Years ago, when we were relatively newly-weds, I took him to see The Seventh Seal, one of my very favourite movies. He fell asleep. I was appalled.
This gift is a Criterion DVD. There's a commentary, which I have yet to access (and an essay by Woody Allen, which I plan to ignore), but I decided to watch it a couple of nights ago, marvelling in the crispness of the re-mastered black and white print.
Like all good art, I see something different every time I revisit it. I think the last time I watched it was in 2020. Being set at the time of the Black Death, it made harrowing pandemic viewing. Now, of course, the ever-looming presence of the black robed and hooded Death (Bengt Ekerot), who stalks the Knight (a very youthful Max von Sydow) and his companions between chess moves, is particularly piercing, following my own recent loss.
However, I saw other details that escaped me, even after repeated viewings. This time, I noted that Jös (Gunnar Björnstrand), the knight's sardonic squire, carefully and protectively shifts his body over his dagger, as he sleeps, awkwardly outstretched on a stony beach in the opening moments of the film. I notice his cat-like defiant hissings behind the Knight's back, after being given an order.
I think of the actors, all dead now.
And the Resident Fan Boy? He nodded off. Again.
So this is the kind of day I had.
I rose, with every intention of heading down to the coffee shop, but halfway through my preparations, I felt a familiar pain in the lower right half of my back. I had a kidney infection last summer that sidelined me for three weeks, and this was pretty well how it got started.
The Resident Fan Boy phoned our nurse-practitioner clinic when it opened at 8:30, and was told that we couldn't book in an appointment for three weeks, and all emergency appointments for the day were already taken.
We had been rather expecting this, so the RFB called the Urgent Care Clinic and was put on hold, the automated voice telling him that we were 19th in the queue.
We had been rather expecting this. He handed the phone to me, so I could listen to the muzak, while he went up to the laundry room.
About five or ten minutes later, *my* phone rang. It was the nurse-practitioner clinic, double-checking my problem, and telling me that I could have an appointment at 11:30. I rather suspect someone had checked my chart.
Saw the locum, accompanied by a fresh-faced student nurse, and she sent me across the street to LifeLab with a requisition for bloodwork. The technician told me, that since I didn't have an appointment, it would be a 50-minute wait. They saw me in 80 minutes. I'd been rather expecting this and had brought a book. Got through three chapters.
Walked home and nearly got run down in a lit crosswalk by an older gentleman driving an SUV. He, of course, had been watching left for traffic, while making a right turn, somehow failing to notice me, or the four other pedestrians crossing from the other side. Fortunately, I had been watching for him, because I rather expected this.
In case you missed it, the playwright Alan Bennett had an elderly unhoused lady living in his driveway in Camden (northeast of Regent's Park in London) for fifteen years between the mid-1970s and late 1980s. He wrote a play about it after her death, which starred Maggie Smith, and she took the same role in the film.
Younger daughter seemed quite taken with it, but sad. She said it reminded her of her grandmother, who, I hasten to add, was never unhoused, delusional, or hygienically challenged. Every now and then, younger daughter took the DVD out of the library, as she did this month.
Yesterday, I watched it for the first time since my mother died. (I'm sorry to keep bringing this up, but this is probably going to be a steady part of my life for a while, as I work through things.)
I sat through it, and despite the lack of parallels with my own mother's final years, I felt bludgeoned by the isolation, the vulnerability, and the piano-playing. I'm told that both my grandmother and mother were proficient pianists, but never heard them play, because both flatly refused to play for an audience.
Bennett was in the process of losing his own mother at the same time he was the unwilling host to the lady in the van. In the film, he's consulting with a doctor in Yorkshire, after his mother breaks her hip in her nursing home. The advice the doctor gives him is almost word-for-word what the emergency doctor told me when Demeter fractured her pelvis one week before she died.
I went out for an early evening walk to recover. When I came home, we watched the season finale of Call the Midwife, where Sister Monica Joan, in her nineties, is dying of kidney failure.
There's just no escaping it. The reminders are everywhere, like a milder form of PTSD.
Now Hear This is a PBS programme that I've been following for a couple of years with mild interest. It's a sort of musical travelogue in which conductor and violinist Scott Yoo, often accompanied by his wife, flutist Alice Dade, pursues a given musical theme - a composer, a genre, a geographical setting - and engages in less-than-spontaneous interactions with various experts. It's good fun and reasonably informative.
I'd deferred on the last episode of this season, "The Iceland Sound", because I didn't think it would be to my taste.
Oh gawd. It was ethereal. Much of the music reminded me of the majestic, soul-filling composition by Kjartan Sveinsson that closes out the credits of the film Echo (Bermál), the Icelandic film that made such a deep impression on me during the pandemic.
Two highlights of this episode: 1) an "impromptu" (nothing is impromptu in this series) jam on Icelandic dulcimers called langspil.
The music starts at about the 2:20 mark.For the first couple of decades of our respective lives, Double Leo Sister and I were so unalike, and so seldom seen together, that many people mildly acquainted with us were unaware that we were related.
This has changed steadily as we have aged and we're pretty similar now - at least in appearance and mannerisms, if nothing else.
About five weeks ago, in the wake of our mother's death, I handed an Ancestry DNA kit to my sister.
Shortly afterwards, she managed to break her humerus and tear her rotator cuff. (This was just what happened, not cause-and-effect.)
At any rate, I was pretty sure she had forgotten all about the test, and was preparing to remind her when she was down-Island, that if she really wasn't interested, she should give the kit back, because it's pretty damn expensive.
No, she said, she'd tested and furthermore, had heard back weeks ago.
No sign of her in my DNA matches, nor in those of my mother, whom I tested five years ago.
You're thinking of all those stories, aren't you? Those news items about people getting a DNA kit for Christmas and discovering, with a shock, that they're not related by blood to those they grew up with?
We should be so lucky. (I'm joking, but I think it crossed both our minds.)
Apparently, Ancestry now requires you to turn on match-sharing before it becomes visible to your matches, which, I guess, is a good idea, but it makes me wonder how many other matches I'm not seeing, because it's clear that most people take the tests to get the nebulous ethnicity estimate --"estimate" essentially means "guess", people -- and don't bother with the matches at all.
Anyway, my brother-in-law, the Jolly Not-So-Green Giant, figured out what icon to switch, and there she was: "Full Sister" - a slightly lower number on the centiMorgans she shares with Demeter, with nearly twice the segments that I have in the DNA match with Demeter. Also, her ethnicity estimate is quite different than mine, which happens to be way more similar to my mother's - interesting, but in the long-run, not that significant. Double Leo Sister has clearly inherited a different set of DNA from our shared ancestors; that's how DNA works -- it's more random that you might think.
Have I lost you yet?
I tried to talk about all this with my sister and brother-in-law, but like most people, they're really not into family history research, and they soon changed the subject. My sister is into Creative Anachronism and stained glass. My brother-in-law is into computers and fantasy novels. I'm not crazy about any of that.
I let them chat about these things with the Resident Fan Boy, while I started using my sister's shared matches to identify even more of our mother's and my shared matches.
They went home early.
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