war, famine, pestilence, and death

plus em dashes and hyphens

February 16, 2004


Curried lentil soup simmers on my stove. Wilbur purrs on my shoulder. Talk of the Nation on WBUR segues from gay marriage to A-Rod's becoming a Yankee. The outside temperature starts dropping. My nose is cold and I'm not a dog. None of that is particularly apocalyptic. Well, maybe the A-Rod thing is because TOTN was supposed to follow gay marriage with a discussion on the increasing popularity of foreign films, a much more NPRish kind of topic. Anyway, the segue from gay marriage to A-Rod mirrors some of the discussion over dinner at La Madre's house yesterday. Well except that Talk of the Nation isn't talking about Iraq today.

I flip on the TV. The commercial for tonight's Emeril Live says he's going to cook pork chops. I call Andrea and tell her she'd better protect my brain. She doesn't laugh, just says OK she'll take care of it. That's not particularly apocalyptic either.

It's just that the ordinariness, the mundanity, the regular everydayness of it all contrasts so vividly with the past few days that I feel like I've got some sort of mental whiplash. BiB flew in from Baghdad on Friday (Baghdad Thursday night, Boston 38 hours later on Friday night) for my Uncle John's funeral on Saturday. That made for an intense schedule of funeral-related events in Walpole (where Aunt Helen and Uncle John live(d)) and family gatherings at La Madre's with the basic "BiB's in town, time to relate like crazy" agenda.

Friday night after the wake we had dinner with BiB at La Madre's. The kids weren't there 'cause Lizzy had a soccer game at 10:00 PM, which Madre misheard as hockey and none of us questioned because it's totally idiomatic for Egans to be playing hockey in the middle of the night. Without the kids it was just like when we were growing up: intense talk about politics and religion at the dinner table. Really intense. We kept ping-ponging between gay marriage and Iraq so rapidly that if they slipped baseball in there then I missed it.

BiB was telling stories of being in a convoy that came under fire a couple of days before, or was it the day before, and how every flash of light reflected off a mirror or a piece of metal looks like an explosion, and how 15 Iraqi employees of the company he works for just got blown up (that was definitely the day before), and lots of really intense stuff you wouldn't discuss in front of kids. I keep using the word intense because no thesaurus can give me a word that expresses this conversation. I can't even begin to imagine to be in Baghdad on Thursday night and in La Madre's dining room on Friday night. Good thing there were no sudden flashes of light in the dining room.

Madre and the Beach Boys were being intense about the Catholic church allying itself with some of the most virulent hate groups -- strange bedfellows those -- and the Massachusetts constitutional convention deadlock. I did point out that the one thing the legislature seemed to agree on was that the supreme judicial court had in fact correctly interpreted the Massachusetts constitution, otherwise they wouldn't be convening to try to change it. And I would love to have been a fly on the wall in church when La Madre gave her pastor a deeply meaningful glare.

I didn't sleep at all that night. Somehow I managed to be dressed and caffeinated when the Beach Boy picked me up for the funeral. Besides the odd feeling of hoping that any gaydar had been shut off for the duration, the other thing about the church was that the altar servers and the choir were really old. The church is aging. This is the parish where my uncle went to daily Mass, so it was deeply meaningful. My cousin did a fantastic job with a eulogy that really captured the spirit of the man, bad jokes and all. Boy oh boy did he love bad jokes and man did he love to forward them all over the Internet.

At the KofC for coffee and food after Mass, we all developed the habit of referring to soccer as hockey. BiB made plans to go to Andrea's hockey game that night. I suddenly felt a pang of jealousy. When the exotic and rare uncle goes to the hockey game when the kid is 12, it's a memory of a lifetime. When the mundane AJ goes to piles of hockey games when the kid is 5,6,7, 8, 9, 10 ... it's ho-hum, not the stuff memories are made of. So I had to once more retell the story of how I witnessed Andrea's first goal ever. Oh well. We'll always have 5 years of Full House reruns.

Oh yeah, it was Valentine's Day. Nancy and I had planned to see Casablanca at the Brattle but with all the traveling hither and yon the logistics didn't work out. Plan B worked out just fine though. Dinner at House of Tibet Kitchen and used books at McIntyre and Moore. Who could ask for anything more? Besides that, we just celebrated our 10 year anniversary last weekend at Trident where we met, which trumped Valentine's Day anyway.

Sunday's family gathering added mention of A-Rod going to the Yankees mixed in with war, famine, pestilence, and death as well as Hungarian wineries. It is so weird that BiB and I both deeply cathected the same eastern European country although he didn't seem to have heard of Eros Pista, my favorite condiment, nor did he recognize the words for used bookstore. He did find UNIX auto parts funny, so we have that in common. We all talked to Szilvia on the phone -- in English. I informed her of my continuing desire to learn Hungarian, which of course makes my family AND all the Hungarians I know laugh hysterically. But I do have to say that the Angol/Magyar dictionary I bought during my brief period of non-depression between the rotator cuff depression and the winter depression came in handy the other day when I needed to explain that the printer doing the promotional brochure for the English edition of Conifers Round the World had used em dashes where there were supposed to be hyphens. In my wildest imaginings I never pictured myself desperately needing to know the Hungarian word for em dash (gondolatjel).

And now back to the lentil soup already in progress...

Today's Reading
World Within Walls by Donald Keene

This Year's Reading
2004 Booklist


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Copyright © 2004, Janet I. Egan