Tuesday, December 28, 2004
Bloviatin' Bloggers Need Breaks too... Hence the week-long silence. Sometimes it's good just to be quiet. And soak things in. This way you pick up the little things you miss when you're banging your own drums all of the time. Plus it has taken a while to shovel out the driveway from its eighteen inches of snow. And slipping down the stairs and falling on my tail bone didn't help either...
The sister-in-law is here visiting thirty pounds lighter than the last time I saw her -- a combination of diet and a brother in Salzburg who is ever the drama-queen of dangerous games e.g. this time last year it was a dangerous game of alcohol and sleeping pills. She wisely did not bring her cell phone with her to the States. Just a carton of cigarettes she's been smoking out in the eighteen inches of snow in our garden. I've secretely checked the Salzburger Nachrichten online and there are no reports of brother-in-laws doing stupid things so that's good...
Indoor icicles. On a particularly cold day, I took the sister-in-law to my no-filter-Camel-smoking friend so that she could enjoy a smoke by my friend's kitchen fireplace rather than outside with the icicles. But alas I think my outdoor winter garden is warmer than inside the friend's 17th century house that goes on the market January 1st -- a victim of its owners' unraveling lives -- a dizzying spiral of bad luck and denial as it were. First the friend's husband lost his travel business after 9/11. Then there was the third floor fire. There was a short reprieve where it looked like things were getting better i.e. the insurance covered $400,000 of repair work to their historic home. But taxes and insurance costs on their third floor Bed & Breakfast rose so high that they couldn't afford to maintain their business. The friend lost her job as a receptionist. Their four grown children still live at home. None holds a job by which he or she could feed him- or herself let alone pay rent. My friend is in her fifties without two nickels of savings to rub together. Try that one on for a reality: being a trapeeze artist ever performing without a safety net to catch you i.e. Welcome to America.
Our Jonathan Franzen Christmas. The son was an absolute jerk Christmas morning. Every maddening trait he possesses came out in full glory and every button of mine he could think of pushing he did. Instead of playing our well-worn Ella Fitzgerald Christmas CD, we played 'Who Can Get on Each Other's Nerves?' So.... what better place to lash back but the Christmas dinner table (the advantage to being a non-sentimental secularist is that holiday decorum does not dissuade a brewing knock-down fight between mother and son). Hubby gave me stern looks at the table but to no avail given he had no recriminations to make following his recent stellar Thanksgiving dinner performance. The sister-in-law looked non-plused. She is heir to a long lineage of Franzen-esque Christmas dinners and would surely have been surprised if this one had gone off without a glitch.
The sparks diffused the tension for the time being and we were soon playing a game of Hearts. But the tension is always there, isn't it? In every family that unique conflux of love and hate.... All of the unspoken and spoken things between people bonded together by strands of DNA: The disappointments. The treachery. The demons. The recognition of your own weaknesses in your son, your daughter, sister or brother, your mother and/or father. It's analagous to trying on a bathing suit in an overly-lit dressing room in the middle of February: all of your bulges, wrinkles, warts, pastiness staring back at you all at once...
Christmas could have been worse. I wonder what the family who was stiffed eight pounds of standing rib roast did? Our dyslexic butcher gave the daughter order #313 instead of #331, so instead of seven pounds, the Bloviation's family ended up with fifteen (eight pounds now relegated to the freezer). It obviously did not strike daughter odd to be spending $120 on meat for five people.... Who cares when you're just swiping mom's ATM debit card. Oh well. Another day, another standing rib roast...
The sister-in-law is here visiting thirty pounds lighter than the last time I saw her -- a combination of diet and a brother in Salzburg who is ever the drama-queen of dangerous games e.g. this time last year it was a dangerous game of alcohol and sleeping pills. She wisely did not bring her cell phone with her to the States. Just a carton of cigarettes she's been smoking out in the eighteen inches of snow in our garden. I've secretely checked the Salzburger Nachrichten online and there are no reports of brother-in-laws doing stupid things so that's good...
Indoor icicles. On a particularly cold day, I took the sister-in-law to my no-filter-Camel-smoking friend so that she could enjoy a smoke by my friend's kitchen fireplace rather than outside with the icicles. But alas I think my outdoor winter garden is warmer than inside the friend's 17th century house that goes on the market January 1st -- a victim of its owners' unraveling lives -- a dizzying spiral of bad luck and denial as it were. First the friend's husband lost his travel business after 9/11. Then there was the third floor fire. There was a short reprieve where it looked like things were getting better i.e. the insurance covered $400,000 of repair work to their historic home. But taxes and insurance costs on their third floor Bed & Breakfast rose so high that they couldn't afford to maintain their business. The friend lost her job as a receptionist. Their four grown children still live at home. None holds a job by which he or she could feed him- or herself let alone pay rent. My friend is in her fifties without two nickels of savings to rub together. Try that one on for a reality: being a trapeeze artist ever performing without a safety net to catch you i.e. Welcome to America.
Our Jonathan Franzen Christmas. The son was an absolute jerk Christmas morning. Every maddening trait he possesses came out in full glory and every button of mine he could think of pushing he did. Instead of playing our well-worn Ella Fitzgerald Christmas CD, we played 'Who Can Get on Each Other's Nerves?' So.... what better place to lash back but the Christmas dinner table (the advantage to being a non-sentimental secularist is that holiday decorum does not dissuade a brewing knock-down fight between mother and son). Hubby gave me stern looks at the table but to no avail given he had no recriminations to make following his recent stellar Thanksgiving dinner performance. The sister-in-law looked non-plused. She is heir to a long lineage of Franzen-esque Christmas dinners and would surely have been surprised if this one had gone off without a glitch.
The sparks diffused the tension for the time being and we were soon playing a game of Hearts. But the tension is always there, isn't it? In every family that unique conflux of love and hate.... All of the unspoken and spoken things between people bonded together by strands of DNA: The disappointments. The treachery. The demons. The recognition of your own weaknesses in your son, your daughter, sister or brother, your mother and/or father. It's analagous to trying on a bathing suit in an overly-lit dressing room in the middle of February: all of your bulges, wrinkles, warts, pastiness staring back at you all at once...
Christmas could have been worse. I wonder what the family who was stiffed eight pounds of standing rib roast did? Our dyslexic butcher gave the daughter order #313 instead of #331, so instead of seven pounds, the Bloviation's family ended up with fifteen (eight pounds now relegated to the freezer). It obviously did not strike daughter odd to be spending $120 on meat for five people.... Who cares when you're just swiping mom's ATM debit card. Oh well. Another day, another standing rib roast...
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