Lizkdc Dislocation

Over That River, Through Those Woods (Thanksgiving Travel)

The day before Thanksgiving, I was driving my much-cherished tiny commute to work in Brookline and I had one of those odd and intense bursts of sense and memory triggered by association. They happen when you do a thing on the a particular day of the year that you have done on just about the same day in manyyears past. In this case, driving at Thanksgiving time.

Wednesday was one of those grey and wet November days.  After the red and gold leaves have fallen, only the faded pale ale of old grasses and reeds, the grey and sliver planes of pond and river, the dark curved stems and thin fingers of leafless trees. An inkbrush world. The holiday itself and the rest of this weekend have been that other kind of November day: pure blue sky and brief afternoon light, fading too quickly, leaving the senses confusedly protesting at being robbed of time.

Now my Thanksgiving week trips this year are brief--to a half day of work in Brookline on the eve of the holiday, to family in Lexington on the day itself, home to Roslindale. But for a long time for me, Thanksgiving was about journeys,  sometimes grey and stormy, sometimes in bright chill sunshine, always a holiday framed by time and distance.

There were the years with my then-husband: the years we made it up from Washington, DC to Boston to spend the holiday with my family. He loved driving and hated flying, so we'd get up in the navy blue pre-dawn in Washington, DC, start onto the road at 5 AM to beat the early rush hour. Roll across the Delaware Bridge at sunup with coffee in hand. By the time the sun got bright, we'd be in New Jersey, packed in among vast lines of barreling trucks and the great holiday flood of travellers in mortion. We'd have a packed lunch from the Korean Jewish deli in Adams Morgan, washed down with swallows of whiskey with slow intakes of joint and cigarette for dessert. We didn't do much planning besides jeans and sweaters and having a good stack of cassette tapes. Led Zepplin, Richard Feynman, David Bowie, the Smiths. Sometimes we stopped along the way to have get physical. I can't even remember what it was like, to not be able to go 12 hours without touching and affection. It sounds like a sappy joke.

There were the years after my marriage ended. I flew a couple of times, but the crowds were tense, the airports miserable, the flights unreliable.  After 9/11 and about a thousand factors made air travel in the US even more of a burden, I just began to drive by myself. And oddly, weirdly, I loved it.

Undiscovered Worlds (At the Museum of Science)

Undiscovered Worlds: Trailer from Jason Fletcher on Vimeo.

 

My niece and nephew Milo and Annabelle were staying with Nana and I over the weekend, and because of that, I got to do things I never do. Not can't do, just, usually, don't.  Read Harry Potter out loud. Play chess on the rug.  Watch cartoons. Brush someone else's hair. And awesomest of all, go to the Science Museum.

 What an amazing constructing of the high-tech, and the low.  Annabelle put on a bee-striped cape, and climbed into a giant plastic honeycomb. Milo put on a grey squirrel cape, and raced around a climbing- fort clutching a giant acorn, declaiming MINE MINE in a way that I am sure a real squirrel would cheer. 

 A brilliant volunteer presented them with an enormous box of bones, and challenged them to assemble them back into a skeleton, without telling them what it was a skeleton of!  With coaching and handling and speculation, together they slowly made sense of the parts until it became a creature, a monster, something more familiar--a bird! A really big one! Named at last: an ostrich.   A pretty amazing demonstration of the deep satisfaction kids can get from hands, and touching stuff, and brains, and pictures in books, and a smart teacher.

My Fairly Safe-ish Dangerous Youth

Yesterday, my brother and I, grown-ups both, spent a few minutes of our Fourth of July chortling in the kitchen (away from Nana's ears) about the great traditional tie between our national birthday, and doing goofy, unsafe stuff.

When we were in grade school, the two "big kids" on the street would sidle away from the eyes of parents and light off fireworks, recruiting us as the audience (they were smart enough to not to give them to little kids to hold, except sparklers). There was the fountain firework, which was pretty, and the cherry bombs, which they dropped in the sewer and made a giddy bang (probably would not make the  DPW or the taxpayers happy, either) , and the wonderful time we donated a toy Fischer Price Little People School Bus to the cause and they rolled it down the street exploding with fireworks and flames! I hope we took the little peg-headed passengers out first.

And my brother, since he was younger when us older kids went off to college, got the chance later to tag along with some cousins and uncles up at a lake in New Hampshire who would float out onto said lake in canoes, possibly fueled by beer, and light off their works from the canoes! Because that was stupider, and therefore, more fun!

I mean, that was stuff we weren't officially supposed to be doing! But there was SO much stuff we were let to do, which now has been relegated to the category of unsafe.  Even though everyone knows our Mom was "strict," and our Dad would (mostly) back her up and could yell really loud. Because these were all stuff that everybody did!

A People's History of the Fourth of July in Boston

Pops Concert By Garrett A. Wollman. (From The Archives @ BostonRadio.org) [CC-BY-SA-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

 

Whilst scrubbing my grill, ordering three types of meat and other patriotic tasks, I find myself diving back into childhood memory of this national holiday. 

There are a few small-town Fourth memories, the times we were at the beach somewhere for the weekend. The parents would drive a car into a field of scratchy, dry sun-bleached grass, and settle us kids for the fireworks to come.  You could have convertibles and kids back then: not only did we not have car seats, we drove around with our precious little noggins caressed by the murderous highway breezes, HOW ABOUT THAT. 

So you could sit in that attractively unsafe car, or on an old blanket on the grass, and watch some part-time volunteer firemen--doubtless without the appropriate training--make pretty explosions in the sky.

Other times you got to have your big city Boston Fourth, heading downtown to Pops' giant bandshell to see their deathless leader, Arthur Fiedler, lead the storied band through a medley of Burt Bacharach, Broadway, and George M. Cohan hits that really heated up those World War One-era gramophones, plus a few Beatles tunes for those crazy kids.

Legend has it that when the Pilgrims first arrived upon the shores of Massachusetts, Fiedler emerged from the woodland shadows in his spotless band leader's suit with his snowy white mustache, and foretold that one day, a new nation would be born, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all people were created equal, but that it would take a really, really long time for folks to get that through their heads.

Communion

 

So I was at the First Communion of my little niece, E.

The Church is clever--it decided long ago that a great way to appeal to all the little girls in the universe was to invest them for the ceremony with fancy white dresses and flowers and veils.

E. not only looked lovely, but was decidedly on top of all things ceremonial, carrying the holy cruets up to the priest and kneeling at the right place and popping up again on time.  She is one of the those girls who likes to make an extremely pious face over her little tented hands. No one out holies a little girl when they are feeling holy.

Betrayed by the BBC (Inspector Lewis)

Back in the day, Mom and I used to watch a lot of BBC, helpfully imported by the annoying Anglophiles at WGBH.

It was both alien and comfortable, in those days.   Tragedies happened, but to noble, distant sepia characters in bonnets or belted World War One uniforms. 

Well, let me tell you, it isn't like that anymore. We sat down to watch "Mystery!" after many years away, a series named, with a delectable lack of attempted appeal, "Inspector Lewis."

Opening scene, setting is Oxford! Yay! Hurrah for common room teasand punting and tutors! Stately towers!  Handsome, sexually repressed aesthetes!

Here we go! Handsome, conflicted graduate student angsting in a shadowy church at night.  Chubby, timid vicar looking conflicted, right.

Oh, the conflicted graduate student is smashing up marble Jesuses, here comes the chubby vicar to comfort him and . . . oh! Oops!

An hour later.

Dorothy: "Well, that wasn't what I expected."

Me: "Not your grandmother's Miss Marple, no."

Dorothy: "So many fiery explosions."

"Not so much poison in the dons' port as I remember."

"And you know, even with all the clues, I was pretty surprised about the BRAZILIAN SEX CHANGE."

"Let alone the RED HOT POKER THROUGH THE EYE."

"I didn't see that coming."

"No."

"Not a bit of it."

Is there nothing sacred in this ever-changing world? Weeps upon a copy of "The Murder at the Vicarage."

July, July

The Stargazer, originally uploaded by lizkdc.

Stargazer lily in my garden

Things about July to love:

It's easier to find a bunch of musicians in colonial hats and mandolins singing sea shanties. In Boston, anyway.

Stargazer lilies.

Blueberry pie. My mother bought one from the Dominican nuns, who are financing their good works $5.50 at a time with pie. 

He's Trouble

This is my uncle, Paul H.  A little less then six months ago, he was sent flying by a speeding bicyclist while completing his route as a mailman in downtown Boston.  His head collided with a granite curb, causing injuries so severe that despite being rushed to MGH for immediate brain trauma surgery, the doctors held out little hope of him ever regaining consciousness.  It happened on a gorgeous late spring day, and I happened to be home to take the call, and had to track down by cell phone my mom, his eldest sister, to give her the awful news.

The Shells and the Sorrow (James Hook)

IMG_0109.JPG, originally uploaded by lizkdc.

The Christmas Lobster Run:  Boston harbor institution and shrine to fresh lobster

Dude, James Hook burnt down.  The Boston Harbor shrine of lobster from which our family has been purchasing crustaceans for decades.

No people were hurt, thank goodness, but a half-million dollars worth of tender, delicious shellfish and an unknown amount of tangy red cocktail sauce were destroyed.

We went there every Christmas to acquire the stars for our big Christmas Eve clan feast.

Personally, I think the police should look for a suspect with a hard, red carapace clutching a butane lighter in one oversize claw.

RIP, Hook's.

More photos after the jump.

Headcount

IMG_1824.JPG, originally uploaded by lizkdc.

Park Street Church spire, Park Street T

This last week, one of those seeming coincidences of life took place, where someone I met quite recently in Boston turned out to know a family member of mine.  There's this funky pattern in my life about this. For those of you who know me well, stop me if you've heard this one before.

My mother was one of nine children and my father was one of eight.  Out of those seventeen, fourteen married.  At its highest count, I had 29 aunts and uncles--lost several, sadly, to breakups and to death.  Interestingly, only 3 divorces out of those fourteen marriages, and 1 of those remarried.

All the married people had multiple kids, including one family with seven kids and one with nine, for a grand total of forty-one first cousins.

Growing up, I was also lucky enough to have a whole older generation as well.  Of my grandparents, only my mother's mom, Grammy, played a big role in our lives, since the others' had died before I was old enough to remember. But I had about a dozen elderly grandaunts and uncles.  They have all passed on long since, so I don't count them in my present clan "head count," but they definitely enriched and deepened my sense of family growing up, with their memories of a Boston defined by streetcars and coal,  Catholicism and politics, James Michael Curley and FDR, the Boston of Irish and Jewish and Italian immigrants poised against the old-money Yankees.