Blue

Synesthesia is a condition in which input from one sense triggers an automatic response from another sense.  Very commonly it manifests as music being sensed as colors as well as sounds.  To me that sounds totally amazing, though I’m sure there are potential downsides.  I am not a synesthete, but colors can bring songs or types of songs to mind.

Red is fairly obvious and definitely pedestrian--Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, the McDonald’s theme song and many offerings of the military type.

Yellow would bring to mind The Flight of the Bumblebee, songs from The Wizard of Oz and The Yellow Rose of Texas.  .

Green evokes thoughts of Enya and Debussy and other musical impressionists. 

With thoughts of purple come royal marches and majestic hymns.                            .

Blue brings the most specific of memorable songs, two to be exact.  The first is Love is Blue which I first learned in French class, known to us as L’amore est bleu, a gentler, kinder, more hopeful song than the “translation” into English would prove to be.  I still remember most of the words and the memory of them always takes me back to classes with one of my favorite high school teachers who brought a foreign language into our lives with caring and creativity and joie de vivre.

The second is Blue Moon, my father’s love song to my mother.  He, a young Marine, a native Californian, sent back to a hospital in Long Beach with cancer while his comrades-in-arms sailed on to Indochina just before the Korean conflict began.  She, a school teacher from Michigan by way of Washington State and a volunteer at that same hospital in her off hours.  A romance worthy of pen or screen which became a real life union, a marriage lasting 55 years.  And woven through it all were mentions of Blue Moon.  When my dad died in 2015, we found among his things an inexpensive frame holding a very old piece of paper with the faded, typed words of Blue Moon. 

Blue moon
You saw me standing alone
Without a dream in my heart
Without a love of my own.

Blue moon
You knew just what I was there for
You heard me saying a prayer for
Someone I really could care for

And care for her he did, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health and as she also cared for him.