Reading: Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children, though not noticeably

Water: swam in the lake

16 June 2002: Stepfamily

Sunday dawned rainy in Storrs but the men set bravely off to kayak. I might have gone except I had no certainty that the trip would be over by noon as planned (nope: four o'clock). Instead I spent a wonderful, peaceful morning with Nisou and her mother and our baby, and left at noonish for Old Lyme. The sky brightened enough by Norwich that I left the highway there for the slower if more direct and infinitely prettier route to my lake. By the time I got to the forest, it was nearly sunny. Thank heaven, literally this time.

A sheepdog ran to greet me and I thought its humans were calling it "Angus" (is there Scottish sheepdog breed?) but it turned out to be Mingus. "That's a jazz album, isn't it? No, someone's last name." The humans, kayakers who'd found my lake through the Appalachian Mountain Club, were pleased that I knew Charles Mingus, hailed from Massachusetts, and were all bundled up and vaguely horrified and amused by my plunge into the water. And it was pretty damn chilly, after a cool spring and yesterday's rain. But I swam a good distance.

In the Bowerbird, I found a card for BDL (blank, but what the hell, it was Father's Day and they were out of specialty Father's Day cards, and I wouldn't've at all except that I saw my sister had sent him one and I was going to a Father's Day picnic) and a blue-figured pottery bowl for Charenton. At my mother's house, I found my mother and BDL, and away we went in two cars to the younger German Shepherd's house.

Two cars, you betcha. My father wasn't too scary a driver; my heart was in my throat on the highway last year with my sister who didn't then drive regularly; my mother, zounds. Besides that the truck is big, as I've mentioned, it apparently handles like the tank it is. So anyway I didn't trust myself to keep my temper if I had to ride in the truck again. I drove my little VCR on wheels.

At the GS's house were the two Shepherds, the husband of the younger, his sister, their parents, the sister's two children, my mother, her husband the GS's father, and me. And a hellion of a cat named Julio. And some form of large video game. I didn't look closely but I think I have seen my first Nintendo or X-box or whatever it was. I didn't stay in the living room very much, not being fond of televisions at parties and less of video games. I did go in to say hello to the older GS, who is not excessively mobile. We had made allies at the wedding; the last time I saw her was at Grampy's funeral. Sadly, she's become chronically ill. She has rejoined her father's cult and so, at the end of the Spain-Ireland World Cup match currently being televised, when the victorious Spaniards threw themselves into a huge pile of glee and thighs, and my mother, possibly incapable of experiencing joy herself and mostly incapable of understanding it in others, said, "I sure wouldn't want to be at the bottom of that" there was no eye for me to catch to indicate that I felt rather the opposite.

It was a long cookout. The younger GS and I chatted easily still, and the two tease each other about the older's illness in a very CLH-LJH kind of way that I was glad to see. The older even calls the younger by her middle name, just as CLH calls me by her faux-frainch version of mine. But there was little conversation I could participate in. Mostly I listened and smiled. I had my books in the car but wondered if reading one of my hosts' books would be more polite. Among the Left Behind series, Stephen King, and not much else, I found The Perfect Storm, which was apropos.

My mother told me last month that the reason RDC doesn't have MS is that she submitted his need or case, or whatever they would call it, to her prayer chain. There is a list on her fridge of 31 names; each day of the month that day's person fasts and prays for all the various people. When my coworker told me he had prayed for RDC, I thanked him sincerely. I do believe that faith can affect outcomes. When my mother told me RDC doesn't have MS because of her prayer chain, I said something noncommittal. I didn't say, "Oh, that's interesting, because I didn't tell you that he might have MS until it was evident that he didn't have MS [right now]." I didn't say that, because the nature of MS is that anyone can get it any time, or at least people of European ancestry who live in northern latitudes and aren't 50 yet, such that the "anyone" includes us still, and in the spirit of the disabled calling the able-bodied the "temporarily abled," I'm not dancing around claiming immunity for me and mine. I didn't say, at the time or later, that that prayer chain didn't do much for the older GS, whose chronic illness is, in fact, relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis. Because that would be mean. But my mother's selective memory taking retroactive credit for RDC's being spared narrows my eyes.

But I was good, I really was. I didn't snap, and not-snapping often entails keeping my trap shut, and maybe silence is not as friendly as accord, but I did my best, and I damn well don't require accord in my relationship with my mother. Just not snapping.

Fr'instance, the following morning at her house she continued to try to empty her house into my lap. (She called my father a packrat, which she didn't even mean as the joke it was.) She had to drag up the reproduction thing again, and said, "I know you girls say you don't want children but just in case I wonder if you would like them to have your father's coonskin cap." I told her if she wanted to get rid of it she should send it to him, since it's his, not hers, to give away. I also pointed out that it reeked. I didn't say anything about how seriously she takes my assertion ("you girls say") or how much she obviously does not sympathize with the fact that my sister's decision has not been wholly voluntary. I didn't steal the arrowhead from her china cabinet for my father, but I shouldn't've told her he wants it back, which he does. Even before she became part Cherokee, I doubt she would ever return to him an artifact not even remotely possibly Cherokee that he lifted from his own Connecticut woods as a boy.

When I said that yes I would like two of Granny's paintings, she wanted me to put them in my luggage. I took a page from Miss Manners' book and said no, it just wasn't possible. When she continued that they were small and flat (not noticing that they were framed and not flat), I repeated that it was impossible. When she continued to press, I failed to snap at her that I always pack the smallest fucking piece of luggage available and will never pack an empty bag just in hopes she will be able to cram it full of detritus. I merely said that no, it was impossible to fit them. Goddamn it.

We had a companionable breakfast on the deck, seeing a hawk and a bluebird (which she said isn't rare?) and a young buck and the turkeys before finally I was permitted to escape to my lake. It was a beautiful day, clear and warm and sunny, and I pointed out the beaver lodge yesterday's kayakers had shown me to two little boys there with their father, found a mockingbird's nest, swam again to the east end, and sat on a rock at the lapping shore, my back against a towel on the bank, and read.

The boys' father and I chatted some, and he observed that Denver's a long way away. "Living in exile," I said, a truth spoke in a jesting tone. He pointed out, reasonably, that not many people would consider Denver to be exile. Not many people had the grace to grow up near this lake, I returned evenly. Denver has no swimming except in city pools. "It doesn't?" he was surprised. He'd've thought it would have lots of places "like this." I was facing the lake so I hope he didn't see me roll my eyes. Jumping jehosophat, people, do you think the state would be burning down if it had ample water? I pointed out what seems boneheadedly obvious to me, that Denver is not in the mountains but on the high arid plains and not awash with tempting little ponds.

He wasn't a complete chowderhead: he said he didn't think he could live so far from the ocean.

After her hair appointment, I met my mother back at the house. It occurs to selfish petite moi only now that I should have remembered what she was doing that day--two hours!--and said something, but I didn't. If her hair had looked any different I might have. Ooops.

She wanted to go to the Bowerbird and there had been a ferny vase that reminded me of her--she has a ferny bedspread now and bought lamps to match it--so we went. I showed her the vase, asking if she liked it, considering a present for her, but the first thing she looked at was not the design but the price, because she took it from my hands with her own tilted, to turn it bottom, therefore price sticker, up. At the Bee & Thistle Wednesday she had said something about Sunday being the other half of my birthday present, and so I thought she had understood and appreciated my statement that my birthday present was one entire pleasant day with her (for Sunday, the second day, to be the other half). But no, the other half of my birthday present (because the lunch hadn't cost enough) was to come from the Bowerbird. I told her I had had my present, which I had. Same planet, different worlds.

I needed to go in the drugstore again, because when my sister saw the tawdry Old Lyme sweatshirt I snapped up the week before, she said I could leave that with her when I left. And I would have except it was rainy and cold that day. So I was going to buy her her own. "Did she give you the money to make this purchase?" my mother asked. No. She tsked at either my sister's taking advantage of me or my stupidity in not perceiving that I was clearly being taken advantage of. Again, same planet, different worlds.

After a stop at Hallmark's--a milkshake for me, coffee ice cream with chocolate syrup, and fries for her--finally she manuevered her sedan to the beach. Veeery slowly. Her podiatrist tells her "it's a concrete world." Aha, again, same planet different worlds. Her world is concrete, because she never goes off-road. The world I make out of the same town has springy beach sand, firm below the high water mark and slippery above, and trails through state forest, and unpaved bits of old road near her own house. Anyway, I suggested that if walking was okay for her foot, here was a nice unpaved place to walk. I didn't lecture and say she ought to walk--it was my other parent who'd shove you back on the horse right after it trampled you, metaphorically speaking, my other parent whose example I followed when I continued to bike all over town with a cast on my arm--and I hope she heard my suggestion to walk on the beach if the podiatrist allowed walking at all in the spirit I offered it. Probably not. Whatever.