Apparently all I needed was to give that permission to myself. Hence, a couple of stories.
Tuesday Intern and I were waiting for the bus together for 15 minutes longer than we should have because we missed the bus we were aiming for by about 45 seconds. In the chat, he divulged that the best present his parents could give him would be a bunch of toilet paper, because buying it seems so petty and is a terrible reminder that he's not living at home anymore. A lightbulb went off in my head.
Friday I drove and suggested to Intern that I give him a ride home punctuated with a stop at my house to give him his present (which I had announced the existence of before, because I'm hideous with surprises). He was hesitant, but he wanted to meet Blake too (who wouldn't?) and I am sure he recalled a dumpster into which he could deposit whatever I had in mind if it wasn't to his taste. So first there was the mandatory admiring of my tree, which I again refuse to be modest about--actually first was my mourning as we pulled up under the shorn outside trees--and second was the Meeting of Blake, who had got so offended when I came home and spent a minute in the living room with my guest instead of fetching him right off that after dutifully climbing onto Intern's finger he immediately hopped back to me for his proper measure of snuggling, and third was scampering down to the basement and my saying "Merry Christmas" and handing a 36-pack of Costco toilet paper into his arms while he laughed. Also he met RDC, who was much more sociable than Blake. Then I drove him home.
So that was a success.
I say this hoping my father and notstepmother haven't found this site. If you have, don't read this until after Thursday. (I keep thinking Christmas is Wednesday.)
My sister's gift to our father (and notstepmother) is a photograph album, more his photobiography. She received family photographs from Aunt Namesake and included those. (I would have found that difficult, greedy and grasping as I am, but CLH said, realistically though scarily, that she would get them back eventually. We both swallowed hard.)
There is a photograph of the Ascendancy great-grandmother who married our decidedly-not-Ascendancy, plain Irish, immigrant great-grandfather and was disinherited for his sake. (Similarly, our maternal great-great-grandmother Elizabeth Rockefeller was disinherited for marrying our great-great-grandfather (whose daughter I hazily remember: she died when I was five). We are peasants from way back and on both sides.) A photograph of our great-grandfather holding our infant maternal grandmother; his face is just not one that gets made any more. Photographs of her girlhood; of her beloved big brother, our great-uncle, whose story I want to tell here but for which I want a scanner; of our father and his siblings as children (all wearing glasses before their fourth birthdays; I'm grateful again to have my maternal line's myopia rather than their compound of problems, and mystified again how my sister at nearly 40 (!) can still have perfect sight).
A picture I'm jealous of, since I could never be in it: my father's cousin, sister-in-law, brother, father, and wife holding his first daughter. I, the second daughter, was born after his father died.
A large section of pictures of CLH and me:
* With puppy Sagi. My mother has a series of snapshots of us mauling the poor thing; in one, I in no more than a diaper am holding the dog, and in the next, my hand is raised to hit CLH who is now holding the dog. This latter is the one in the album, of course.
* With grown and aged Shadow in her beanbag in front of our father's chair, in which I sit with CLH on my lap. Over the chair is a photograph portrait of Dad's father.
* At my high school graduation and her college graduation and my wedding, all with him, and the last time he saw us together, at his brother's in 2001.
* The two of us in Boston and Old Lyme and Aspen over the years.
Also pictures of CLH on her own and of me on my own and with RDC, including this one of us going to the opera. Last weekend our materal cousin was looking through the album, I hope out of interest and not just courtesy, and when she turned to this page said "Great dress!" I replied, "That dress? Fifteen bucks at T.J. Maxx!" and my sister exclaimed "Good story, Jwaas!"
Because most of my stories, like the one I've just told here, are overly long and filled with tedious unnecessary detail and have no particular point. Whereas that one merely communicated the glee of that dress at that price. My sister is my biggest fan. Whereas I was proud of myself for fibbing about the name of the store, since the actual one, while operating on the same principle, isn't nationally recognizable.
I picked up Blake's tray (a foot by less than a foot, with a half-inch lip; it started its life as part of my dorm fridge) the other day and asked RDC what were those desiccated hairy things? He had bought broccoli sprouts to put on sandwiches. We always share foods with Blake--the sandwich bread, some lettuce or spinach, a wisp of cheese--and that's how RDC discovered what extremely yummy things sprouts are. Except they mummify even faster than spinach wilts.
They snap in the beak, they shred well, they stick to the wall when you whip your head back and forth to clean it (like a wet dog shaking), so even if they weren't tasty, their physical attributes would make them a favorite. My little buddy.
The last page of my father's album features his grandchildren: Kitty sunning herself in my sister's ivy-covered window, and Blake preening his tail. Of course.
RDC just digitized our wedding video, eight years old, already deteriorating, and not of high quality to start with. His uncle took it and gave us a copy, I'm pretty sure. I didn't know he was taking it until I spotted him during our first dance, which was unsurprisingly dreadful. I asked RDC, when he told me he'd digitized it, if the dance was as cringeworthy as I remember. He said that the most embarrassing moment was when I wouldn't let him feed me cake.
We didn't have an argument about something that happened 8.5 years ago, but we had stiff words: he said it was embarrassing that I wouldn't let him feed me, that I held his hand away from my face with both of mine, that I didn't trust him just to put a little frosting on my lips to kiss off. Hmm. Whereas what I remembered was not knowing about this "little bit of frosting" ahead of time and fearing that he would smear me. "You didn't trust me," he translated. I didn't argue that, but why would he think I wanted frosting on my mouth?
So I started the video, jumping up to remove cookies from the oven every few minutes, and finished the cookies sometime during the wholly unorganized because unplanned receiving line. I figured I had already found the most embarrassing moment: my mother's shrill voice commanding everyone to "look over here," over and over and over again.
Then I brought my computer downstairs to finish watching it with him. The dance was terrible, but either RDC's uncle didn't catch my first, displeased reaction to spotting the videocamera or he tactfully edited it out (which might be why we have only a copy). There is only my saying, "Arrest that man!" and RDC at my ear--he was whispering that any protest would be undignified because, in fact, also taped. He was correct, though I was right--I didn't want video--and I shushed.
The toasts were okay, EJB's short and sweet and my sister's welcoming us to Colorado and praising RDC for putting up with "that laugh." That footage does include the worst moment of the tape, RDC's aunt approaching the lens to urge her husband closer, thereby giving a really dreadful close-up.
Then the cake-cutting, and yes I was watching to make sure I was right, always a nice way to treat wedding relics. RDC fed me first, bringing his hand to my mouth, and I took a bite. Then, with audible encouragement from at least two identifiable voices, he approached his hand to my face again, frosting forward. So ha, I did have cause to fear the oh-so-tacky smearing, and that's when I leaned back and pushed his hand away before, for form's sake though with basilisk eyes, I stopped outwardly resisting. He put a little frosting on my lips and kissed it off. When I fed him, I held the piece of cake still so he could control his bite rather than have to work around my moving it toward him.
Then we kissed and made up, both on the video and in person.
Not the most embarrassing but the stupidest moment is the bouquet toss. The only things I had forgotten to bring with me were not on my list: garters. RDC's grandmother gave me one that might have fit around my lower arm when I was eight. Also, my uncle gave me the garter he caught at my parents' wedding--what he was doing going for the garter when he was already married I couldn't say--and I would have worn that as my Something Old if I had remembered it--but not thrown it, a keepsake meant for CLH. Without a garter, we had a co-ed bouquet toss. That might have been funner if we could have coordinated a throw better. We released the bouquet so late that it landed nearly at our feet, while everyone bunched up to catch it stood at least 10 feet away. CLH and SPG were equally determined to get it, so they tussled amusingly.
I think I have mentioned before that I completely bollocksed the old-new-borrowed-blue poesy. My dress was new, LEB lent me a pearl choker, I forgot the old garter, and RDC's aunt had lent me diamond-and-sapphire earrings but I preferred faux-pearl-and-rhinestone pendants that went with my dress better, dangling for its neckline and pearly for its fabric. I had my sapphire engagement ring of course, but CLH wore that during the ceremony.
We seem to be muddling along all right despite that inauspicious beginning.
