Weird Gifts

Here’s an added thing I should say about my weekend trip to New York: the most important thing I did there was to see my youngest child, who moved to that nirvana-for-the-young  after finishing  up at a college not 20 minutes from here. His birthday just rolled around again and for the 5th straight year I didn’t get to see him on it. I did send him an immersion blender.I sent him this because one of his big sisters gave me one and I just adore it. (Imagine! No more having to pour homemade tomato soup into a Cuisinart to make it look like food instead of throwup! No more having to ladle various kinds of goop into a blender! You just sink it into whatever you’ve got on the stove and its tiny steel fangs take it from there. (I picture them like the teeth of the bad gremlin Stripe.:-))  Michael does sometime cook for his pals, I know. That’s why I got him all those crystal glasses last December. I saw them at a consignment shop for a song, this set of stemware for 12, a dozen wines and a dozen waters, with the Mikasa sticker still on the bottom of a few. I bathed each one like a newborn baby, swaddled each in the softest cotton and laid them in what turned out to be four large gift boxes -  and never once stopped to think that of course he couldn’t lug 100 pounds of crystal stemware back to Brooklyn on the bus.“It’s Okay, I’ll just keep them here til you come back” I said, and then blushed fiercely for having spoken aloud my dearest hope: that he  will come back to us, maybe, someday.In the meantime they have sat in my dining room, where every night for some 60 seconds they break into tiny song. It took me forever to realize the source of this music which, when the house is hushed so we can hear it at all, turns out to begin just as the Boston-to-Lowell train that passes some 200 yards away. The glasses don’t even know him yet. is it possible that they’re calling to him just the same?  Watch this 30 second video and see what YOU think:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaHym4-WNG4]

We're Reading Your Thoughts (and We Want Some of That Wine)

Is there a Poltergeist at this vacation house I’m wondering? Because two things: (1) I corked this bottle of wine and the cork kept popping out – shooting out hard and flying five, six feet in the air; and also (2) there was this thing with my TV set..... We had a rainstorm the other night, see, that was so severe it trapped me in the supermarket. FOR AN HOUR AND A HALF I was the only dope in the place.. “Dude, the Parking lot is a TOILET!” said one of the kids working there as he looked out at the rain drumming and the wind howling. It was too: a world of water was circling this one large drain just like when you flush. Another kid finally went and got me an umbrella so to help get me to my car without drowning but the water went all the way to my calves as I fought my way there and then home.

Then when I finally got there, well let's just say I’ve OFTEN thought if Old Dave were ever hit by lightning he probably wouldn’t notice; at least he wouldn’t react in a big way. And he looked ok, meaning he wasn’t all googly-eyed and radiating, but SOMETHING sure as heck happened here because: The computer is history. Ditto two TVs. Plus, the cable is out. AND,  the phones are dead.

It’ll cost us big to replace this stuff if we replace it all and I just couldn’t deal with that thought right then. I kept thinking "If I can just sit down in front of this last TV that still at least turns ON and if I can get its DVD player to work, I'll be OK."  Because I had such HOPES for this vacation week - about how I was going to watch all these episodes of The Wire and finally file all the family photos from 2001 on. I was so hoping the week would be like that. It’s what I pictured all summer long: the peace, the quiet, the chance to sort through things and watch some fine drama uninterrupted. (sigh) I had such hope…

So I poured myself some of that feisty wine, popped in the DVD of Episode 5 Season 3 of The Wire and well, see for yourself: the RIGHT hand part of every shot appears on the LEFT hand side of the screen, while the LEFT hand part appears on the RIGHT so you have to mentally rearrange what you're seeing like someone with dyslexia does (and this happens whatever DVD you put in.)  Also, there’s this one giant black bar that runs vertically down the screen, and another that runs horizontally across it so that only about 60% of the picture is visible.... See?

The TV is in our bedroom and in this shot below as you can see by the reflections on the screen but here’s what’s eerier still - even more eerie than that wine popping its cork every ten minutes. In fact It’s as if the TV can READ MY MIND because here's what appeared, black bars and all just as I snapped the picture:

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I did: I had such hope for this vacation... And now I have some tingly fear besides.