Reading: Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse; Alison Weir, Henry VIII: the King and His Court; Mark Dunn, Ella Minnow Pea; Ursula LeGuin, Unlocking the Air; National Geographic, Eyewitness to the 20th Century; John Leonard, When the Kissing Had to Stop

Moving: lots of walks on the beach, several dog-walkings around the neighborhood, some laps in the pool

Watching: "Gypsy" and "Tempest," two of DMB's favorite movies that we gave her for Christmas and she wanted me to see; "Spiderman," "The Time Machine" (gut-wrenchingly bad, that), and "Panic Room" on DVD; "The Two Towers" in a theatre.

25 December 2002: Christmas

First, a public service announcement: never fly Spirit Airlines. The seats were like lawn chairs, and not like yuppie chaises lounges but like those tattered webbed nylon things on rusty bars with sharp screws sticking out in your great-uncle's backyard.

Second, a public service announcement: by lucky coincidence, Spirit is the only airline that allows pets in the cabin, if you need to bring your small animal anywhere. Blake came with us, and if you don't know how much that reduced my stress level, you haven't been reading that closely. He fretted and whined but didn't shriek on the way down; then two weeks of being cagebound humbled him into stellar angelicness on the way back--maybe he knew we were going home?

I did nearly cry in the car after we were picked up at midnight--by my mother-in-law, whom I was glad to see, and by RDC's sister, into whose presence I thought I could ease myself rather than being thrust into right off. I had to see her that first day, to decorate the tree, and Christmas Eve and Day, but not after that. She doesn't live with her mother and son at this time. And I didn't cry but bucked up and ignored her as best I could.

RDC's nephew RDC2 is much improved. He doesn't whine as much and I did not scruple this time to correct his hygiene ("Blow your nose, don't snuffle") and his grammar ("I seen this," "there's presents!" "I didn't get none") and his diet (no Doritos for breakfast) and his manners ("please" and "thank you" seldom pass his lips). But when he's just being a kid, in the sand at the beach with a bucket or in the waves body-surfing, he's fine and fun to play with.

Once, trying to figure out his "Chamber of Secrets" X-Box game, he was getting nowhere (because he didn't think to look in a book (in the game) to find out how to get out of Knockturn Alley). I closed Unlocking the Air (which I had been reading, just keeping him company in the room, because I want nothing to do with video games: Pajama Sam was my last) and opened a jigsaw puzzle that he'd also received; soon he was helping me assemble the puzzle (a raccoon peering out of a pair of jeans hung on a line). I told him stories--about Misty of Chincoteague when we were in the pool and I was tired of being a boat so I capsized and reappeared as a pony, and Rumplestiltskin when we were stomping sand after the tide ate our castle and it could have been straw, and Perseus after I pointed out Cassiopeia in the night sky (also I showed him how to find Orion all by himself), but he can't sit and follow a book's story. If I can't be his Book Aunt, I can be the Distracting Aunt.

I finally scored with RDC's presents. He always buys himself this or that gadget and I'm averse to outspending him, if that were possible. I gave him the bathrobe, new UConn sweats top and bottom, a few pairs of wool dress socks, and a new cap from Sloppy Joe's (Hemingway's hangout in Key West). He buys himself gadgets and he enjoys the semiannual trip to Men's Wearhouse, but these things he absolutely needed but were too boring to buy for himself. The bathrobe is nearly as old as our relationship and his sweats were all worn through. Don Giovanni, because that's his favorite opera. No kitchen stuff because of weight. And a gadget--a retractable earpiece for his cell phone--because he spelled it out.

And I specifically told him to restrain himself, and he did. I'm glad of my webcam, natch, and I like John Leonard and Madeleine L'Engle and a new skirt and shirt (both gray, because hey, gray! selected from several pages ripped out of various catalogs). My mother-in-law gave me a pair of pyjamas, which I spell with a y because they're all sexy and loungy and a big departure from my FAO Schwartz rocking horse nightshirt. And Staring at the Sea, to replace my 16-year-old tape. When the CD arrived she didn't remember whom it was for. "If it's even vaguely '80s, it's mine. RDC has only jazz, classical, and blues on his wishlist." She showed it to him and he said "That's definitely Lisa's." My stepfather-in-law gave us a tea chest, which is a beautiful luxury. Also a rubber ducky with a squeak that Blake particularly likes.

We spent the middle weekend with my father and notstepmother. I get along with him much better on the phone than in person, where I have to witness how he treats her. Like telling her to boil stone crab claws that she must have blown the grocery budget on, despite stone crab claws always being cooked on the fishing boats, and despite that reboiling a delicacy like a stone crab claw at all, let alone in water polluted by a can of Busch beer, is fairly sacrilegious.

Their part of Florida is beautiful, at least: rolling, not flat as a pancake; with horse and cattle ranches (in the middle of whose fields a palm tree might incongruously sprout); and looking a heck of a lot like the setting of The Yearling--Cross Creek is less than 50 miles away. We saw manatees and I waded in the Gulf of Mexico, disappointing my father by declaring the water cold. It was 58, and when I do happily swim in water that temperature, it's when the air is hot, as in the Grand Tetons.

I'm glad I didn't give my father The Long Walk; I had considered it but it turns out I gave him that last year. We Die Alone might be promising. I gave my notstepmother Girl with a Pearl Earring and to both of them, Nobody's Fool. (Whose movie version finally came along so I, ack, watched that the Saturday we left home as I tacked velcro to the black felt cloak for Blake's travel cage. It was a Master Plots version. It maybe didn't suck, with Paul Newman and Jessica Tandy (and Bruce Willis and Melanie Griffith, well cast in those roles), but it maybe did, with Newman betraying Sully's character to Jessica Tandy. Bleah.) I gave SMW hand lotion, because she asked for some, a melon and cucumber scent from Bath and Body Works that, I said, she could use on a salad if she didn't like as a lotion. She also liked her ornaments, including a faux-cloisonné hummingbird that I was, at the last minute, going to send to my mother instead, and a snowflake hung with blue crystal, and a turtle wearing a santa hat and holding a present (she likes turtles). I made a batch of peanut butter cookies for my father, a double batch actually and I'm glad of that, since when I inevitably burned the first tray I could leave those for my mother-in-law, who likes everything burned.

One present I saved for last. My father had overlooked it and SMW had to point it out to him. He picked it up and unwrapped it, finding a box for a hand lotion from Anthropologie that I had received a few days before. He was flummoxed: hand lotion? He opened that box, removed a tissue paper bundle, and unwound it.

"My spear tip!" he exclaimed. (Okay, so it's not an arrowhead.) He found it in a newly ploughed field in Town Woods, pheasant hunting one morning. His brother-in-law (whose opinion he respects most when it jibes with his own) said it's not of native stone but was probably traded for from far west of Connecticut, Ohioy or so. Whatever, it's still in perfect condition, despite being who knows how old and coming out of a field that'd been ploughed dozens of times. (I was supposed to spell it "plow," wasn't I? "Plough" is prettier.)

There.

And the prejudice, it is not pretty. I shouldn't've told him the following story, because while I knew he would empathize with my offense, his empathy would come from prejudice rather than from pride. When we returned my rented skis, the clerk at the shop asked my name and I gave it. He asked, "Is that with a J or an H?"
"An H!" I exclaimed.
"Well, I wondered, you know, Julio..."
My name's the most Irish in the world. It means Ireland. Had this doofus--20 at the oldest--never read any Yeats? Humph. I was offended by his ignorance, not by his thinking I was maybe Latina.
A few days later when I was getting my new eyeglasses, the optician (who, as is right and proper, had silver hair) repeated my surname and then said, "That's Dutch, isn't it?" What the fuck is wrong with people? But the Julio thing had overset my meters and he was teasing me. Oh. I get it now.

All in all, mostly good though not a vacation. Blake didn't get eaten and my stepfather-in-law dug out his cage from three years ago and supplied the grub to make his chow, Ginger is a cute boxer dog too old not to be trained but with such soft ears, RDC2 was fun, I managed to french-braid two ponytails into Halley's shoulder-length hair, we saw everyone (of which more later), I ate six raw Blue Point oysters and a lot of peppermint bark, I read five books, I appreciated new reasons to admire my mother-in-law, Taz the African Gray relearned to shriek in Cockatielian and also to chuck, and I spent several long days on the beach, swimming, building sand castles, reading, and playing.

Okay, so that last part was a vacation. Listening to the ocean. Running in the sand (the only time I've enjoyed running for exercise is when I ran on my beach). Digging tunnels for the tide to wash into, to collapse the castle above. Floating in salt water. Swimming through real waves. Riding the surf. Getting stung only once on the first day by either a regular jellyfish or a wee little tiny man-o'-war. Reading, mostly books but also, one day, skywriting: "Surrender, Dorothy." (No, actually it read XAVIER IS BOR THANK GOD JES IS LORD. You'd think you'd have to be literate to be a skywriter, not least to earn your pilot's license. Whatever.)

 

Red Hanrahan's Song about Ireland

The old brown thorn-trees break in two high over Cummen Strand,
Under a bitter black wind that blows from the left hand;
Our courage breaks like an old tree in a black wind and died,
But we have hidden in our hearts the flame out of the eyes
Of Cathleen, the daughter of Houlihan.

The wind has bundled up the clouds high over Knocknarea,
And thrown the thunder on the stones for all that Maeve can say.
Angers that are like noisy clouds have set our hearts abeat;
But we have all bent low and low and kissed the quiet feet
Of Cathleen, the daughter of Houlihan.

The yellow pool has overflowed high up on Clooth-na-Bare,
For the wet winds are blowing out of the clinging air;
Like heavy flooded waters our bodies and our blood;
But purer than a candle before the Holy Rood
Is Cathleen, the daughter of Houlihan.

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