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...