Dwarf Planet in Purple

First of all, I honor the anniversary of my mother's passing, 27 years ago tonight.

Now about the heading of this entry. At church on Sunday I stayed after the service to rehearse a hymn for next Sunday's MLK Jr. service. I kept my mask on while singing, but not everyone was masked. Late yesterday afternoon I received an email from our minister -- who tries not to work on Monday, her personal sabbath -- stating that if we stayed for the singing practice, we were probably exposed to covid. She sent it out BCC, so I'm pretty sure I know who the other recipients were but I don't know whose name was left off (and was thus the person who exposed the rest of us). So now I feel like a pariah. I skipped last night's dance practice out of an abundance of caution, and during tomorrow's errands I will certainly wear a mask. I need to find a non-expired covid test before Friday so that I can determine whether I can do anything this weekend (singing practice, Maugorn's birthday, church...).

Today my self-isolation was a no-brainer because a "winter" storm is blowing through. I put "winter" in quotes because the weather is not cold enough for water to freeze, so we're just having lots of rain and wind gusts. Fortunately, we still have power here in the little cottage, which is just outside the Pepco area in BGE's turf.

Hey, it's about time. Five things make a post.

1. Yesterday was the 25th anniversary of my dear mother's passing. I remember my parents' 25th wedding anniversary -- red roses, silver-colored gifts, firecrackers and Roman candles. There are no such general symbols for a death anniversary. I volunteered to light the chalice during yesterday's Sunday service (on Zoom). It seemed the best way to honor her.

2. Saturday I ventured out to the local town cinema -- first time to a movie theater in almost two years! -- to see the new West Side Story on the wide screen. It was every bit a visual feast as you would expect from the pairing of one of the all-time great director-cinematographer teams, plus the music was exquisite. I have loved this music since I danced to "I Feel Pretty" in my preschool ballet class. No matter what you might think of the plot or the general artificiality of a movie (or staged) musical, you have to admit that the music is some of the most sublime ever written. I'm so sorry this film is now considered a "box-office bomb."

3. I have been spending money like crazy. New eyeglasses (first since the summer of 2013), vet exam and blood/urine tests for Julia (who is now a senior kitty), new muffler and tailpipe for the noisy car. Whew. Hard come, easy go.

4. I am SO. INCREDIBLY. TIRED. of this covid-19 pandemic. None of the organizations to which I belong can meet in person this month because of the omicron surge. Atlantia is "shut down" until January 21; Storvik is taking the entire month of January off. Church is soldiering on with Zoom meetings. Same with Toastmasters. People are fed up with virtual this and online that. My local science writers' group had its second online holiday gala last month and attendance was barely two dozen instead of the usual 150 or so. No wonder people drive like entitled maniacs and treat strangers so poorly when they do manage to leave their hidey-holes. We are all losing social capital.

5. Just now, as I was writing the above, I heard a crash in the condo. The little wooden shelf in the dining room fell off the wall. It's the little wooden shelf I gave Mom for her 75th birthday. Is it a sign??

Over and out....

Today the boy toy and I spent some of our time tearing apart a 24-year-old mattress. It felt good, actually.

My mother bought this King Koil mattress and box spring in the late summer or early fall of 1996. I'm not sure because I was down here in Maryland and she was up there in Massachusetts. I went to see her in October 1996 because she was in and out of the hospital three times that month. She complained that the mattress was thicker/taller than the previous one, which she had put on my bed when she got the new one (both beds were full size). One night while I was up there, when she got up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night, she fell on her butt and it scared me. After that I made her start sleeping in my bed, and I would sleep in her bed, because I was younger and the extra height didn't bother me.

At the time, she didn't seem hurt from the fall. However, she apparently bled a tiny bit into her spinal column because of her blood thinner. And when she had a spinal anesthetic for a minor procedure a few months later, her legs got paralyzed and her condition spiraled out of control and she died.

When I bought my condo in 1999, I needed only one of the two beds in my childhood home, so I took my bed frame and my mother's King Koil mattress and box spring (because it was so much newer than the other one). I've had it all these years, through weight gains and flings and illnesses and whatnot. Supposedly you're supposed to change your mattress every eight years; this one was three times that age and had all kinds of saggy spots and stains and dust and whatnot. The boy toy and I were tired of waking up with backaches.

Despite the pandemic, we did some shopping ... but oy vey, the prices nowadays. We ended up getting a firm spring mattress from IKEA. I know a lot of people complain about IKEA mattresses, but they do have a partial 25-year warranty, and I am pretty sure it will last for eight years. There's just no way I could have afforded anywhere from $600 to $1800 for a freaking mattress, plus delivery charges. I spent less than $250 on that mattress and it was rolled up so tight that it fit in the back seat of Anna Three (my Corolla).

So far, we have been sleeping very comfortably.

We don't want to keep the old mattress around until the next condo "community dumpster weekend" in November, so today the boy toy got out his box cutter, and we cut off all the cloth and foam on the outer layers and bagged it up for trash. At some point we'll have to borrow a metal-cutting tool for the bare springs.

It served its purpose, but no mattress lasts forever.

For those who were wondering about Expo 67, 50 years ago this month....

My family drove up from Massachusetts to Montreal. By this time, the family car would have been a 1965 Dodge Polara, sort of an off-white eggshell color. I have no idea which roads we took, but the trip seemed to take all day, and we got to Montreal in the late afternoon. My mother tried to teach me a bit of French; I was fascinated that the red stop signs said "Arrêt" and the exit signs said "Sortie." Since I had been reading everything I could find in advance of Expo 67 -- and even though I was only 7 1/2, that was a lot! -- I could recognize the huge geodesic dome of the U.S. pavilion off in the distance, but my Dad could not figure out how to get any closer to it. I remember saying, "Daddy, I think you missed the sortie."

We pulled over to the side of the highway and Dad pored over the map. A car pulled up behind us and a man got out and walked up to our car. He asked us whether we had any hotel reservations, and when my parents said no, he said, "You aren't going to find any." He introduced himself as a Mr. Dalton, pulled out his government ID and said that he was a Quebec government official and he and his wife were letting tourists stay in their home. So we followed him to his house, which had a facade made of randomly shaped blocks of white stone. The house seemed magnificent to me, especially because the street was also named Dalton. I have no idea how much my parents paid for us to stay in their spare bedroom, breakfast included.

We spent two or three days at the Expo. I remember HUGE crowds everywhere. At one point my mother and I waited 45 minutes in line to use the ladies' room. Forty-five minutes' wait to PEE!!!! I remember going up the escalator in the U.S. pavilion, which was said to be the longest escalator in the world. (I suspect the ones now at the Wheaton Metro station are longer.) I remember turning up my nose at the tuna-fish sandwiches my mother had packed for me in a cooler; I wanted fresh French fries, while my parents had a "buffalo burger." A parade for the 20-millionth visitor to the exposition passed by us.

I remember riding on an antique carousel in the amusement-park section, La Ronde. I was terrified, because instead of the vertical pole right in front of the saddle, the only place for me to hang on was a tiny little T-shaped handle to the right of the horse's mane. I remember spending my carefully saved-up allowance on an Expo 67 tote bag and a little flag with the "Man and His World" logo. I remember that I'd fall asleep in the back seat of the car on the way back to Mr. Dalton's house, but I would wake up when the car stopped at a gas station or something and my mother (whose grandparents were all born in the St. Lawrence River valley) would be translating directions for my father, who didn't speak a word of French, couldn't read the signs and kept getting lost.

On the last afternoon we were there, my mother declared that her feet hurt and parked herself on a spot of grass in the shade of a tree. My Dad took me to La Ronde, where we rode the Gyrotron, which I'd read about, probably in Life magazine. (An image of its exterior is here.) It was the first time I'd been on a ride with little moving cars that never quite stopped, even though this is quite normal now in the big theme parks. The first building was filled with a space motif, and it was my first encounter with black light -- I laughed at how my white ankle socks and the white parts of Dad's print shirt glowed eerily. Then the moving car took us back outside and down into the bowels of a fake volcano, where we were "eaten" by a big red monster at the end. I'm not sure what the combination of the two scenarios was supposed to convey, but I was thrilled anyway.

I wanted to take my mother on the Gyrotron, but wouldn't you know it -- that night there was a huge thunderstorm and the La Ronde rides closed early for safety reasons. We spent the evening sitting under the roof of a food-vending booth, with my mother talking in French to one of the workers there. The next morning we checked out of Mr. Dalton's house and headed home.

In late July 1983, as my mother and I were approaching the first anniversary of my father's death, she and I took a short trip to Montreal to see the actual city. We stayed at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel -- I didn't yet know it had been the site of the famous John and Yoko "bed-in" -- and saw lots of neat stuff. I insisted on checking out the Expo property again. From a distance we could see the skeleton of the geodesic dome. The Gyrotron had vanished from La Ronde, but I did go on a loop-the-loop roller coaster, just to satisfy myself.

On January 12, 1997, the New England Patriots won a playoff game. I know this because I had to plan the calling hours at the funeral around this.

My mother used to say, "Don't bother having a wake for me when I go." And she went on about the expense of it all. Finally I told her, "Well, gee, Mom, what if **I** want to have people come and comfort me at the hour of my greatest need? Funeral rituals are for the living!" After that, she didn't rant about the calling hours as much.

So, when I came to make the arrangements for Mom the way she had done for Dad ... I realized that everyone was 15 years older than when Dad passed, and some people might have given up night driving along the way, and it gets dark early in January. And then the funeral director gently suggested that the playoff game started at 4 p.m. and would go till at least 7 and no one would want to be at the funeral home during that.

Thus, instead of the tradition 2-4 and 7-9 p.m. hours, I just had the wake from 1 to 4 p.m. Then my relatives trooped over to my childhood home and we all watched the Patriots together. Not like my heart was in it or anything like that.

Forgot to mention yesterday: The NBC commercials celebrating Matt Lauer's 20th anniversary as co-anchor of the Today show remind me of how much of a fan of Bryant Gumbel my mother was. In fact, on Gumbel's last day on Today (20 years ago yesterday), I left my VCR recording when I went to work so that I would have a tape of that tribute episode in case my mother missed it due to her knee procedure. I never showed it to her....

Twenty years ago today ... my Saturday started with a call from my cousin Janet, saying that my mother was in a lot of pain and couldn't move her legs and was being transferred from Leominster Hospital to St. Vincent's Hospital in Worcester. Obviously I was upset over the complications, and I wanted to fly up to Massachusetts, but I had the additional complication that I was the only member of my four-person work group who was supposed to be in the office for the coming week. My boss and his wife were incommunicado, somewhere in Paraguay on vacation; the second person was on a ski trip in Vermont; the third person was flying (with my boss's boss) to a conference on the West Coast.

I remember the afternoon as a tangle of phone conversations. I couldn't call Janet back directly because she had called from a pay phone -- remember that technology? So I was trying to find out what was going on from the Leominster staff, plus I was trying to convince US Airways that I needed a "family emergency fare" or whatever it was called, so that I could fly to Boston right away, plus I was trying to find somebody from my then-workplace to notify about the situation. I finally tracked down the wife of my boss's boss, who promised to tell her husband once he reached his destination.

Around dinnertime I flew up to Boston. (I wasn't worried about how I was going to get around in Massachusetts, because my mother's car was sitting, unused, at her house.) Janet and her husband, Kevin, picked me up at Logan Airport. By that time, my mother was in surgery (for 4.5 hours, as it turned out), so there was no point in my trying to see her that night.

On the way back to my childhood home, we stopped at Leominster Hospital to pick up my mother's personal effects, which for some reason weren't transported in the ambulance along with her. Once alone at home, I looked through her purse just to see what was in it (you know how people always say stuff gets stolen in hospitals). At the bottom of the purse I found a baggie with two diamond rings in it. My mother's and my grandmother's. The ones that my mother had reported stolen to the local police a couple of months earlier, because she was sure that the visiting nurses and home health aides that I'd arranged for her were stealing her blind. With her mild confusion, Mom had robbed herself.

The Tournament of Roses has a "never on Sunday" policy, apparently dating back to the days when people rode horses to church, so we had to wait until today to watch our favorite New Year's Day parade. (It was certainly a tradition in MY house, anyway.)

Later on, the boy toy and I watched the Rose Bowl football game. I'm not one to watch any old football game just for the hell of it, but the boy toy is a big fan of the University of Southern California Trojans, because his mother graduated from USC. (The boy toy himself went to a Division III school, Humboldt State.) It was a thrilling game, with dramatic interceptions and lead changes, plus lots of scoring. USC won with a last-minute field goal, 52-49. Woot!

* * * * * *

Tonight makes 20 years since my final telephone conversation with my mother. (Of course, I didn't know that at the time.) I'm about to hit a lot of Mom-related 20-year milestones, all of them sad.

A woman’s home is her castle.

When I think of “home,” I don’t think of the condo I bought nearly 15 years ago. I dream of the perfect little house.

Two bedrooms, one bath, six closets. A basement, half finished, and an attic with a real fixed staircase. A garage just big enough for a whale of an American-made car.

Shiny varnished woodwork. Maple trees to shade the roof. A backyard hill made for sledding.

My father and mother built that house. One evening, as a thirtysomething man trying to start a family with his wife, my father sketched out the design of the house on a crinkly sheet of tissue paper. The initial sketch became more detailed as he took a ruler and pencil and measured out the walls and doorways just as he had been taught in his high school mechanical-drawing class. Then he and my mother bought a half-acre of land and got the foundation dug. All summer long, the two of them worked 10 hours a day at their factory jobs, grabbed a sandwich for supper, set up a couple of clamp lights, and hammered away until midnight.

My parents brought me home to that house as a newborn. Growing up, I knew every closet by name (front-hall closet, work-clothes closet) as well as by the sound of its door and by its contents (the squeaky canister vacuum cleaner, the musty scent of worn sweaters and pants). The medicine cabinet made a prolonged metallic squeak as my father opened and closed it when he got up at night to take some aspirin. The sheets on the backyard clothesline almost blinded me with their cleanliness in the sunshine.

One evening at the dinner table when I was about seven years old, my mother announced, “We don’t have to pay the rent anymore.” I didn’t know anything about veterans’ mortgages at the time, but I garnered the sense that we had planted deep roots and I would always be able to build cardboard-box houses in the cellar and roll down the back hill with the grass slap-slapping me in the face until the world spun weirdly.

Time passed, and one Sunday morning my father dropped dead in the bathroom he had built, and some years later my mother went into the hospital and never came out. I bought a condo near the big city where I’d always wanted to work and sold the little house in the small town to a single mother who had been born at the hospital near my condo.

My life puttered on until the economy crashed around me. Now I am old and hard to employ, and I worry constantly about paying the mortgage. I know I could not have foreseen the Great Recession and its lasting impact, but some days I bitterly regret not keeping my parents’ house free and clear. At night I close my eyes and still dream about the perfect home, built by my parents’ hands, with hopes and love.

Sixty-five years ago this morning, the granddaughter of French Canadian immigrants and the son of Lithuanian immigrants got married ... and they eventually became my parents.

Ten years ago today, I started a LiveJournal. Wow, it's been quite the ride. I was following a new friend onto LJ. Since then I've made lots of new friends, reconnected with an old friend from my Massachusetts days (by literally recognizing her face in an icon in the "fortysomething" community), got involved in the SCA (on the suggestion of said new friend, who proposed that I get involved in Markland, except I couldn't figure out how to do that), made even MORE new friends. Never mind gaining and losing a couple of jobs along the way, although at least I got to go to Hawaii for free. :-)

Yep, I've had quite a few adventures in the past decade, and LJ has been heavily intertwined in most all of them. Since LJ has had its issues over time, and now seems to be a shadow of its former self, I started this mirror account at DW a few years back. I suppose I should start using LJ Book to back the whole darned thing up just in case the Russian overlords pull the plug. Hey, we've seen other 'net ecosystems go away: GreatestJournal, Geocities, Posterous....

I wonder where the next decade will take me? And how will I chronicle it?

Today is the 120th anniversary of my maternal grandmother's birth. Yes, she was born on the 25th anniversary of Lincoln's assassination, and her 22nd birthday was the last day Titanic saw sunlight.

Here she is during World War II with the youngest of her four sons:



Here is Grammy sewing in her kitchen, probably in the 1940s (the master bedroom is in the background):



I was the youngest of her 11 grandchildren, and I came upon the scene when she was already a senior citizen, but she did make me some doll clothes with that sewing machine, and she crocheted huge single-granny-square afghans for my parents and me.

I took this photo of my mother and her mother when I got my first camera, a Polaroid, for Christmas in 1971:



All my older cousins called her Mémé (pronounced "meh-may" in the Canadian French patois), but for some reason my mother thought that sounded lower-class, so I called her Grammy. I always enjoyed her company so much, even though her body had gotten frail by the time I got to be in elementary school. She had severely bowed legs. But she was a strong-minded person. Despite her dentures, she could still eat corn off the cob in 1974. I don't think she was well-educated, but she had an awfully good heart.