Why my book is not finished. Excuse # 743

I have come next door to visit Mom and bring her various things: the newspaper, fresh eggs, batteries, a book about Ethiopia, chicken Marbella I made yesterday. I’ve fixed the curtains in her bedroom, and deciphered a name on a piece of mail. (A very old Belgian friend. “I never liked him,” she told me.) Now it is time for me to get going.
Me: Bye Mom.
Mom: Where are you going?
Me: Home, next door.
Mom: Well what for?
Me: I have to get to work.
Mom: Oh? What are you working on?
Me: I am writing a book.
Mom: That’s nice. What is it about.

Me: It’s a novel about a Hungarian man who develops a rare disease and tries to cure himself with horseshoe crab blood, and his ex-wife, who still loves him, but had an unfortunate affair with an ex-felon, and their daughter who is obsessed with language and a boy named Henry.
Mom: Why is he Hungarian?
Me (One foot out the door): It seemed like a good idea at the time.
Mom: Your father and I went to Hungary, but we didn’t like the food.
Me: (Curbing the impulse to tell her that they never went to Hungary, because it is bad form to contradict an Alzheimer’s Assertion, and I know that claiming to have been in every country ever mentioned is a compensatory mechanism for her these days.) It doesn’t take place in Hungary. It mostly happens on Cape Cod.
Mom: What is Cape Cod?
Me: It’s right near where you lived for sixty years. We used to go there in the summers.
Mom: I don’t think so, but if you say so.

Me: Thank you. I’ll see you later.
Mom: What is it called?
Me: What?
Mom: The….. the thing you are writing.
Me: I’ll let you know when it’s done.
Mom: When will it be done?
Me: Never. If I keep answering questions.
Mom: But when can I read it?
Me: When it’s done.
Mom: So when will it be done?
Me: Soon, but now I have to go.
Mom: You never talk to me.

Travel notes

PHILADELPHIA is where best-beloved daughter and Michael Brownstein recently celebrated their marriage, which in fact occurred one year ago, but they have their own version of chronology.

Philadelphia is where my ophidiophobic* sister and I were strolling beside the river when we saw a pudgy man striding along with a fat yellowish snake, about 8 feet long, wrapped around his waist and draped over his shoulder. He would periodically stop, look around to see who was watching, and then stroke his snake, call her a “lovely girl” and a “pretty missy” and then kiss her on the lips. Or the mouth. I don’t actually know if snakes have lips. My poor sister ran ahead in a state of profound misery. Instead of following to hold her hand, as a good sister would have done, I stayed behind to learn that the snake in question was an albino reticulated python, and that she had a very mellow temperament. I asked how one could discern a snake’s temperament. Her pudgy keeper told me that she liked to sit on the couch and watch reality television with him. As if that proved his point. I would like to say for the record that kissing your snake in public is not a good idea.

This is what an albino reticulated python looks like when she is not being kissed.

Philadelphia is also home to the Hyrtl Skull Collection, in the Mütter Museum at the College of Physicians. The collection was amassed by Joseph Hyrtl. He was born in 1810 in Austria, where his father played the oboe in Count Esterhazy’s band. In university Hyrtl studied the osseous systems of fish and later collected over 800 fish skeletons. He also collected organs of hearing. But it is The Skulls for which he is best remembered. There are 139 skulls, mostly from Central and Eastern Europeans. And each one has a hand-written placard giving the nationality, the name, age, religion if known, occupation, means of death, and a description of any skeletal anomaly. In his collection there are 16 suicides and 11 executions. Here is a small sample of his captions:

Szigeth (Hungary or Romania)
Geza Uirenyi, 81; Reformist, herdsman. At age 70 attempted suicide by cutting his throat. Wound not fatal because of ossified larynx; laryngeal fistula remained. Lived until 80 without melancholy.

Prague
Araschtan Gottlieb, 19
Suicide by potassium cyanide because of suspected unfaithfulness of his mistress.

Magyar (Hungarian)
Jaska Soltesz, age 28
Reformist, soldier. Died of pneumonia.
Everted Gonial angles (bilateral); dental caries, potential abscessing.


Magyar (Hungary) from Transylvania
Ladislau Pal
Reformist, guerilla and deserter
Executed by hanging, 1861.
Bilateral flare of gonial angles.

North Hungary
Julius Farkas, 28
Protestant, soldier
Suicide by gunshot wound to the heart because of weariness of life.
Depressed nasal root.

*this is not the only thing she has in common with Indiana Jones.

Just in: a patron saint for panic attacks

I think I may have discovered a patron saint of Panic Attacks – Saint Romuald. I didn’t know I was seeking one, but clearly, given my delight upon finding him, I must have been.

Much is known about Saint Romuald (950-1027):
He did not live to be 120, contrary to early reports.
As a youth, he was a slave to his passions.
Then he watched as his father killed a man in a duel. Romuald was so traumatized that he fled straight to a monastery and stayed there for 3 years practicing austerities.
For the next thirty years he wandered around Italy founding monasteries. Based on a dream of white-robed monks climbing a ladder, he changed the official garb of his monks from black to white. But these are not why I think he should be the patron of Panic Attacks.
No, this is. Apparently Romuald always had this fantasy of going to Hungary and preaching to the Magyars (barbaric Slavs beholden to paprika) but when he did finally go he was stricken with a mysterious illness the instant he set foot in the country. He tried repeatedly to get himself to Hungary, but each time the mysterious illness returned.
Hungary for Romuald: Cocktail parties for me.


More observations upon putting all my books alphabetically on the shelves.
W is a full of women writers and in particular women writers of whom I tend to own many copies : Wharton, Wesley, Woolf (she alone represents almost 3 feet of shelf), Welty, Weldon, and Winterson. There is no other letter – on my book shelves – with so many women so amply represented.