Shades of Enlightenment

Morning is coffee-colored, a deep, aromatic brown. Beside the cup is a newspaper. I read about the Rams: yellow and blue. The way this season is going, mostly blue.

I trip over one of the kid’s toys on the way to the garage. A Ninja Turtle vehicle: half tank, half dune buggy. It’s olive drab, the color of war and of surplus stores. My ankle hurts where I twisted it: a flash of scarlet.

On the freeway, the radio plays Mozart. Mozart, for some reason, is silver to me. Beethoven is dusky gold, Handel a brighter shade. Brahms is the gray of a high winter sky. Bach is almost transparent.

Unlike the smog that dims the towers of downtown. It’s smoky, milky, rusty, as thick as the dust clouds looming over the Joads’ farm at the beginning of “The Grapes of Wrath.” The color of doom.

The office is white, off-white, beige. A sterile gleam of fluorescent lights. The symbols I type on the computer are green. My daydreams are an X-rated pink.

Back home.

It’s a refuge, as always. Dinner connects us with the past: the fire dancing in the primeval cave. And although the kid thinks he’s a mutant reptile the color of pea soup, I look into his hazel eyes and see something else: a hopefulness, like the first faint translucence that we accept each morning as evidence that the sun will come up again.

The color of the future.

“Tuning In to the Color in Our Lives,” a lecture by painter Jann Rucquoi, will be offered at the Philosophical Research Society, 3910 Los Feliz Blvd., Los Angeles, from 7:30 to 9:30 p.m. Tuesday ($5).

And for those with a particular penchant for purple, a seminar on “Success With Lilacs” is scheduled at Van de Kamp Hall at Descanso Gardens, 1418 Descanso Drive, La Canada Flintridge, from 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Saturday ($10).