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Zen blue
It’s not a color. Or, is it?
I’d never heard of it, until I made it up yesterday. A simple description for the color of a hat I’d seen in a dream the night before.
The dream
I’d visited a used bookstore in Portland, looking for a quiet place in the back corner. A blog entry I’d found, written by two lovers who use bookstores in the same way other lovers use lavatories in jumbo jets, described the maze between the front door and the shelf of well-worn titles. One sentence described a bent metal flange, hanging from the sixty year-old ornamental iron ceiling, that would mark the spot above where they sat together and read Leaves of Grass to each other in whispers.
Walt Whitman — Zen Master
The lovers’ blog mentioned nothing of Zen, but didn’t have to. Whitman, to me, is a Zen master, and those whose minds he engages sit before him in contemplation of a path to mindfulness.
In my sleeping mind’s eye, the stacks appeared so close together as to barely allow two people to pass without rubbing against one another. To sit together on the floor and read, one would need to scrunch up in a ball and block traffic. Some patrons would feel inconvenienced, others might choose to sit and listen and, if they did, would be welcomed into The Body Electric.
I followed the maze, found the flange and closed my eyes. Pages turned ambient above sirens in the distance. Patrons coughing conversations, resembling the sound of a television show that can be heard through the walls of a home just before one falls asleep.
Noon struck
Having found the quiet, I sat in the corner. On the second shelf, about eighteen inches above the floor, crammed behind a row of books, each without a name, I found a blue hat.
Taking the hat to the owner, I asked her to leave it in the lost and found. She lit up and declined. Instantaneously remembering a man having worn the hat into the store a long time ago, and never having returned to retrieve it, she told me to keep it.
I agreed to leave wearing it, but not before returning to the stacks to look up and see the flange. I left the hat upside-down on a small marble-topped table and returned to find a copy of Leaves of Grass laying in the hat with a note that said “free”. I asked the owner if she’d seen who left the book behind. She declined and told me to take the hat and the book.
Now, I’m looking for a real Zen Blue Hat.
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