittany).
I am not certain whether all those blues have been seen when looking upwards, but I love imaging what a Cobalt Blue sky would look like. I think that the shade that exists out the window of my garret here on West Miner Street could be construed as Majorelle Blue, but given time and a change in the position of the sun you might also be able to describe it as Maya Blue in polite company.
I considered myself lucky to examine the shades of blue we’ve seen overhead from one of the best vantage points in the county, the parking garage, which I have noted in previous musings. Open only a few short years, it allows panoramas that were not seen in the hundreds of years that West Chester has been populated – letting one see the expanse of the county from an entirely unique point, and check off the blips on the horizon as the pop up like heartbeats on a cardiac monitor – there the Historic Courthouse clock tower, there the steeple of West Chester United Methodist, there the West Chester University water tower.
I know that the sky will change it’s shade of blue tomorrow, and into the winter, where we will be more apt to describe what is clearly Glaucous or Ceil blue as Dull gray. And simply to know that everything changes, including the color of the sky, is comforting in a way, because we no longer have to revere as heroes only the men whose swords are bloodiest.
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