As you finally get rid of them (Rid of them!)

It's the Ninth Day of Christmas, not the Second, but it's been about sixteen years since I last posted the lyrics to this Elvis Costello ditty (co-written with Paddy Moloney of The Chieftains), and it's been playing in my head a lot this holiday -- not that anyone got drunk, I hasten to add, and we finished the tourtières days ago:

I knew of two sisters whose name it was Christmas,

And one was named Dawn of course, the other one was named Eve.
I wonder if they grew up hating the season,
The good will that lasts til the Feast of St. Stephen

For that is the time to eat, drink, and be merry,
Til the beer is all spilled and the whiskey has flowed.
And the whole family tree you neglected to bury,
Are feeding their faces until they explode.

There'll be laughter and tears over Tia Marias,
Mixed up with that drink made from girders.
’Cause it's all we've got left as they draw their last breath,
Ah, it's nice for the kids, as you finally get rid of them,
In the St Stephen's Day Murders.

Uncle is garglin' a heart-breaking air,
While the babe in his arms pulls out all that remains of his hair.
And we're not drunk enough yet to dare criticise
The great big kipper tie he's about to baptise.

With his gin-flavoured whiskers and kisses of sherry,
His best Chrimbo shirt slung out over the shop.
While the lights from the Christmas tree blow up the telly,
His face closes in like an old cold pork chop.

And the carcass of the beast left over from the feast,
May still be found haunting the kitchen.
And there's life in it yet, we may live to regret,
When the ones that we poisoned stop twitchin'.

And in the middle of the celebrations

I had a landmark birthday recently. 

At least Double Leo Sister thought so.

My first inkling that I was in trouble came about six weeks beforehand, when I got a series of texts.  Double Leo Sister rarely texts, and when she does, she sends one after the other.  Usually about three or four come in, while I'm struggling to compose a tactful reply to the first one.

My sister is what you might call an impulsive person.  She probably pronounces it "spontaneous".  You can imagine how alarmed I was to be receiving a series of texts from my impulsive/spontaneous and frankly, volatile sibling a full six weeks ahead of my birthday, a birthday that, up until that second, I had regarded as being not particularly significant. 

She and her husband, the Jolly Not-So-Green Giant, wanted to visit for my "Birthday" this year.  Did I have plans?

I desperately wanted to say that yes, I would be out of the country.  However, DLS knows I'm visiting Demeter three times daily to facilitate meals and other homely things.  Swallowing panic, I texted tactfully but truthfully, that I'd expected they would be dropping by for Mother's Day, which roughly coincides with younger daughter's birthday.  (Younger daughter adores her aunt and uncle.)  Couldn't we celebrate my birthday in conjunction with those special days?

DLS responded:  "We can probably do both."  Following immediately with "Gonna do your birthday this year." It's true that they haven't "done" my birthday since long before we went to Ottawa.  I've grown to depend on it.

With a sinking heart, I forwarded the texts to elder daughter in Britain, who also adores her aunt and uncle, but knows the reasons behind my trepidation and despair.  

I mulled over this in some misery for a day or so.  I like my birthday.  It's my day, and way too often over the years, it's been hijacked by the proximity of both daughters' birthdays.  It's a day which, in a best-case scenario, is a quiet one, spent doing things I like to do - not picking my way across the emotional minefield of my sister's feelings.

I tried, once again, to get this across to my sister by text (leaving out the bit about emotional minefields).  I had to try, at least.  Once again, I suggested a joint birthday celebration that could take in younger daughter's birthday, and pointed out that there were few days around my own birthday that weren't booked by the Resident Fan Boy for his church stuff.

I suppose I could have predicted the response, which arrived while the RFB and I were Skyping with elder daughter in London.  The gist of the text was DLS's impression that she and her family were only welcome at younger daughter's birthday.

Unfortunately, this was rather true, but it wouldn't do to admit it.  The RFB and elder daughter coached me through a response, and I recalled the advice of the late American linguist Suzette Haden Elgin, who wrote a series entitled The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense - in particular, a key tip:  "Ignore the bait."  (I.E., the imbedded statement:  "We are not welcome.")

With no apology, I simply texted back with a choice of two dates - after consulting both the calendar and The Resident Fan Boy.

This worked, after a fashion, and I didn't hear from DLS for several weeks, which begged the question:  Why was my "spontaneous" sister planning this visit so far ahead?  Most unlike her.

Demeter had an answer.  DLS and JN-S-GG had found a "special" gift for my "special" birthday, and they were, apparently, very excited about it.

I wasn't.  My sister is a fan of grand gestures, many of which have meaning only to her, but she expects a rapturous and grateful response.  If I don't deliver, things get ugly.

After over a month of apprehension - although I did get my quiet birthday - their van drew up, and they got out bearing a large, flat, rectangular box, decorated with layers of coloured tissue paper.

I thought it might be one of my sister's stained-glass creations, difficult to find a place for, but doable, and rather pretty.  With some effort, I opened the box with appropriate ceremony, casting surreptitious and pleading glances at the Resident Fan Boy, who cleverly avoided them.

And then I summoned all my powers of feigning enthusiasm for -- whatever it was.  It defied description, but I'll try: 

Big. Rectangular.  Very dark brown.  It looks like a trophy, with photos sealed behind a sort of plexiglass skin.  The largest of the photos is the famous shot of the Beatles crossing Abbey Road.  Below are two small snaps of the Beatles waiting to cross Abbey Road.  At the bottom, is a small silver plaque or sticker bearing the songs that make up the Abbey Road album.

Well, it certainly was a surprise.

I'm fond of the Beatles, but Abbey Road isn't even my favourite Beatles album.  (That would be Rubber Soul, but I don't want a commemorative plaque of that, either.)

And my sister and her husband merrily hung this thing on my living room wall, exclaiming over it, while I did my level best to not betray how baffled I was.  We made it through the weekend, then the RFB and I put a heavy-duty hook on our bedroom wall (the thing would yank most hooks out of the wall), and every time they come to town, we pull the plaque out of its hiding place and hang it up.

We discovered afterwards that they got this in a charity auction.  (There was a receipt in the decorated box.) They paid $521.81 for it.

On the days I have to look at it; I comfort myself by thinking of all that money that went to a hospital.  Then I go and look at other things, until my bewilderment abates.

Difficult December people

There have been a number of key December birthdays, in my family -- none of whom are living now.  It occurred to me this morning that my grandmother would have 120 years old today.

Heavens, she would have been annoyed!  Towards the end of her long life, she was getting weary of living, as piece by piece, like books being removed from a shelf, the things she enjoyed were taken from her: reading, knitting, music...

Mind you, my other grandmother would have been a bit over 123 years, had she lived to today, but I never knew her.  It's odd, thinking how people I actually knew, who were parts of my life, would be impossibly old now.  It's even worse for the Resident Fan Boy, whose parents were well advanced in age by the time he was born.  My late father-in-law, another December birthday would be 111.  My father, also born in December, would be well into his nineties.

Evocations of these difficult December people glow like the Christmas lights, not bright enough to read by, but strong enough to draw me to a standstill.

The summer of the fire signs

I must have looked upset, because a guy wandered over from his gang of friends clustered around an illegal beach fire and offered me a joint.

It was sunset on an August evening fourteen years ago, and I was perched on the rocks below Dallas Road, weeping in the aftermath of what I came to call The Big Blowout, when my sister, the Double Leo, ripped into me over a chance remark about a slice of pizza in front of my bewildered and terrified daughters, then aged ten and six, and her three-year-old son.

It wasn't about the pizza, of course. I sat on my stony seat (literally - I hadn't accepted the kind offer of a toke), gazing out at the darkening Juan de Fuca Strait, with that ghastly feeling you have when you know the injury is serious, and you don't know how to staunch the bleeding.

I thought about the years of pussy-footing, of being cowed and intimidated, and I wearily decided that I couldn't sustain a lifetime of emotionally supporting my daughters (particularly one on the autism spectrum), my aging mother, and use up my precious empathy reserves on my high-maintenance sister.

This is by way of an explanation for the following tale of tizziness, because the scenario emerging this summer of 2016 was eerily and ominously similar to that of 2002: my sister and her family turning up unexpectedly and moving into the guest suite of my mother's condo for a few perilous days.  Back then, in the growing shadow of the Olympic Mountains, I came to the conclusion that my sister and I can't be under the same roof for more than twenty-four hours, not without a mis-step on the minefield that is my sister's psyche.

Perhaps it was fortuitous that fourteen years later I was impulsively treating myself to lunch at Il Terrazzo after beginning art lessons offered by a friend.  I ate a lovely risotto in the cool patio of my favourite restaurant in Victoria, then, lugging bags of art supplies, dropped by a stationer's to pick up birthday cards for the various fire signs in my life.  I was rather dreading a two-day visit to my mother by my sister and her family scheduled for the following week, inadvertently overlapping with my stay, and had quietly made arrangements with my art teacher friend to stay in her basement for two nights, for the reasons described above.  My friend had made it clear that she would need plenty of notice.

I came home in the mid-afternoon, worn out.  Demeter was out for most of the day for a special meeting of her book club, but her walker, which she uses for ferrying laundry downstairs, was planted in the hallway, laden with towels and sheets.  Had I not been so tired,  I might have wondered more about this, but I squeezed past, sank into a chair, and drifted in and out of a doze.

I was awake and finishing something on my laptop when Demeter returned and informed me that Double Leo Sister and her family were turning up that evening and staying for three days.  My niece had picked up some sort of bug which involved symptoms that didn't adapt well to a campsite.

I suggested my giving up the spare room, and when my mother vigorously refused, stifled my panic and offered to set up the guest suite, texting the Resident Fan Boy in Hades, who advised me to get out.  He remembers 2002 all too well.

I was scheduled to meet my friend the Choir Singer at a folk concert in Beacon Hill Park that evening.  Double-Leo Sister et famille hadn't shown up when Choir Singer picked me up and, seeing my agitation, took me for ice cream therapy before proceeding to the Cameron Band Shell.  While a Stevie-Nicks/Lindsay-Buckingham-type duo from Sooke sang standards, I retreated to the springy plantations near the public washrooms, and in desperation, called the hostess of our largely fallen-through house-sit, who had offered their guest-room at any time.

The offer was still good. Ironically, she's a Leo, too.

I returned to the bench, and vacillating between relief and trepidation, enjoyed the rest of the concert. Choir Singer friend drove me to the empty apartment.  Evidently the unexpected guests had arrived and gone out to dinner with Demeter.  My friend waited while I threw all my belongings into my suitcase and hastily scribbled a note:  I've done the math:  Four people in the guest suite - one bathroom; two people in the apartment - two bathrooms. . . .

Of course, Demeter walked in, just as I was wheeling my suitcase towards the door.  As expected, she looked disappointed and weary. Jolly-Not-Green-Giant-Brother-in-Law (another fire sign -- he's an Aries) soon followed, declaring that my evacuation was unnecessary, along with my niece (another fire sign) and nephew (an earth sign, like me, poor kid).  Double Leo Sister was downstairs in the guest suite, but we kept missing each other in the running between floors.  I pleaded that Choir Singer Friend was waiting to drive me, pointed out that I would be back in the daytime, and fled to the guest room of yet another Leo where I spent the next three nights, being very polite.

I also spent the next three days being very polite -- and making myself scarce whenever possible.

In short, I kept careful control of how much time I spent with anyone.  When you're surrounded by control freaks (and fire signs are, no matter how you feel about astrology), fences are the best defence.

Still waiting for this summer to ease up. What do you suppose my chances are?

Another wrinkle

Yesterday morning I woke early, after a late night, unwilling to get up and dress just yet, but not wanting to wake my husband.  I padded down to the living room to retrieve my laptop, because I've been deliberately keeping it downstairs to discourage myself from going online before the day has properly begun.

However,  I had gone to sleep with the briefly glimpsed corner of a mystery on my mind.  It seems that the Disney corporation will be attempting to bring A Wrinkle in Time to the big screen.  There have been attempts before, including an adaptation to the small screen, an unsatisfactory televised version.  I'm wondering if a satisfactory version is possible, but I have a daughter living on the autistic spectrum, and thus have acquired an appreciation for movies, television specials, and graphic novels based on classics, so I tried to find out a little bit more.

In doing so, I noticed a sentence fragment in a Google search just before I went to bed, something about her son's death in 1999.  Madeleine L'Engle herself died in 2007, but I do not ever recall her writing about Bion Franklin's death; she devoted nearly a whole book to the final year of her husband Hugh. It was late, and I was working on something else, so I set my puzzlement aside for the morning.

With the covers over my head to block the dimmed light from the screen from the sleeping Resident Fan Boy,  I went back to the link --- and learned that Bion Franklin had died in his forties from the effects of alcoholism.  Bion?  The little boy who was the model for Charles Wallace Murry and Rob Austin?  I entered a few more search terms and stumbled on a 2004 New Yorker article, which said, among many other things, that Bion and his adopted sister Maria loathed the cycle of books about the Austin family, and that L'Engle's children and grandchildren alike detest L'Engle's Crosswick Journals series, especially Two-Part Invention which was L'Engle's memoir about her marriage to actor Hugh Franklin. Hugh Franklin drank quite a bit and had at least two extra-marital affairs.

Their eldest child Josephine read it and apparently thought: Who the hell is she talking about?

The New Yorker article, which has become quite notorious amongst L'Engle fans and which somehow I'd managed to miss, is not a hatchet-job.  It also reflects the love L'Engle's family had for her along with the exasperation.  But I, huddled under the covers with my glowing laptop, was fighting back my shock and a sense of loss.  I've read everything L'Engle wrote, with the possible exception of her poetry.  I grew up with the four books that begin with A Wrinkle in Time, and of course, I loved the Austin books which were about the sort of family I'd never had.  It turns out that L'Engle may not have have had that sort of family either.  The Crosswick Journals were the sort of books to which I'd turn again and again for comfort, wisdom and perspective.

As the shock wore off, an odd sense of relief took over.  I felt consoled by all this dysfunction somehow, and besides, I recognized something about her children's feelings -- anger, bewilderment, and the sense of having no say in the story.  It was the same feeling I had when I read the biographical essay featured in my father's order of service.  I wonder if they too had the cold sweat when they read the matriarch's version of their family?  Coincidentally, Alan Jones, L'Engle's ex-son-in-law, was the dean of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco when my dad's service was held there.  Possibly he still is.  Speaking of L'Engle, he refers to the "confirmed construction of the self by means of narrative" which could also be a charitable way of describing the legend my father built up to support his life in California.

I don't know what I'll find now when I revisit L'Engle's books, particularly the Crosswick Journals, but I've been rereading many of my favourite books this past year (no L'Engle ones, as it happens), and I'm rediscovering that no book will ever be the same, anyway. That's probably true of most things.

Auntie bellum

She was a lady of the mid-twentieth century whose demise was reported the way we get the news in these days of the early twenty-first century.  The Resident Fan Boy got a text via his cousin's husband and relayed the message to me by email.  I pulled up a photo from my laptop and posted it on Facebook: an elegant woman with a chignon and a choker of pearls, sitting next to elder daughter when she was two, twenty years ago.  That was just before she and her husband, my husband's paternal uncle, made the move from Seattle to San Diego.

I haven't seen her since, although we corresponded by the old-fashioned means of letters.  I used to hand-write them until she made a sly joke about the "elegant spider that uses your note-paper".  After that, I typed, then word-processed.  She always responded in writing, never taking on the tiresome nuisances of a computer.

Until three years ago, when she stopped answering, which is when I saw the writing on the wall, so to speak.  I continued to send a card every year, trying always to enclose a letter, because I think it's when she could no longer send them herself that she probably needed them most.

It's not that we were particularly close, but we were both in-laws in a family that didn't welcome outsiders, and although we never discussed the slights suffered under our respective mothers-in-law, I like to think the underlying understanding was there, unspoken as it was.

And now she's left, closing the gate behind her with a discreet metallic click, leaving no footprints and taking with her all the questions I never dared ask.  I suspect the answers would have been, like her, enigmatic.

A genealogical jolt

Outside, the snow is clinging to the branches of the tree like blobs of meringue.  You can hear the occasional soggy plop as a cold, wet ball gives into gravity.  I've been on the receiving end a couple of times over the past thirty-six hours.  They're heavier than you think and your shoulders jolt upwards as the snowball bears down.

I've had a genealogical jolt today.  I've been working my way through the London Electoral Registers (1832-1965), checking which of my London ancestors had enough property to vote in the nineteenth century.  An odd pang of pride has been the appearance of the names of two of my great-grandmothers and a couple of those of the Resident Fan Boy as suffrage was extended to "selected women over 30" in 1918.

However, as is the usual case, my checking through the data has led to a re-examination of some parish records -- and to the discovery of a third marriage for one of my great-great-great-great-grandmothers and the realization that this third marriage was to another great-great-great-great-grandfather.  That is, a different 4xgreat-grandfather than the one she married the first time.

Which seems to indicate that a pair of my great-great-great-grandparents were step-siblings.

As far as I can tell, this wasn't illegal in 1813 and isn't illegal now.  They didn't even grow up together, as their respective parents were well into middle age when they found each other.

Still, it's a bit like a thick wet smack on the top of my head.

The Silence is Rest

My half-brother was found dead in his fetid apartment in England today. He had been dead for several days. I never met him; he did not learn of my existence until seven years ago. I only spoke to him during two endless long-distance phone-calls where I mostly listened in helpless bewilderment to his incoherent grief, rage and despair.

But blood goes deep. Blood goes beyond knowledge. I am diminished by his loss, the current loss and the ongoing loss that was the final two decades of his life.

This isn't why I haven't written for nearly two months. It is why I have little to write today. I will endeavour to do better.

The night I met my cousin's girlfriend

Okay, I'm a little terrified. I joined NaBloPoMo for the month of February, just to see if I can do it. Jaywalker tried it for November and damn near made it except she managed to get herself hospitalized at the very end. She managed 30 posts for the month, so I think she should get credit. I chose February because a) it's the shortest month; b)it's not a leap year so I only need do 28 posts; and c) it's usually a kind of limbo month, so I'm counting on time for reflective blogging, as opposed to frantically blogging on late-breaking news. (And no hospitalization.)

Yesterday, elder daughter and I decided to take in Milk. Resident Fan Boy didn't particularly want to go. He has a knee-jerk reaction to Sean Penn -- also an irrational dislike of Leonardo Dicaprio who wasn't in the movie but is also another fine actor that my husband dislikes for vague reasons of his own. Elder daughter did, so this worked out well. The long walk in and out of town (bus strike is "over", but no buses until the 9th) provided us with chatting time we haven't really had since she started walking to school unaccompanied.

I'd seen the original documentary The Times of Harvey Milk several times, as it was shown repeatedly on PBS in the eighties and nineties. The documentary won an Academy Award and is one of those films that has stayed with me over the years. I particularly remember the candid, lively, articulate and expressive interviews of those from Harvey Milk's circle. The film Milk openly acknowledges its debt to the documentary, and it seems to capture the feel of the era, although someone living in San Francisco at the time would probably be a better judge of this.

I had family living in the Bay Area in the seventies. Although at the time I didn't know it, my late father was living in Alameda with his last wife. He was a very conservative fellow, so I can't imagine his being thrilled about the idea of gay rights, but he would not have condoned the shooting of Harvey Milk and Mayor Moscone. I remember his sitting bolt upright in his bed with a cry of horror when the news about Robert Kennedy's assassination came over the radio. We had been treated to a number of anti-Kennedy diatribes in the lead-up to the 1968 US election, which must have been a particular irritation to my very liberal mother. I was very young and asked him why he was so upset, if he didn't like the Kennedys. "Yes, but I don't want him shot!" he replied vehemently. It was an important distinction for a young girl to hear, and one of his better fathering moments.

Also living in San Mateo was my equally conservative maternal aunt. Some years after Milk and Muscone's murders, I went to San Francisco to attend a drama workshop. My aunt picked me up at the airport and immediately launched into a litany of her latest worries over one of my cousins who had, according to my aunt, embraced lesbianism. Now, I always took things my aunt said with several grains of salt. One of her more memorable revelations was that the students who threw themselves off the tower at Stanford University were invariably Jewish, driven over the edge by their pushy parents. So I listened to this latest outburst with some skepticism. My cousin had recently introduced a woman to her parents, her eyes glowing with excitement and pride, "just as if she were introducing a boyfriend!" My aunt was clearly overwrought.

The demands and logistics of getting into the University of San Francisco by bus from San Mateo on a daily basis to attend an intense workshop put this from my mind until my cousin contacted me and offered to take me to a coffee house south of Market. Something niggled at the edge of my mind about the direction in which we were headed, but I dismissed it. She picked me up with a couple of friends, including a Danish girl who looked at the passing scenery in the fading light, and remarked, "This looks like a happening place." I could see my cousin and her friend smothering giggles in the front seat.

It was dark when we arrived and we took our places with several other friends of my cousin at one of the round tables dotting the coffee house. My cousin passed around photos of her recent trip to the Galapagos, and I looked around, struggling with the strange feeling that we were in some sort of sanctuary. The people around the tables seemed to lean in toward the centre, as if this were a pool of safe light with the dark pressing in from the outside.

The songwriter we had come to hear was managed by my cousin's controversial new friend. I don't remember much about the singer; she was one of those cabaret-type of performers, probably more Dory Previn than Tori Amos. It was pleasant enough; we applauded and as we were gathering our things, one of our table-mates hugged my cousin and grinned at me: "You should have been here at Christmas; everyone wore mistletoe around their hips!" As I was taking in the implications of this remark, smiling politely if somewhat dazedly, she continued: "I love to make her blush..."

Then the singer's manager walked up, and my cousin introduced her, turning to me with her eyes aglow and face flushed with excitement and pride --- just as if she were introducing a boyfriend...