At Least Eleven

A HOUSE WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

"The Long Road Home"
Painting by my talented cousin and mixed media artist
Pam Carriker
who lives art at the speed of life and vice versa!
Thanks Pam!
I can't say I was ever a huge fan of The Divine Secrets of the Ya - Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells, but I always smile in sympathy when recalling Sidda's trip home (at age thirty - something) to introduce her fiance to her mother. As they pull into the driveway and her mother comes out, Sidda "tried not to feel five years old. She tried to feel at least eleven" (336).

Nearly fifteen years have passed since I first read those words back in 1999, yet they are still ringing true! How accurately that phrase -- "at least eleven" -- captures my own experience of trying to feel (and act) like an adult when the family gathers and it suddenly becomes so difficult to feel twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, even sixty. Just ask my oldest brother Dave or my younger sister Di, who heard me quoting the phrase more than once this past weekend.

Family Reunion
with my sister Di (left) and cousin Alicia (center)

Girls Together ~ Women Together
When my oldest brother referred to himself as "a sixty year old man just trying to stand up and say enough," I couldn't help thinking of my favorite story -- "The Third and Final Continent" -- in Jhumpa Lahiri's Pulitzer Prize winning collection Interpreter of Maladies. In this story, a young, twenty - something, male student from India comes to work at MIT and rents an upstairs room in the home of a very elderly woman. After a few days, the landlady's daughter, also elderly, comes by to check that everything is okay for the new renter.

Here's what happens:

On Sunday there was a knock on my door. An elderly woman introduced herself: she was Mrs. Croft's daughter, Helen. She walked into the room and looked at each of the walls as if for signs of change, glancing at the shirts that hung in the closet, the neckties draped over the doorknob, the box of cornflakes on the chest of drawers, the dirty bowl and spoon in the basin. She was short and thickwaisted, with cropped silver hair and bright pink lipstick. She wore a sleeveless summer dress, a necklace of white plastic beads, and spectacles on a chain that hung like a swing against her chest. The backs of her legs were mapped with dark-blue veins, and her upper arms sagged like the flesh of a roasted eggplant. She told me she lived in Arlington, a town farther up Massachusetts Avenue. "I come once a week to bring Mother groceries. Has she sent you packing yet?"

"It is very well, Madam."

"Some of the boys run screaming. But I think she likes you. You're the first boarder she's ever referred to as a gentleman.

"She looked at me, noticing my bare feet. (I still felt strange wearing shoes indoors, and always removed them before entering my room.) "Are you new to Boston?"

"New to America, Madam."

"From?" She raised her eyebrows.

"I am from Calcutta, India."

"Is that right? We had a Brazilian fellow, about a year ago. You'll find Cambridge a very international city."

I nodded, and began to wonder how long our conversation would last. But at that moment we heard Mrs. Croft's electrifying voice rising up the stairs.

"You are to come downstairs immediately!"

"What is it?" Helen cried back.

"Immediately!"

I put on my shoes. Helen sighed.

I followed Helen down the staircase. She seemed to be in no hurry, and complained at one point that she had a bad knee. "Have you been walking without your cane?" Helen called out. "You know you're not supposed to walk without that cane." She paused, resting her hand on the bannister, and looked back at me. "She slips sometimes."

For the first time Mrs. Croft seemed vulnerable. I pictured her on the floor in front of the bench, flat on her back, staring at the ceiling, her feet pointing in opposite directions. But when we reached the bottom of the staircase she was sitting there as usual, her hands folded together in her lap. Two grocery bags were at her feet. She did not slap the bench, or ask us to sit down. She glared.

"What is it, Mother?"

"It's improper!"

"What's improper?"

"It is improper for a lady and gentleman who are not married to one another to hold a private conversation without a chaperone!"

Helen said she was sixty-eight years old, old enough to be my mother, but Mrs. Croft insisted that Helen and I speak to each other downstairs, in the parlor. She added that it was also improper for a lady of Helen's station to reveal her age, and to wear a dress so high above the ankle.

"For your information, Mother, it's 1969. What would you do if you actually left the house one day and saw a girl in a miniskirt?"

Mrs. Croft sniffed. "I'd have her arrested."

Helen shook her head . . .

***********************************
Even after sixty - eight years, poor Helen is still struggling to feel "at least eleven" in the presence of her mother. I don't want that to be my fate; and I understand exactly what my brother meant when he wrote that sixty years old is old enough!
~ Additional Connections ~
1. My dear friend Cate provided me with this excellent mantra to carry in my heart and in my head when traveling to see the family (or anyone else for that matter):No appointments; no disapppointments.
C. K. Ramaswamy Gounder, 1914 - 2002
aka, Swami Satchidananda Saraswati
2. Words of Wisdom from Brian Andreas at StoryPeople:

Why do they treat us like children? they said
& I said why do you treat them like adults?
& their eyes opened wide
& they began to laugh & talk all at once
& suddenly everything looked possible again.
Sign up for Story of the Day
3. Favorite dialogue from The Office:

Michael: This is where I belong.
This is my home,
and home is where the hardest.
Oscar: Home is where the heart is.
Michael: Heart is. That makes a lot more sense.
Actually, as is so often the case, I think Michael might have had it right the first time; for indeed, so / too many times, "Home is where the hardest."

Home for Christmas Card from Pam

4. As I wrote earlier in the summer about my "Ancestors":

"We have all rejected our beginnings and
become something our parents could not have foreseen."
from the novel Fifth Business (248)
by Robertson Davies
5. Apparently, even the gods must struggle at times to feel "at least eleven":

I wonder now about Demeter and Persephone. Maybe Persephone was glad to run off with the king of death to his underground realm, maybe it was the only way she could break away from her mother, maybe Demeter was a bad parent the way Lear was a bad parent, denying nature, including the nature of children to leave their parents. Maybe Persephone thought Hades was the infinitely cool older man who held the knowledge she sought, maybe she loved the darkness, the six months of winter, the sharp taste of pomegranates, the freedom from her mother, maybe she knew that to be truly alive death had to be part of the picture just as winter must. It was as the queen of hell that she became an adult and came into power. Hades’s realm is called the underworld, and so are the urban realms of everything outside the law. And as in Hopi creation myths, where humans and other beings emerge from underground, so it’s from the underground that culture emerges in this civilization.
from A Field Guide to Getting Lost
by Rebecca Solnit
The Return of Persephone, 1891
(Hermes helping Persephone to return to her mother
Demeter after Zeus forced Hades to return Persepone.)

by English artist, Frederic Leighton, 1830 - 1896
SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Wednesday, August 28th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading: "Girls of Summer"
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

That Old Blue Willow Has Me in Its Spell

A BREAKFAST ROOM
WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUSThe Epicure

This painting appeared first in The Seven Ages of Childhood, 1909
by American author of verse and parodies
Carolyn Wells, 1862 - 1942
& American illustrator of magazines and children's books
Jessie Willcox Smith, 1863 - 1935
(later reprinted as a Vintage Green Tiger Press Postcard)

Blue Willow
My fate might not have been the dreamer's,
No time for prose and all for froth,
If the ware had not been old blue willow
From which I supped my daily broth!

A child, I lived the quaint tradition,
I was the Chinese maid, Kong Shee,
Flitting the bridge with Chang, the lover,
From the convent house by the willow tree.

I drained my mug at every serving
To rid it of its milky sea
And bring to light a gull still sailing
Above the swaying willow tree!

A whimsy thought but one for toying,
For who has power to estimate
The end of a young poetic fancy
When nurtured from a willow plate?

by Mildred D. Shacklett

Shacklett's poem can be found in the well - loved
anthology from my formative years:
The American Album of Poetry
compiled by American radio personality
Ted Malone, 1908 - 1989


Malone's book, filled with sentimental selections and companionable commentary, nurtured my poetic fancy as did the traditional Blue Willow bread and butter plates upon which my grandmother served us many a childhood breakfast of "dippy eggs and toast soldiers." When I got married, I also grew enamored of Wedgwood's pastel rendition of the pattern called "Chinese Legend," that Gerry and I discovered on one of our trips to England in the early 90s:


At the suggestion of my friend Ann de Forest, I recently read Rebecca Solnit's extended essay, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, which carries a recurring theme of "The Blue of Distance." I guess it should not have come as a surprise to find Blue Willow amongst the ubiquitous images of blueness!

I was touched by the truth and beauty of Solnit's insight into our ageless attraction to "that blue - and - white stuff whose most familiar imagery is also a small tale of tragedy, the blue willow pattern of birds, trees, water, and separated lovers, like the items of a song you could drink from, teacups that would always be a cup of sorrow" (125).

Ah, a cup of sorrow.

****************

Some Nice Books for Children & Collectors
"She was seeing what no one else in that room could see. Leaning willows and running water. Blackbirds balancing precariously on slender reeds. The river. . . . Her eyes were fixed on the ragged line of blue - green foliage that marked the river. There the willows grew, and in amongst them would be shade and running water and an endless number of delights that Janey couldn't have listed but which she could feel very plainly in her bones. It was the same feeling she always had when looking at the willow plate. Something fine was about to happen" (66 - 68).
****************

"One morning Chang wrote, 'As the willow blossom falls onto the water, so my heart flies to you. Meet me on the banks of the river, as the tide turns under the moon.' When night came, the lovers finally met under the weeping willow, hidden from the Great Pagoda by an apple tree."

****************
"It was some time later, while the last leaves were still on the willow, turning yellow from cool evenings, that there was a cloudburst in the late afternoon. The merchant was at his scrolls, writing with black ink and an empty heart, when he heard the villagers cry out on the opposite shore of the river, and he went to the window.

"His heart leapt at the sight, for just above the foot bridge that led to his daughter's pavilion, there appeared a most wondrous rainbow of every color, and while the villagers watched, and while the merchant watched, two swallows fluttered above the willow tree and kissed, their wings making the sound of wind in bamboo."


SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Wednesday, March 28th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT ~ Willow Willow Willow
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

Detail from The Epicure