Alecto's Ophelia

What I did today

For Amy because she asked:

I did not mean to have Thanksgiving this year. I meant to skip right by it as if it wasn't there. I meant to take Cletus and NoMans down to the Cobbs Mill Inn and be with all our favorite waiters and bus people, eat good food, be loved, and go home. I meant to bypass the pain of not having my son. I meant to pull the strings of time together and step right over the day and into tomorrow where I could pick myself up and keep on swimming.

That's not what happened. What happened was my brother called last week and asked if he and his wife could come because they wanted to stay local this year and I said, well yes, of course, and bought a turkey.

I bought a hormone and antibiotic free range scrawny bird weighing in at 11.66 pounds and put him in my refrigerator and forgot about him. This morning I got up late, around tenish, and wandered into the kitchen and here is what I did:

I cooked the sugar pumpkin (yesterday, I cheated a little) and pied him up and only had to roll the crust just one time. I peeled and pared my apples and then realized I only had the one pie pan and so rolled the next crust, just one time, into a cake pan and piled my apples high and laid the top crust over to wait it's turn. I made a poolish of the sour dough starter and checked my supply of stale bread and chopped it up and put it in a bowl. I chopped an onion and sauteed it in half a pound of butter and set it aside. I made a stock from turkey giblets, turnip, carrot and onion and let it simmer. I boiled potatoes and mashed them with some kind of triple cream soft cheese well ripened on my counter with two heads of roasted garlic. I made the sour dough bread from the poolish and let it rise and fall and rise and fall three times before I baked it into two long loaves. I cooked up a mess of cranberries with clementines and set them aside to rest. I chopped root vegetables and tossed them with garlic cloves, olive oil, lemon and wine and set them in to roast. I put the stuffed turkey with more apples in the oven and let him go. I baked the bread, reheated the potatoes, set the pies aside and greeted my brother and his wife at the door.

While I was doing this NoMans was stacking two cords of fire wood. We only ordered half a cord. I will have to hunt those boys down and give them a lot more money. I did not need that much wood but it is stacked in a safe dry place and we will use it eventually. It made me feel abundant and safe.

We sat in the living room, Cletus scrolling through LOL cats and we were together. Then I got up, rested the turkey, made the gravy and set the table. My brother's wife brought brussels sprouts and salad and we sat down together and we broke bread. We talked about the world and who we are and who we want to be. We talked until we could talk no longer and have come off here to bed.

Today we walked through the garden and examined the wreckage that needed to be cleared away weeks ago but maybe we will tomorrow. The celery is still going strong and the ground is littered with the cherry tomatoes we didn't get in before the killing frost. How can the celery still be going after the killing frost? The broccoli is trying to resurrect itself and the hollyhocks have sprouted again. Too much too soon.

I did not listen to Alice's Restaurant for the first time in twenty-five years of listening every year because there was no Mike but I drank the wine and ate the food and sat with my family and allowed myself to be grateful for the simple fact of being here in this house with people I love.

I wrote this tired and disjointed but that's the way of it today.

Good-bye The Lion

I am so fragile tonight and I'm like to say I don't know why, but I do. Sometimes we have enough layers pulled off that we become defenseless to the outside world but more importantly defenseless to ourselves.

I've been doing my usual blog surfing and aside from one new site David B. Dancy I'm visiting the same places I go every day; I'm just a little more susceptible to the human condition today.

So here are the people who made me cry today; Mr. Dancy, Cielo, and Father Luke. CG made me smile and remember who I was at fifteen and Cielo reminded me of who my mother is today. NoMans about broke my heart walking around like the living wounded and Amy being back made me ridiculously happy; it was like an early Christmas present from the Chanukah Queen.

But what's really got me is that The Lion died yesterday at 4:18 PM. The Lion has been dying for twenty freaking months! His dying has left my father an unbearable wreck as he cannot disassociate himself from the man he might as well have been married to for the last 37 years; they were that close.

When my father wrote last week that The Lion was on his way out again I didn't go. I think my brother might have but I did not. I justified not going by telling myself and anyone else who would listen that I spent most of the summer of '06 sitting in ICU on weekends knitting while The Lion did not die. I saw The Lion at Jim's funeral and he knew me and kissed me and it was good. I decided I had already said enough good-byes and didn't need to go back. I told myself it was not about supporting my Dad despite the fact that Jack made that gently but very clear. I didn't have the emotional bandwidth to cope and I let my Dad down, I could hear it in his voice today.

So I'm just sad. I am sad that The Lion is gone. Despite his failings, he was a formidable figure and I loved him and he loved me. He was larger than life for nearly all of my life. His name was Vic Deveau and he was my Daddy's best friend from 1970 until yesterday at 4:18 when my Dad sat at his bed at hospice and finally let him go and he deserves to have his real name published.

The Lion was played a pivotal part of my upbringing. I have written these things and therefore cannot bring myself to write them again so I'm finally going to migrate the posts from the last blog to this so that they can be cataloged together.

That's him up there, circa 1960 something or other. He was some kind of beautiful. They called him The Silver Fox. I call him The Lion and I call him Uncle Vic and I hurt so bad I can't see straight. Guess I better just let myself have that.

I am thankful for those of you who made me cry or remember myself today. It broke the walls down so that I could feel.

p.s. Father Luke 'yes ma'am'd' me. I'm having trouble reconciling the fit of giggles with the tears. I guess that's OK. Thanks, Father Luke. OK, bye.

Light

Well yes, I can.

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I made him send the email because I was more afraid than he, I suppose. And he did too, and he told in the writing that it was a scary thing to do, to reach out like that and make yourself vulnerable. And when she said, Yes! but, he heard the but because maybe he thinks he isn’t enough (oh, he is). And since I wasn’t the one brave enough to send the first communication I was more than able to hear the yes. And we didn’t make it happen and I really wish we did but I did make that one phone call to say we wouldn’t be there even though she gave us an out, to not even have to call.

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I listened to her voice tell about the city and I listened and drank it all up. She sounded just like I thought she might and it made me feel light in the world, just to hear her very buoyancy of her.

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In this reaching out beyond our own self inflicted borders we are so fragile.

And light… we are so light.

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Thank you, Amy. You made my day, my week, my month, just by picking up the phone and being you.

Being There. Priceless.

El Greco - View of Toledo - The Met

I don't know what got into me, really I do not. My intention was to sleep until my back screamed and then roll out of bed, down the hall to very old coffee and the Saturday version of the Sunday Times.  Today was NoMan's day in New Jersey with the boys.  That means he left around 7ish and even resetting coffee to brew at 8:30 I still meant for it to be old by the time I got to it. And the Saturday version is just because they like to get a jump on the Sunday news. It's true.  Then I was going to roll around in my messy bed with the paper, half a bagel and some more bad coffee and read that paper cover to cover with nobody fighting for shares. And then I was maybe going to get up, have a shower and shave my legs.  I love the Saturday shave, I get a new blade and everything comes off smoooooth as silk.  It's a beautiful thing and part of my favorite Saturday ritual.

Not happening.  Not any of it.

I don't know. Sometime around 8:30 or so, when I could smell the coffee brewing, I started to think about what kind of nice day we were expecting and the fact that it was only me and Cletus Marie all day and we could pretty much do anything we (I) felt like doing. We (I) felt like going to The Met in NYC (Metropolitan Museum of Art).  Which meant We had to get out of bed at a reasonable hour if We wanted to park anywhere near the vicinity of 5th and 80th.

It took me until 9:30 to make up my mind and by then it meant We had to seriously get our acts together and blow out the door. I banged on Cletus's door on the way to coffee and yelled, 'Get up and shower, we're bugging out of here!'  Cletus may have bothered to ask where and for what but I wasn't listening and so we moved. I also told her to look nice.  I don't know why I told her to look nice and I don't know why I thought I wanted to look nice either. This edict resulted in both Cletus and I leaving the house in stacked heels. We wore jeans but we wore stacked heels.  I'd have been better off in my cowboy boots. We looked good.  Don't know why we looked good, but we looked good.  As I backed the truck out of the driveway I remembered a conversation NoMans and I had with another couple mid-way through a whole day tour of Vatican City.  We were talking about my shoes.  These very same shoes (and probably very same jeans) I was wearing.  And the woman said, 'They sure are cute but I bet you're ready to cut your feet off and leave them in the gutter.'  Yup.  I was.  And yes, I did it.  Again.

I didn't tell Cletus where we were going until we were almost there.  Not sure how she worked it out because I can't remember the last time I drove directly to Museum Mile, versus parking at my brother's building or somewhere else, or taking the train. She worked it out about 8 blocks North of our destination.  She looked down at her feet in her super hot sexy Rat Stomper boots and then looked back at me and said, 'Momma, I look GOOD, why are we going to a museum?'

Sigh.

When we pulled up to park the nice man had a look in the back of the truck and said 'I hope you don't have a body back there or anything.'  I said, 'No, just the contents of my closet which my lovely husband swore he was taking to Good Will, oh four or five weeks ago now.'  He laughed and let us in.

Now let me tell you, I haven't driven in NYC in quite awhile.  This is not a skill that once honed will ever really go away but I was driving the truck and it was a beautiful day and people were everywhere and by the time I got us parked and into the back entrance I was pretty well good and flustered. The fact that Cletus did not abandon me at the first opportunity is testament to her general good nature because if it had been me and my mom had been behaving like an utter lunatic I'd have bolted for sure, or at least sulked about it. Cletus was golden, even if she was laughing at me and still asking, 'Um, why the hell are we in this god forsaken museum?' Because we are, darlin', because we are.  And you'll suck it up and like it too!

We wandered first through the Greco-Roman period.  This part was really surrealistic for me because the last time I wandered through the Greco-Roman period I was in blasted Greco-Rome and the stuff is still in the streets, not locked behind glass or up on pedestals.  It was just plain weird and then it was sad because I'd kind of gotten used to just being able to pick up and fly to Europe for a long weekend if I felt like it.

OK, maybe that sounds a little ridiculous but there is a reason I do what I do for a living.  There's a reason my husband does what he does.  And if you take those two incomes, even after subtracting maximum 401k withholding, Other investments, Alimony and Child Support, we still do OK. And one of the reasons that we choose to do what we do is because it gives us the means to pick up and go if we are so inclined, and both of us are very much inclined. Only we can't do it anymore.  We probably can't do it again for another two years because I probably cannot leave Ms Cletus behind, or take her with me, until she is eighteen. And while that's a price I'm more than willing to pay I did get hit upside the head with it today and I stood there looking at the Vermeer's and the Caravaggio's and wishing for some Bernini statuary and a Piazza Navona and wishing for one particular Caravaggio that I remembered (after tearing from one end of the Dutch Painters exhibit to the other) was probably in Rome at the moment.

And it all boils down to this:  I miss being on adventure with my husband. And I cried. And then I wiped off my face, got a good look at my daughter and said, 'Alecto, you are here today.  Be here.' And then the day took off.

We looked at everything.  We looked at musical instruments and made roaring noises at each other in the horn section. We looked at armor and weapons and giggled over the one cod piece some assine king had made to display his enormous erection during battle (um, most warriors tuck the boys up under chain mail and as close to the skin as possible - this guy had it on display and it freaking curled up at the end too!).  We did look at the Vermeer's and I cried because the man was a genius and I had the great privilege to stand in front of a handful in New York City because I live within the 60 mile radius (barely) and have the wherewithal to get myself there. We went to the Eternal Ancestor exhibit and learned about the Congo and the Fang region and the death, fertility and burial rites.  I even a bought a book (which scandalized Cletus because these things ain't cheap) because I was so completely enthralled with one particular burial process where - I think, I still don't quite get it yet - the deceased is sewn into what resembles an over-sized ugly doll and then buried.

And then we had tea.  We got in line for tea at 2:30 and were ready to pass out. Cletus looked at me and said, 'I just want a bloody cold drink already.  I do NOT drink tea.'  I said, 'No, no, Cletus, we are HAVING tea.' Cletus wasn't having any of it but Momma was and so Cletus snarled and sucked it up.  Twenty minutes later we were seated.  Twenty minutes after that we had tea. 

It was wonderful and amazing and from here on out if anyone says the word tea to Cletus she will immediately jump to attention and ask if clotted cream and lemon curd are possibly going to be involved, in which case she will practically mainline the tea to get to the goodies. There were little egg salad tea sandwiches with scallions and asparagus.  They were round and made on dense white bread.  There were the most delicate little chicken and apricot pies and salmon rolls and savory pancakes.  There were scones, and tarts and petit fours. And there were four pots of clotted cream, blackberry jam, lemon curd and marmalade. The best part was that everything was teensy tiny so that you could have just a taste of many, many wonderful sweet and savory things. There might have been champagne involved as well but I was driving.

Cletus had to be told to wipe her face.

The icing on the cake was our exit from the building.  After years and years of visiting this place I still don't get it.  I can get as lost as all get out and spend hours happily wandering in ever widening circles until I pass out from sheer exhaustion but fail to actually locate an exit. (I do a lot better at the Museum of Natural History, for some reason)

I told Cletus, as I poured over the map, that I had no idea how to get out of the building toward the garage.  Cletus said she had it handled, all we had to do was go back to the Greco-Roman period which was right below the nearly closed Islamic section and we knew right where that was.  We went there.  Unfortunately as we went there Cletus decided to gallop (like a horse on the way back to the barn) through Eternal Ancestors which caused one of the Docents to gallop after her in serious alarm which caused me to use 'the voice' to get her attention which caused the Docent to nearly drop dead in fright. After that she had the good graces to slow down.  Somewhat. (Cletus has got Momma figured out, if you go too slow Momma will stop to look at things and we WILL NEVER GET OUT OF HERE).

Once we got to Greco-Roman Cletus led us through eight precise turns and I'll be damned if that wasn't exactly the backwards path from how we started our day.  Except that on the eighth turn I realized we were passing the same bathtub for the third time, just at different angles. The exit was at the entrance or the way we'd come back. Cletus was beside herself, I'm still having fits of giggles.

I'm so glad I got out of bed today. Maybe I'll shave my furry self in the morning.