Leavin' on a Jet Plane

The block party looked like such fun last night but we couldn’t go.

Our girl Annie wrote us all an email to say she wanted to see us.

More to the point she wanted to feed us because that’s what Annie does. She knew we were leaving today for Italy and I guess she just wanted to collect all her family members up and look at us all again.

I brought a very old photo album to her place to show them all, a pictorial account of my grandfathers' wedding trip from 1903.

I say 'his' : His bride was along for the ride too of course but because she died at 31 I have trouble thinking of her as a grandmother.

I think of her only as Carrie, who I have heard about all my life. the young mother who died of uremic poisoning in her fifth pregnancy in six years, Carrie with the blue eyes, Carrie who we named our own first child for.

It happens that I have all the letters this honeymooning couple sent home in 1910 and so last night I asked 'our' Carrie if should I take my new silver Sharpie and just carefully print some of the text of those letters inot the book, to illustrate various phrases of the wedding trip based on what they said about it.

"Hmmmm, I don’t think so Mum,” she said in her careful and diplomatic way. “I mean, this is so beautiful as it is, the old black paper, the leather covers. You wouldn’t want to take anything as new as Sharpie to it, would you?"

That’s the difference between us I guess. They are all aesthetically tuned, these three children of ours; they love a thing by leaving it alone. I am historically tuned; I love a thing by learning all about it and trying to pass on what I learned. I want everyone in our family to know our story and well - this album has no markings on it all. You can slide the photos out yes but even they have no writing on the back. Who will remember, I worry? Who will know and remember what happened to us?

That there was this early death and a baby buried in a mother’s arms?

That there was poetry and the Irish Virus which means drinking?

That my father didn’t even ask to see me when I was born and had been gone throughout the pregnancy anyway and then stayed gone for the rest of his life?

Who will remember my grandfather’s sadness? My mother’s willed jauntiness in the face of a society that shunned and feared her as an abandoned woman?

Who will remember and why can’t you write in an album and leave your own imperfect handwriting as part of the record because you will soon one day be dust yourself?

But my judgment is always shaky. And come to think of it my three children do know the story. Annie knows every least detail of it, right down to maiden names and birth dates. Carrie protects the artifacts and reveres them so much you can see it in the way her very hands look as she holds them.

Even our son knows it and talks about it in a very different way: when he was a college senior he did this charcoal at the top here. It is a huge canvas, five feet wide and three feet tall and it depicts the four children at a window just weeks before their mother's death would forever mar them.

He worked from a tiny photo just like the photos in the wedding trip album. In it you can see the shadow of a tree falling over their faces. You can see the shadow of the hat worn by the young soon-to-be widowed father who snapped it. I mean you couldn't think up an image so filled with such foreboding.

This grandfather, this photographer, was not a drinker himself, any more than our abandoned mother or our abandoned aunt who helped raise us and yes her husband drank and left us too so it was deja-vu all over again.

My grandfather was too nervous to let alcohol carry him away. He was like me in that respect and in many other respects and I know this because I lived with him. In our abandoned state we lived with in his house, my sister Nan, and Mom and I, and when he died we had to find someone new to take us and that’s where Aunt Grace and Uncle Jack came in.

Well enough of all this old sadness. I'm getting on a plane with David this evening even though as the classic child-of-a-drinker I distrust fun and fear loss of control…. Still, all of Northern Italy awaits and if a person can’t relax and enjoy 16 days there, I guess she can't enjoy anything.

I'll close with this image of Michael and Carrie from 1899. He is the one with his hands on her mortal head. She is the one already engulfed by waves.

I know but who else knows that the woman next to him perished in the great Influenza epidemic of 1918? I know but who else knows that the man next to her died three weeks before the Armistices, just two months after his wedding day?

And if we didn't - if someone didn't - know all their stories, who would they be to us but strangers on a beach?

Whadda Day

ABE AMONG THE FLOWERS

Is it OK to whine in a blog? I swore off whining in my diaries out of pity for my poor kids who’ll have to go through them all some day and who wants to find out their mother was so petty, writing down how misunderstood she felt all the time or else primly recorded every time her husband looked at her cross-eyed?

No I’ll not burden them. I’ll burden you instead.

On Monday our nice crazy cat Abe disappeared - just vanished into thin air. I noticed it at suppertime when he didn’t come downstairs talking his little black gums off. (He’s one of those really chatty animals.) I asked his sister Charlotte where he was but she wasn’t talkin’. David went out to play tennis and drink Scotch with his pals so I made a fire in living room fireplace thinking “this is the center of the house; if Abe is anywhere in here I will hear him.”

I didn’t though and when David came home and heard he was gone we searched the whole house twice; then he went back outside with a flashlight and looked and listened, even drove around hoping Abe would pop out of the bushes since he loves nothing so much as a ride in your car so long as you’re just going around the block.

No luck though. “He’s in the house,” I told David. “I can feel him; so for the third time that night we searched all three floors and even the cellar. Nada. We slept with our bedroom door open for the first time in 20 years the way we used to do when the kids were babies. “What’s this about?” I asked Dave when he swung it wide. “So he can find us if he comes looking.”

He didn’t though. So the NEXT day I looked for him all over the town and every old newspaper, every piece of tree-limb looked to me like a little grey cat huddled in the gutter, killed by some ruthless fool in a car.

Finally I called my pal Mary, school nurse, veteran of the Oncology Department and the AIDS ward at Mass General Hospital. She’s the one who helped me through my last cat crisis which, when I made it into a column, brought in more letters than any other thing I have written in 27 years. (You can see it - hell you can HEAR me tell it in my own voice but you have to buy my $30 audio-plus-read-it book first ha ha.) Mary said she’d come after supper that night and help me look. She brought her lovely 13-year old Rachel and not eight minutes after they got here we found him - in the skinniest little space behind the door of my son’s third floor bedroom, empty now with Michael off in New York subsisting on a diet of beer and Ramen noodles.

He just stared at us, listless. Mary touched him, studied his face and said “renal failure?” We went right to the all-night animal ER, this gorgeous well-lighted temple of wellness and they operated on him within the hour.

All this was yesterday and I felt OK; I felt as if we were making progress. Because he wasn’t lost anymore, see. I felt as good as you do when you HAVE the baby and then the nurses suggest you let them take it down the hall to the nursery so you can rest and you say yes sure because you’re no fool you know it’s gonna be a LONG 20 years.

So yesterday I was happy. But today when the vet called at 6am she said he was no better really. His bladder didn’t burst and kill him but the catheter in his little neutered pee-pee set up some inflammation and his bloodwork looked iffy and he just couldn’t go home today forget about it and we’re now heading past the $2000 mark billwise but that was OK, right?

So at 6:30am I made my way down to the kitchen and opened up the cabinet with the flower vases, thinking to bring a bouquet to Mary and Rachel and out fell the one thing I have from my mother’s wedding day: a low chunky water glass saved as a souvenir. She used to keep one of the napkins in it from the reception hall. “Longwood Towers” it says in blue embroidery. The napkin was fine but the glass smashed in a million pieces.

Then, not six hours later I was thinking about the 20 Shakespeare enthusiasts who are coming here Tuesday night so we can all read Henry VIII aloud in my living room . I went to the dining room and was vaguely pawing some nice china service pieces when Smash! there went the fine china platter from my mother’s wedding in 1903 and you wouldn’t mind but this poor lady died at age 31 and what kind of a thing was THAT to do to her memory?

So I felt like hell all day and began thinking what were they doing to my baby down the hall in that nursery? I want him back! So I went to visit him. He has his leg in a sort of cast to support his IV tube and he seems to have dandruff or something all of a sudden and at first he tried to say some things about how sore his pee-pee was but in the end settled for purring like mad while I held him.

And now I’m home again and the column is due tomorrow and still has a zillion mistakes in it. But Dave’s got his bridge pals over and they’re drinking MORE Scotch and watching the Celtics so that’s good. That means I can iron and watch my new DVD of Eastern Promises, way too scary a move for David to even see a single scene of. I didn’t eat any dinner so maybe I’ll take that up with me too, then when I’m done put my sorry self to bed, asking forgivingness of my mum and her poor young mum and pulling up the covers to hide my head just like Abe did when we brought him in to the Catheter Cathedral.