Reading: The Cider House Rules, The Bookshop, A Walk in the Woods, Memoirs of a Geisha, Anna Karenina

Moving: swimming and walking

Learning: lots of good stuff

Watching: whales

15-24 July 2000: Vacation

Part the third

And so we braced for a weekend of family. We spent Friday night at his aunt and uncle's and Saturday fetched his grandfather from his nursing home for lunch on the deck. Sunday we would see my grandmother.

During the day I called my mother to firm up plans for Sunday. I told her we'd arrive in Old Lyme between 10:30 and 11, and two sentences later she said, "No later than 10:30, then," as if confirming what we'd previously agreed to. I stood up on my hind feet and repeated the earlier range. Also she asked how we'd get there from Orange, as if she knew how to get from Orange to New Haven at all or would be able to instruct us in a more direct route between New Haven and Old Lyme than I-95, and I told her we'd be leaving from Cheshire, not from Orange. She seemed unable to comprehend how I could be calling her from Orange at 1:00 in the afternoon but be in Cheshire at 9:00 the next morning. So I was really looking forward to Sunday.

Picking up Grandpa G from his place, I wondered how I would manage Granny's. A blind woman grasped my hand in her iron claw and rattled off a bunch of names of people she'd rather I be, and wanted to know if I would help her. Would Granny be this infirm?

We got to Cheshire around 4. EJB and Tracy, their dog Cody, JGW and Robin, their dog Stumpy, and a surprise: college friends RDC hasn't seen since I've known him (at least eight years) and their eighteen-month-old son. A good break between family sadness and frustration.

We ate copiously of everything EJB grilled and partook of the extra treat of a Robin pie, white and yellow peach. Robin makes the best pies. After dark, we sat by the pond and made s'mores, which I haven't done since Girl Scouts. I still don't like marshmallows, but in some circumstances, they're quite tasty. A properly burned marshmallow is the best. Slouching around, watching the logs burn, the embers rise, and listening to the bullfrogs burp, I suddenly wondered what is a marshmallow made of, anyway. It struck me that this was the sort of question Gordy and his friends would have debated on their way out to look at a body, and I thought of Dora.

Cody doesn't like hot-tubbing. First of all, he doesn't like water, doesn't like swimming. Then, his humans seem to disappear and be floating heads, and he doesn't like that either. Like Mason, he is slender for his breed, and so although he's a St. Bernard, he's not massive. He came from a St. Bernard rescue group, and I wondered if any St. Bernards themselves do the rescuing, and if so would that be an oxymoron.

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Sunday we set off on the most distasteful leg of the journey. At least it was a pretty trip, through Durham and Killingworth and past the interestingly named Roast Meat Hill Road in the latter. My mother always stresses me out, no news there, but this would be the first time I'd see Granny in a nursing home. However much BWJL does stress me, I'd never be able to do this without her, and I told her so appreciatively, on the phone and in person. I'm not sure she understood or believed me.

So we got to the house. I observed all the new appliances in the kitchen, the repellent wall-to-wall carpeting they installed over the solid oak floors, and the new chintz living room furniture, and we were shown the tow-along camper they bought and the truck they bought to tow with. My mother said they'd be driving the truck to Vermont next weekend, and I made the mistake of asking why they didn't use either of their marginally more fuel-efficient sedans. BDL asked in return how many mpg our foreign car gets and didn't believe 28. He called Cassidy a "Jap four-banger," asserting that a four-cylinder "sardine can" could never climb hills or navigate mountain passes.

As usual, there were several instances of her annoying me, and BDL didn't miss an opportunity either. She asked how the house was; we said this and that and spoke of the painting yet to be done, none of which she appeared to listen to. BDL told me to put up my hand "like that" and I copied his gesture and he said, "You can hold a paint brush just fine; what's stopping you?" as if I never did my fair share of housework.

Oh yes, and this is the best one. My mother was telling me how Granny has changed, how she now believes the vivid dreams she's always had, and hallucinates, and fantasizes, and believes it all. Granny has reported to my mother that there have been two murders in the nursing home though of course there have been none. What grieves me about this is if my grandmother were not a frightened, lonely woman, the nature of her fantasies might take a wholly different course. She probably read with increasing alarm as she aged about the rise of violent crime, and about abuse in nursing homes, and here she's combining them. The latest one, my mother said, was that a man down the hall was taking Viagra and there was a steady procession of women in and out of his hall with accompanying noise. She had already expressed concern about being the next murder victim, and so BDL's thoughtful response was--here my mother called it "teasing"-- that she should lock her door so the Viagra man couldn't rape her.

I dropped my fork in astonishment that even he could be so unfeeling. Here is a frail woman completely incapable of defending herself and here is her son-in-law belittling her fears, not taking them seriously, yet egging them on. I told him I couldn't believe he'd be so cruel and asked him please not to tease my grandmother about such a thing in future. Of course, my mother, who told me when at the tender age of 14 I was forcibly kissed on the mouth by an adult cousin that I should learn to accept affection better, completely did not comprehend my disapproval.

After lunch, I scampered out to the car for my toothbrush. As he told me later, in the less than 10 minutes I was away from the table, my mother grilled RDC on all the questions she thinks I don't answer. Why we won't come to Connecticut for Christmas. How much he makes. Is so-and-so an amputee.

I stopped him there. I've told my mother why we don't go home for Christmas: Connecticut holds no allure for me in winter. I've told her we're better off with his job and here we are buying a house; can't she figure out it's not of her business what the exact dollar figure is? But an amputee?

Earlier, I had described someone as "dumb as a stump." I call the person that to distinguish her from someone I used to work with who is dumb as a box of rocks. Apparently my simile was too obscure for her, the slant rhyme too acutely angled, because she asked RDC, in her coy manner, if this person "had a woody complexion," trying to insinuate a question she considers herself too polite to ask directly. God I wish I could have heard that.

Whatever. So.

Then we visited Granny.

Then we left.

After escaping my mother, we returned to Storrs for a lovely supper at Charenton. During the evening, ALB told me she's found my site, which freaked me rather but is only what I should expect, and that my initials for her parents are wrong. This latter came up only because for some reason JMUB had her UConn ID out and I asked what the M in her signature was for. I had always called her JUDB, but after marrying she didn't keep her birth name in her string of names. And AMB's middle name isn't what I always thought it was. Which is a problem because now even I don't know whom I mean.

Anyway. I don't know how it came up, except that I, who talked as if my jaw had no hinge, must have started it, but we talked about elephants. I contributed my idea of smallish elephants, the size of spaniels, as good housepets. I might have taken that from a book, actually, but I don't remember and I think it's a brilliant idea. I said they perhaps could make themselves useful in the kitchen, and then I had to credit that line to Emma Thompson's screenplay for Sense and Sensibility. Later ALB introduced a logic test she'd heard on Car Talk.

I risk alienating Charenton not only with incessant chatter but also my utter dismissal of Car Talk. I heard it for the first time in the car with Nisou, six years ago as we motored to New London to gather Ulla from the ferry. I didn't like it then, and now I wonder if my dislike then indicated that I was already in a pissy mood (I actually got angry at Nisou for the first and only time that week). And we always leave NPR on for Blake to listen to and I feel guiltier than I regularly do for abandoning him when I leave after 11 of a Saturday morning. I hate that forced deejay type laughter, whether it comes from an obnoxious morning deejay (as if there's any other sort) or from a mechanic.

So anyway ALB had a logic test for RDC and me, and she said if it would make us feel any better, her parents had both failed it.

First question: how do you put a giraffe in a refrigerator?

Good grad students that we are, we analyzed it and I contributed that perhaps giraffes could come in the same junior size I want elephants available. It didn't take more than several sentences for RDC to suggest, for starters, that he'd open the door. A round of applause.

Second question: how would you put an elephant in a refrigerator?

Now, if we were working with my junior animals they could both fit at once, but anyway I said I didn't know how but I'd take the giraffe out first. More applause.

There's going to be an animal convention and all the animals in the whole wide world are there except which one? The third question was easy: the elephant in my refrigerator, because Mary Kay, the medical labs, and various zoos can be easily escaped but the refrigerator cannot.

And (fourth question) if you want to go to the convention yourself but need to cross a crocodile-infested river to get there, when there is neither boat nor bridge nor any tool, RDC suggested you just wouldn't worry about it since the crocodiles were already at the convention.

So we passed with flying colors. What a relief.

Also I ate lots and lots more blueberries, straight off the bush, in a blueberry tart, and for breakfast with granola, and at home in Denver since JMUB gave us a jar of myrtilles, vii 00.

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Monday after the blueberry-y breakfast, we zoomed off to Boston and had lunch with CLH before running Logan to earth. Actually finding Logan wasn't bad. CLH told me how to get onto Storrow Drive and after that I just followed signs, not that there were any. After we dropped her at her restaurant, I drove Comm Ave from Mass Ave to Berkeley Street and remembered all the usual stuff--summer of 1988--and now new stuff, now that I've read Taking Care of Terrific. Waiting at a red light on Berkeley, I realized that this, Comm Ave a block from the Public Gardens, was prime Terrific territory, but I couldn't get the camera out in time for Dora.

The best, if only good, thing about the end of a vacation is the end of stupid public transportation. Our 4:55 flight didn't take off until nearly 6:00; and then despite DIA's miraculous luggage system that cost so much, we had to wait at the carousel for our stuff (which is annoying only because DIA brags that your bags will always precede you to baggage claim); and then we nearly had to hijack a van to take us to our lot. Four shuttles to the Pike's Peak lot had come and gone but none for the Mt. Elbert lot, such that when the fifth Pike's van showed up, the five people waiting for Elbert were going to redirect the driver by force if necessary. Luckily for the driver, the Elbert van did right then show up.

And so we got home to our very anxious buddy. HAO had very kindly picked him up from the vet during the day so he'd be waiting for us, and returned in the evening to feed him when it was evident we'd be late. He had screamed her ear off when she picked him up, telling her exactly what he thought of being away from his flock for ten days, and on her second visit he was a snuggly buddy until it was obvious she was leaving again, at which point he got all pissy again. After we got home, at 10:30, seven hours after we arrived at Logan for a 3.5 hour flight, sleep was the last thing on his mind. He stayed on our shoulders happily as we unpacked and pet his head and did laundry and pet his head, and finally went obediently to bed.