Feb 10, 2012
A previous ornithological post click drew gratifying response, so I am bringing you another bird. I owe this one to my sister Luli, who suffers, as I do, from bizarre and frequently scatological images.
This blog is six months old, and I have written twenty-five posts, most of them focused on me. Like many people, I find myself fascinating. I love stories with rich detail, and the stories I know best are my own. I could happily fill a blog post with photos of my dog, my cat, the rooms of my house, and my amateurish attempts at container gardening, frequently wrecked by squirrels.
THE SQUIRRELS TOOK MY THYME
If I felt free to write about Amanda – her troubles and triumphs, the funny or maddening things she does – I would have a goldmine. Since I want to protect her privacy, instead I mine the past.
I think I’m far enough along in life to have found the proper balance between smugness and self-loathing, but while writing my previous post, about the cute little rich girl misbehaving on the train home from prep school click , I had a severe attack of the latter. ‘Who gives a shit?’ I thought.
I’m not planning to stop writing the blog. It is excellent practice, and finding the pictures is really fun. The weekly deadline maintains order and discipline in my otherwise ad lib life. While the thought of reading all day with cat and cookies has its appeal, I know from experience that sloth bums me out. I could turn back to my novel, but I’m still avoiding that. It has scared me off by being too close to my own life, and the revision I have in mind is daunting – it requires me to eliminate the main character.
Before I began The Feminist Grandma I consulted with Sandra, whose blog frequently highlights other activists and writers. click She suggested that I sometimes feature subjects other than myself, and I think it’s time to do that. Otherwise The Feminist Grandma will become The Blog Bird, which flies in constantly diminishing circles until it disappears into its own asshole.
THE BLOG BIRD (WITH APOLOGIES TO THE MAGNIFICENT SANDHILL CRANE)
Feb 3, 2012
“Everybody loves the sound of a train in the distance; everybody thinks it’s true.” (Paul Simon – Train in the Distance)
The whistle calls, “We’re on our way, we’re leaving you behind.” The roar of the wheels on the rails comes closer, louder, more urgent, and then fades away, promising new places, new romance.
I love trains. When I was at boarding school in Andover, Massachusetts, I took two trains home to Ann Arbor – Boston to Albany, Albany to Detroit. It was Christmas, and the Boston train was filled with kids going home from prep schools and colleges. We took over the club car with our guitars, pocket flasks, and bags of sandwiches and cake. From Boston to Albany it was the great traveling Honey Hunt.
At Abbot Academy in the sixties there wasn’t a lot of boyfriend activity. Twice a week we could walk in pairs to town, so if we weren’t too scared of getting caught we could meet a local boyfriend. On Sunday afternoons after church we could have a caller in the parlor. At dances with boys’ prep schools we could pair up with a boyfriend if we had one, or we could love the one we were with. “Love” meant dancing as close as we could get away with, or sneaking off to make out behind the bushes.
So sex was hard to find. Of course there must have been lesbians, but I was never aware of them. Though a few of the teachers were long-time housemates, lesbian love seemed so exotic and unreal. Surely these dowdy spinsters weren’t involved. The teachers were in the same category as parents and other impossibly old people: we shielded our minds from any thoughts of their sex lives.
At the same time, we were obsessed with sex and romance. I had barely been kissed, but I was a virgin with aspirations – the only girl in the tenth grade dorm who admitted she wanted to get laid, the expert in sex who told the others everything I had learned (from books) about free love.
I had two boyfriends: Charles, a lanky senior at a progressive prep school in Vermont, and Toby, a pudgy Harvard sophomore. Until we moved from Cambridge to Ann Arbor I could see them on holidays – Charles and I went to a street dance in Boston, Toby took me to a night club. But in boarding school the point of a boyfriend was letters – after lunch we crowded around the mail slots hoping for something other than a letter from our mother. Both Charles and Toby obliged.
With a love affair that was essentially epistolary, we could have as many boyfriends as we wanted, or could get. So I sat in the club car on the train from Boston, singing harmony and hoping for romance.
Jamie McPherson* went to Groton. He was suave and preppy, with tousled hair and soulful eyes.
JAMIE WAS CUTER
When we learned that we were both going on to Detroit, we were a natural pair. He was joining a friend for the two hour layover in Albany; so we agreed we’d find each other in the club car on the Detroit train.
Union Station in Albany was like a smaller Grand Central: vaulted ceiling, crowds of strangers. No one knew me – I could be whoever I wanted. I loved to try on characters and lives. Once in a restaurant I pretended I was a French student and spoke no English. On a plane I presented myself as a thirty-year-old mother of three; this struck me as glamorous. It was modeled on my sister-in-law Esther, whom I adored.
I bought a ticket for a couchette for $11 and then wandered around with an ice cream cone, people-watching. When no one spoke to me and gave me a chance for role play, I sat in the waiting room with my novel, happy to know I had a date for the night train.
ALBANY UNION STATION
Jamie and I found each other, and went on to the dining car. White tablecloths, stemmed glasses, flowers, and the black night with flashes of light. The waiter was smiling and benevolent, but we didn’t have the nerve to order a drink. Though I wanted a steak, I had a salad. If Jamie saw how I liked to eat, he might think I was fat. Coffee was sophisticated so we ordered two demitasses, but barely drank it, and then made our way through the swaying cars to my couchette.
The couchette was a child’s delight. The seat unfolded into a narrow bed under a big window; the sink unhooked from the wall to cover the toilet. The sleeping car porter had unfolded and made up the bed. We explored all the cunning devices, and then lay on top of the blanket and began to explore each other.
I had a problem. Of course I wanted to go all the way – wasn’t I a proponent of free love? Jamie was as cute as they come, and I could lose my virginity on the night train! But I had my period. I had to tell him before he got past my bra, but then he would think that I thought that he thought…oh dear.
Somehow I told him, and we both agreed we would simply have to stop above the waist. If he had heard of fellatio, he didn’t have the nerve to ask me. So we cuddled and kissed, and for me it was True Love. He’d never seen a bra in full light so I let him examine mine. I showed him how a tampon worked, though I didn’t demonstrate on myself. We tried to sleep for a while, tightly spooned, but the bed was too narrow, and eventually he went back to his coach seat.
I woke in the middle of the night in Canada, warm in my bed, and watched the tall pines rushing past, the snow lit by moonlight. Alone, I could savor every word and kiss and touch, and dream of what would come.
I didn’t see Jamie in the morning, and he was going back to school earlier than I. Maybe there would be a letter when I got back to Abbot. My father met me in Detroit, and we drove to Ann Arbor. I didn’t know a soul there; we had moved from Cambridge just before school started, so I spent a lonely Christmas with my annoying family, waiting for my real life to begin again.
CLUB CAR DINING CAR
After a long three weeks I was on the train again, but this time the club car was full of boring businessmen, so I ordered a Coke and settled in with a novel. A Creep sat down next to me, a balding blonde with a red face and a gray suit. He bought me dinner and two rum and sodas, then followed me to my couchette. I opened the door, slipped inside and closed it securely behind me. I have a clear image of him standing stunned, open-mouthed – but it must be an imaginary memory
I spent the night dreaming, awake and asleep, of Jamie. In the morning I dressed in jeans and a sweater, and went back to the dining car for breakfast The waiter brought me water, offered coffee, and said, “Where’s your friend?” And so completely had I obliterated the Creep from my thoughts, so entirely had my dreams been filled with Jamie, that I said, “Oh, he’s not on this train, he’s traveling tomorrow.”.
Back at school I waited for a letter from him – a week, two weeks – and then it came, on high class cream-colored notepaper, black ink, a small clear script. “I’m glad I met a girl like you.” I puzzled over that line like a biblical scholar, trying to wring from it some pledge. I consulted with my friends – were they words of love or was he calling me a slut? I clung to his closing: Love, Jamie. I wrote him back, pages and pages of witty stories of my Christmas at home, full of scorn for my parents and stupid teachers, warm accounts of after hours revels in the dorm, and probably a bit of poetry.
I never heard from him again. It was a romance as beautiful and brief as a bubble. Charles and Toby’s letters kept coming, and there were more dances, more trains. Jamie was a game, Charles and Toby were games. Men only ceased to be a game when I began raising a son, and realized that these aliens beings were simply human.
I took a train from Jacksonville to New York a few years ago – a nightmare of crying babies, a seat designed to prevent sleep, and a club car full of drunken middle-aged people joking about penis size. Trains aren’t what they used to be, but then, neither am I.
*Fake name of course
Jan 27, 2012
“That’s vulgar,” my mother would say. Oh. Well then. That settled it; I wouldn’t dream of doing anything vulgar.
My mother died when I was twenty-three, before we had fully recovered from my adolescence. I grope in the dark to understand her. Much of what I think I know is probably wrong.
I was reminiscing with my sister-in-law, Esther. “And what’s wrong with vulgar?” she said. “It just means common.” Though I was past fifty, and had long since shattered every one of Mother’s taboos, I had never questioned that vulgarity was shameful. It was a powerful moment, and I began thinking of all the things that Mother considered vulgar.
Dangling earrings. Pants worn with high heels. Bikinis. Clashing colors. Chartreuse. Fuchsia. I was in 7th grade when I got my first sexy bathing suit: an orange tank with broad fuchsia stripes up the sides. Everyone knew orange and pink clashed, as did red and pink, green and blue. I have to assume I chose the bathing suit, and I admire Mother for buying it. She was encouraging autonomy. Or maybe she was just tired.
DANGLING EARRINGS ON VULGAR RED LACE
The word Mom. In 1955 Phillip Wylie coined the term momism in Generation of Vipers, an astonishingly misogynistic (and extremely popular) book. Mother absorbed his loathing, and I can see her mouth stretched in an exaggerated O as she spoke the word Mom with contempt. As children we called her Mummy, nicely British, therefore not vulgar. (My father was an extreme anglophile.)
New York accents, nasal voices, loud female voices, crude language. “Gentle voices,” my father would say, if Luli and I spoke too loudly, and he frequently spoke of Esther’s melodious voice. I never heard “shit” until I was 12, and was astounded some years later when I realized Mother knew the word.
Carmen Miranda, Las Vegas, blondes. Ginger Rogers was only saved from vulgarity by her elegant pairing with Fred Astaire.
Fried foods, chewing gum. “It’s like a cow chewing her cud.” And Mother would do a wonderful cud-chewing imitation.
Fat women in stretch pants. Fat women. Fat. My father felt fat women were a personal insult, as they apparently did not care to attract him. My sister Luli says Mother was terrified of becoming fat. Luli was fat for many years, distressing my father, as she was his favorite.
I learned the concept so well I can apply it to things my mother never mentioned. Tap dancing is vulgar (except for Fred Astaire); ballet is not. Why weren’t Broadway musicals vulgar, full of flashy colors and blondes? Probably because my mother and father enjoyed going to an evening of dinner and theater in the city.
It’s hard to know where my father’s thoughts ended and my mother’s began. The only subject on which I know they disagreed was Eleanor Roosevelt. My mother admired her; my father dismissed her. She was homely, and her voice was horrid.
Mother was the daughter of a distinguished professor, whose specialty was southern agricultural history. Professors were respected, but ill-paid, and her mother taught piano. Mother grew up in the south, went to college at George Washington, and belonged to Kappa Delta. She dropped out after her junior year to marry my father, a Jew from New York. He was six years older than she.
Dad was ashamed and contemptuous of his father, but he was proud of his mother. His father was an entrepreneurial merchant whose business failed, a man full of life and bonhomie. Her family were sugar barons in Colombia, where she was raised rich and sent to a Jewish boarding school in London.
I believe Dad was quite young when he began denying he was Jewish. He dropped his father’s name and took his mother’s, changing his surname from Jacobs to Eder. He was over 90 when he told me my mother’s parents didn’t like him because he was Jewish. It was the first time I had ever heard him acknowledge it.
My father was successful as an international corporate lawyer, and my parents lived the high life in South America and Long Island. But Esther once described my father as a man standing outside a beautiful house, with his nose pressed against the window.
I think my mother also felt like an outsider. Yearning to be not just respectable, but aristocratic, my parents had to guard against any taint of the vulgar.
I try to find a common thread in the things my mother identified as vulgar. Anything flagrantly sexual was certainly vulgar. Anything which suggested Jewish. Anything from poor southern culture, which would include anything Black.
The other day in Cordele, Georgia I met a woman in the motel breakfast buffet. She was a very fat woman, with bleached blonde hair. She told me she is raising five foster children – a 17-year-old whom she’s had from birth, two three-year-olds, and two four-year-olds. They live out in the country, so there’s plenty of room to play. She loves having foster children. Her face glowed as she talked of them.
She, her husband and some in-laws were on their way from Michigan to Florida to take a Caribbean cruise, and she was very excited. I asked if the children were in respite care. “Oh no, my daughter and her husband are keeping them.”
My mother would consider modern-day cruises vulgar, though ocean crossings in the grand style of the first half of the twentieth century were fine. Yet Mother valued kindness above all. Would she see past the stretch jeans, the dyed hair, to the generous heart and patient spirit of this woman? I like to think she would.
MOTHER
Jan 20, 2012
When I was in college everyone took a personality test. We ridiculed the question that asked whether you preferred carrots raw or cooked, and assumed it was about sex (wasn’t everything?)
COOKED OR CRUNCHY?
But I also remember being asked to agree/disagree with statements such as “Success in life is largely a matter of luck” and “I can control my destiny.” As I understand it, your answer to these indicates your sense of efficacy and likelihood of success. If you think life is largely a matter of luck, you’re out of luck.
But so much of life is determined by luck. You walk along happily for awhile, doing whatever it is you do, and then life comes along and snatches the rug out from under you. The personal calamities: dread disease, business failure, loss of a loved one. The public calamities: hurricane, riot, economic collapse. Any of these will knock you flat.
Wise advisors, such as self-help books and grandmas, say that though you can’t control what happens to you, you can control your response. While some are defeated by fortune, others rally and stand up again, like one of those little dolls with a rounded, weighted bottom. No matter how many times you knock it over, it pops right back up.
So where do we get our optimism, the courage to fail, the will to keep trying? I say pluck is also a product of luck. If we are very fortunate perhaps we are born resilient, but I think for most it is nurture, not nature. And our luck resides in the circumstances of our birth.
I have an image of babies, each set at the beginning of a path. On every path there are hurdles. On some paths there are small, regularly spaced hurdles, and at each early hurdle, hands reaching out to help the child clear the bar, voices raised in praise when she does. On other paths the hurdles are high as a house, and the child is alone. Some rare few of these children – and who knows the source of their strength? – will clamber over and move on, but many more will be defeated.
PERDITA FELICIEN AND DAWN HARPER
I used to ask my law students why the homeless victims of hurricanes receive assistance and compassion, while the world scorns the chronically homeless, whose lives were blown awry by abuse, war, illness. And they would reply that the chronically homeless people were responsible for their own situation, and should help themselves. Yet the students knew very well that for some people the deck is stacked from the beginning.
Puzzling over their need to blame the victim, I thought it was hard for them to acknowledge the role of luck in their own success. They wanted to have control. And if they believed they had not earned their many advantages, they would feel guilty. Even more, it was important to believe that the losers had brought their troubles on themselves. Otherwise, what was to prevent the same thing from happening to them?
I’ve had a lovely life, full of friends and lovers, a late and happy marriage, interesting work, adventures, travel, and even economic security. The primary reason is that I’ve been lucky. Of course I’ve met my share of hurdles, and worked hard, but I was lucky to be born into a family that blessed me with enthusiasm, optimism and resilience as well as material well-being.
There were plenty of weeds in the family garden – alcoholism, tyranny, petty snobbery. For me they were hidden by the flowers. My parents assumed I would succeed in school and in life. My father was an optimist until the day he died. He was also overbearing, but because I was the last child, I wasn’t the star of his dreams, which meant I had room to move. My mother was gloomy but loving, and I was very close to her. They were both voracious readers. They had more than enough money, and happily they valued education and experience over stuff, so we had excellent schooling, travel and adventure in our lives.
As one of the lucky ones, I hope to repay my debt to fortune with compassion and appreciation. I should keep my heart open to the one who has not been lucky. I can’t walk a mile in her shoes – she’s wearing them, and only she knows how they hobble, where they pinch. But I should meet her where she is, and help where I can.
And I should appreciate good luck while I have it; it will certainly come and go. I can’t live looking over my shoulder for that figure that will snatch the rug out from under me, but I can rejoice when life is going well. Denise Levertov said it as well as it can be said:
Of Being
I know this happiness
is provisional:
The looming presences –
great suffering, great fear –
withdraw only
into peripheral vision:
but ineluctable this shimmering
of wind in the blue leaves:
this flood of stillness
widening the lake of sky:
this need to dance,
this need to kneel:
this mystery.
in Breathing the Water (1987)
click
Jan 13, 2012
(I promised you a post on The Fairy Queen, but the Fairy Queen was shy)
North of Macon, in the Oconee National Forest, the road to Sue’s cabin is a long drive, with towns and turns that fill a page of directions. At four o’clock one spring morning I loaded Oyster and Chilidog into the back of my Honda wagon and headed up the interstate. Driving in the dark with no landmarks but the exit signs, no traffic but the trucks, the time and distance passed quickly, and the sunrise on my right was soft and clear. We drove up I-75 and I-16 and over many country roads to Sue’s cabin.
OYSTER AND I; CHILIDOG
The wiggling and whining began when we reached the old bridge over Murder Creek, rusting iron and old wooden planks that made the Honda rattle. As soon as I parked at the end of Sue’s drive and opened the tailgate, the dogs burst out of the car, and Putnam tore up the hill, barking, to meet them. Then there was ass-sniffing and nose-touching, circling and chasing until they were all satisfied they knew each other.
SUE AND PUTNAM
The cabin is well below the road, and the unpaved driveway descends steeply, then rises to a clearing. Fog or rain turns the Georgia clay to slick mud, trapping the cars, so we always walk in. We trudged up and down the hill, mercifully dry on a cool sunny day, lugging water jugs and food.
Every trip to the cabin is a new adventure. It began as a pine box with a loft, beautifully crafted by Emery, an old man who works alone. The boards run diagonally up to the high ceiling, the wood gleaming yellow. In the twenty years since he built the basic box and dug the hole for the outhouse, he has added a screened front porch, and an open deck on the back and side. At each visit there are new souvenirs on the pine walls and wooden shelves: a tile with a hand-painted picture of the cabin, a turtle shell, a deer skull.
Sue has ten acres, and watches with dread as other tracts of land are cleared and sold off in large lots. But it’s almost twenty years since she built the cabin, and in that time she has only acquired two new neighbors and one new hunt camp.
Her one close neighbor, Gloria, was there first, up the creek from Sue’s land. She is a tall, scrawny, rural woman, missing some teeth. The man who knocked them out left a dozen years ago, with some legal persuasion from Sue, and now Gloria lives happily with her old dog, her garden, and her chickens, who run free through the woods. Free-range chickens, I suppose they are, but Gloria wouldn’t think of calling them anything so fancy. They’re just chickens.
Sue and I finished unloading the car, and I sat on the porch in the old Adirondack chair while she puttered: sweeping up a dead spider, pulling down a sleeping bag for my cot in the corner, bringing in wood for the stove. For Sue, housekeeping at the cabin is play, not work. After the long drive, I prefer to sit and gaze, breathing the cool piney air, listening to a cardinal sing three notes over and over.
There will be plenty of time for talk, as we bush-whack through the woods, or huddle in front of the wood stove with our wine. We have known each other since our twenties, when we were young lawyers fighting for the poor, young women struggling to be heard. We have grown up together.
JACKSONVILLE AREA LEGAL AID, 1975. SUE AND I AT LEFT.
The dogs had worn themselves out chasing up and down the hill. Putnam was helping Sue putter, while Chili and Oyster lay at my feet. Oyster was regal, her head high, her tongue out, panting. Chili was half-asleep, her head on her paws, ears relaxed, eyes closing, her tail wagging whenever I threw a remark her way.
Sue brewed coffee on the camp stove, in a nasty old aluminum percolator. I heard a rustling in the leaves. One of Chili’s long ears twitched higher; Oyster turned her head. Around the bend in the creek trail came three large hens in procession, pecking and chuckling and heading for the clearing.
Chili was up and out the door, down the cinder block steps in one wiry leap. Two chickens flapped and squawked into the safety of the woods, but the lead chicken was flat on the ground, Chili standing over her. I screamed, “Chili, NO!” and was at her side, holding her back by the collar. Oyster and Putnam and Sue were with us now, dogs barking, chicken lying flat. Sue dragged Putnam into the porch and threw me two leashes, and I hauled Chili and Oyster inside. We came back out and stood over the chicken. It was injured, but still twitching, and we knew we had to kill it quickly. We’d explain to Gloria later.
Chili was my dog; it was my problem. But I had no experience with killing chickens. We had no gun. Sue has No Hunting notices posted all around the perimeter, and a couple of Wildlife Refuge signs for good measure. I would have to smash it with a shovel. Sue went to fetch it, and I breathed deep to find strength. I raised the big shovel up and over my head with both hands. As I swung it down, the chicken leapt to her feet and raced into the woods.
Jan 6, 2012
All happy Christmases are alike – compounded of food, friends, memories, and most of all, family, complete with love and aggravation. We had a quiet one this year – no Twelve Days of Houseguests.click Only Luli for four days, overlapping with Joe’s daughter Leah for three, overlapping with a day visit from Rick (Joe’s brother) and Catherine, plus two cousins and a girlfriend.
Before Christmas we went south for visits with family. Tuesday night was a big Hanuukah dinner at Joe’s Dad’s house in Delray. Fifteen people, matzoh ball soup, brisket, latkes, broccoli, apple cake and rugeleh. The three children lit the menorah, played dreidel, and received generous money gifts. We did not get to read the Hannukah story (the kids were a little out of control), but the menorah made an impression on Amanda, and each time we saw one in the following week she would tell me which day of Hannukah it was.
BY TERRY KATZ FROM 123RF.COM
The day after we returned from south Florida, I picked up my sister Luli in Jacksonville. Her plane was late, but not very, and we were home in time for dinner with the Hilkers. Mary Anne and Larry are our only old friends with a young child. Ariel is eleven, and she and Amanda have been friends since Amanda was born. They call each other sister, and play and fight as though they were.
We spent a balmy evening outside in their back yard, with pizza and half a bushel of oysters. Joe and Larry shucked most of them and fed them to Luli in a steady stream. Amanda rode Ariel’s scooter around and around the patio, stopping on each circuit for another oyster warmed on the grill.
BY LENA GROENHALL AT WWW.123RF.COM
On Christmas Eve, Luli, Amanda and I went to the children’s service at United Church of Gainesville. I made Amanda leave her book in the car, and told Luli she should leave her battered daypack, which serves as both luggage and purse. I had no good reason for either of these rules, just a fuzzy feeling that it was not respectful or appropriate – shades of my mother! My bossiness made all of us cross, but it couldn’t ruin the service.
Sandy, one of the ministers, greeted Amanda at the door with a Wise Man figure to put on the creche when they came to that part of the Christmas story. Amanda took it reluctantly, and told me “I don’t want to do it.” “Okay, you can just take it back to Sandy.” Which she did, after choosing seats for us in the front row.
Andy, another minister, told the Christmas story, with frequent pauses at the appropriate place for children to bring up their creche figures, or for all of us to sing a carol. The children, many of them barely walking, many in lavish Christmas dress, carried their lambs, shepherds, and angels to the creche table, where Sandy helped place them. Amanda’s figure wasn’t missed, as there were about a dozen Three Wise Men.
BY KATERINA STEPANOVA AT WWW.123RF.COM
The brief sermon in doggerel was accompanied by a slide show of Mary and Joseph, played by a very pregnant church member and her husband, searching in vain for a room at Gainesville’s seedy motels. The service ended with everyone gathering in the courtyard with candles to sing Silent Night. We sang many traditional carols that afternoon, with not a Rudolph or Santa in the bunch, and I was glad for Amanda to be learning the Christmas carols that I love.
We usually decorate our tree on Christmas Eve, so we had waited to buy one until we returned from South Florida. But on December 22 all the tree lots were empty, and the tents were coming down. Finally, at Home Depot, Joe found four trees, and rather than take advantage of having the last trees in Gainesville, the clerk gave him one for free, and sold him a lopsided bare pine wreath for a dollar. I had found a bag of decorations – ribbons, small pinecones and a few balls – for 25 cents at the Children’s Home Society thrift store. So I wrapped the ribbon around the wreath, added a rumpled red tartan bow, some small pinecones, and a teddy bear and shiny balls. Joe worries that I will turn into Martha Stewart.
After Joe wound the lights around the tree, Amanda hung all but the highest ornaments. She promptly broke the blown glass ornament Joe and I bought in New Orleans, and I told her “It’s a tradition – we break one ornament every year – it’s good to have it over with.”
So many of the ornaments carry memories. The yarn ornaments I made with Amanda’s mother and uncle when they were young. The punk snow man my son made, with a red mohawk and a safety pin in his ear. On the mantel, tiny creche figures from Amanda’s uncle, and Amanda Angel, a little figurine I bought when she was three. Missing is the ornament that was dearest to me – the angel Amanda’s mother made out of a toilet paper tube and a styrofoam ball decorated with glitter and spangles. It topped our Christmas tree for fourteen years, until our relationship deteriorated and she took it for her own tree. Now we have three ornaments made by Amanda, including a cup of hot chocolate with marshmallows.
On Christmas morning Amanda opened her stocking presents with great enthusiasm and appreciation. Among other treats were a tree made of cardboard, which, placed in a magic solution, grew fluffy crystals in 24 hours, and a small rubber rhinoceros which floated in a bowl of water until it became a large rubber rhinoceros, after passing through a slimy stage.
After breakfast (eggs, sausage, bagels, lox, cream cheese, grapefruit, strawberries and Calvados) we opened the presents under the tree. Again Amanda took time to appreciate each gift, even the slippers and calendar, and then cheered us on as we opened our own. I was thrilled by her graciousness and joy. Although I am her mother now, I am still a grandmother, and easily impressed.
We gave her a dance program for the Wii, so after presents we all danced. I flopped after about five minutes (no stamina, MUST resume regular exercise). Joe lasted thirty minutes, while Amanda and Luli continued for a full hour.
Leah arrived the next day and we had another gift exchange. The highlights were stick-on nails for Amanda, a book of poetry by Lucille Clifton for me, and for Leah, an invitation to accompany Joe to South Africa for two weeks this summer. Amanda and I had both declined to go, but now she said, “When I said I didn’t want to go again, I didn’t know Leah was going.” She adores Leah, her big sister, who indulges and plays with her while using all her middle- school-teacher tricks to keep her in line. It’s a lovely relationship.
We always save our big Christmas dinner for the day when Leah arrives, and it was our best dinner ever. (Steaks, spicy grilled vegetable ratatouille, garlic greens (mustard and chard), mashed potatoes, apple and pumpkin pies with butter crusts and tangerine zest in the pumpkin. Whipped cream and ice cream, OF COURSE.) Luli and I love to cook together. She is a professional cook, and I frequently seek her advice, but she insists that at my house she is the sous chef. The pies were worthy of the holiest of holidays.
Bruce and Iris came for dinner. We have had many Christmas dinners with them and their two children. But now Jordan lives in New York, and Casey has moved to Paris. Iris had just returned from a visit, and told us that Casey has made her home there, and intends to stay. Bruce said ruefully, “I guess our new hobby is visiting Paris.” Leah has chosen New Orleans, and is making it her own. With all the Muu Muu Mamas, I rejoice when the children grow up and create their own good lives.
When Rick and his family came, we went canoeing on the Santa Fe River, after a feast of cold cuts and cake. We all enjoyed it except Leah, who remembered too late that she hates canoeing. It didn’t help that Amanda didn’t paddle much, and in attempting to splash Joe, had splashed Leah instead. The day was way too cold for water fights, but Leah was very good-natured in her complaint. We all went out for sushi, Leah and I ordered bizarre and very alcoholic drinks, and then Rick and his family took off.
There were more feasts and celebrations. On New Year’s Eve the Hilkers came for supper (salmon, parslied potatoes, greens and fruitcake). On New Year’s Day Sh’mal and Linda, old HOME Van friends, came for lunch out on the deck (egg salad, green salad, cheese, pumpernickel and oranges) and then we went to Peggy’s big retirement party in High Springs, where I saw most of the Muu Muu’s and many of their grown kids. And that night, with Amanda in bed, Joe and I celebrated in the living room and danced to Beau Soleil, with a fire in the fireplace and the Christmas tree lights blinking.
The holidays wore me out, and I yearned for an empty house, and solitude. I am thrilled to be back at work. Every year one of us says, "Can't we skip Christmas?" But I wouldn't have missed it for the world.
A message to my readers: If you have enjoyed The Feminist Grandma, please do me a favor. Recommend it to a couple of friends, or to your "friends" on Facebook. And if you know any agents, editors or publishers, send them my way!
NEXT WEEK: THE FAIRY QUEEN
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