Her car, the virgin

In general I don’t get overly excited by birthdays, but there is an exception to every rule, and every year on this date (actually two days ago, I am running late, so please pretend) I make an exception because it is my grandmother’s birthday, the original Reine, my beloved Bonne Maman.
But in all these years of privately celebrating her birthday – she would be 111 today – I had never realized that she and the AAA (American Automobile Association) both entered the world on the same day (March 4, 1902). I don’t know what time she was born, nor do I know at what time of day the AAA was officially born, but I plan to look into this. Let us presume Reine was born at 3 a.m. on March 4th, in Mons, which is a not unreasonable guess, given how babies prefer to born in the tenebrous pre-dawn; in which case it was only 9 pm of March 3rd in Cleveland, Ohio, where the AAA came into existence. So for the purposes of this connection I am attempting to make, we are going to presume my grandmother was born after 6 am.
If the AAA began with the start of the business day, say 10 am, on March 4th, in Cleveland, then it was still March 4th in Mons. So if Bonne Maman was born anytime before midnight that night of March 4th, then there is absolutely no problem about claiming that she shares a birthday with the AAA. In other words, we have to consider when March 4th in Mons overlapped with March 4th in Cleveland: from 6 am to midnight in Mons and from 12 am to 6 pm in Cleveland. Even if the AAA didn’t officially begin until the end of the business day, say at 5 pm, when it would be 11 pm in Mons, then can we still claim their shared birthday.
This gets complicated, as such things often do.
And why is this important?
Because driving in cars played a small but significant role in the lives of my Belgian grandparents. We will briefly address my grandfather, Bon Papa’s fondness for driving. It was a serious fondness. In Egypt he was a member of an Automobile Club, which was not quite like the AAA that shares his wife’s birthday. As far as I can tell, the Egyptian Auto Club was a group of European men who liked to leave their chauffeurs and wives behind, and go driving into the desert. That is all I know.
Meanwhile, Bonne Maman never drove in Belgium or Alexandria or Indo China or Cairo. She was driven. (And unlike her daughter, SBM, she did not find this objectionable.) Then Bonne Maman and Bon Papa moved to the US to be near their daughter and son and assorted grandchildren, and discovered that in the US it is almost impossible to find gentle chauffeurs named Mohammed. Since Bon Papa had a stroke and could no longer drive, Bonne Maman finally had to learn, in her late 50’s.

She bought a beige Oldsmobile with a Fisher body. How do I know this? For all that I know about - and obsess about - my grandmother, I had no idea what model car she drove. I barely know what model car I drive. So this is what I did: First I searched and searched the Internet for grandmother-appropriate cars of the 1960’s, and found nothing that remotely resembled the car I remembered Bonne Maman driving. Then I emailed my siblings and cousins, and my cousin in California is responsible for the phrase “with a Fisher body” which is exhibits a degree of auto-savvy light years ahead of anything I could aspire to. The car was equipped with an early version of automatic transmission, with only 3 speeds. At some later time an air conditioning unit was installed in the middle of the dashboard, so if you sat in the middle of the front (bench seats of course) you could get blasted into Irkutsk.
The important thing about Bonne Maman’s car was that it was a Virgin.
By a virgin, she meant it had no dents or nicks or bruises, that it was as perfectly intact and pristine as it was on her first day on the road. Some grandmothers might like their pubescent granddaughters to be virgins; Bonne Maman apparently only valued virginity in a car. And miraculously, this car remained a virgin, long after it had been driven into the garage wall, long after it both suffered and inflicted numerous dents, scratches, scrapes and hematomas, long after it straddled a fire hydrant and received a speeding a ticket in Wyoming. This car was gave witness to the triumph of pixie dust over epistemological evidence.
“But she is still a virgin,” Bonne Maman repeated in her lovely French accent, each time the car returned from the body shop.
This was all meant to lead us to my road trip story, about the time Bonne Maman and I drove her virginal & re-virginized car out to California, where I would go to college and she would live nearby in Santa Barbara to keep me company. It was a great road trip. But it will have to be told another day. The important detail is the wooden pomegranate.

Also born in 1902, though not on March 4th, were Charles Lindbergh, the Ayatollah Khomeini, Ray Kroc and Ogden Nash. Bonne Maman outlived them all.

Poor Mv Lyubov Orlova. She is currently adrift in the North Atlantic, and no one wants her. Or maybe the soi-disant owner wants her, but he doesn’t want to actually catch her. For the finer points of this question we must refer to Melville’s Moby Dick, Chapter 89, in which he elegantly parses the rules of ownership at sea, to wit: I. A Fast-Fish belongs to the party fast to it. II. A Loose-Fish is fair game for anybody who can soonest catch it. Since the MV Lyubov Orlova is currently fast to no party, then she is a Loose-Fish.
Let me back up. Or go astern as we say in maritime-speak.
About 2 ½ years ago several siblings and I traveled in the Canadian Artic, from Iqaluit to Nanisivik to Devon Island and back to Ungava Bay, aboard the Russian ship, the MV Lyubov Orlova. It now seems we were the last passengers on board. After we debarked, she was headed to Newfoundland to be refitted. But she never got past the harbor at St. John’s. She was finally “arrested” by Canadian authorities for nonpayment of fees owed. The Russian crew on board had not been paid for months, and they had run out of vodka.
The ship is named for a Stalinist era film star. “Volga-Volga” was Joe Stalin’s favorite and we all know of his avocation as a film critic. Her photographs and movie posters decorated the saloon where we drank and played Bananagrams™ or Scrabble™ late into the Arctic night. (Things could get very heated. Do Inuit words count? Vodka was spilled. Glasses were broken. Then we went up to the bridge to view the Northern Lights.)
For almost two years, MV Lyubov Orlova was stuck in Newfoundland; locals raised money to send the poor Russian sailors home. It was cheaper than the alternative. (Use your imagination.)
Meanwhile, the ownership of MV Lyubov Orlova remains a tricky wicket. Back when we were on board, we all knew about the “Owner’s Cabin,” the locked room that stayed locked, on the Captain’s deck. Nobody would speak on the record, but we heard stories about this mysterious and nameless owner who mostly lived in Paris and did Parisian things, but liked to know that at any moment his cabin awaited him. During the more than two years the ship was detained at St. John’s, the nameless owner was unheard from. Neither was the shell company registered in the Cook Islands that is named as owner on the ship’s manifest.
Then in 2012 MV Lyubov Orlova was finally sold to a shipping company for scrap. (That is one version of events.) An American tug boat, the Charlene Hunt, was contracted to tow poor MV Lyubov Orlova south to the Dominican Republic, where underpaid workers could perform the nasty toxic job of dismantling the ship for parts and scrap metal. On the other hand, I have also read that the owner is Reza Shoeybi, an Iranian, who is hoping to snag the vessel back once she floats over to Europe. But I also read that Mr. Shoeybi is the owner of the tugboat that lost her connection to MV Lyubov Orlova. Who knows why it happened, but it did: on their first day out to sea the tow-line broke and in the 35 mph winds and high seas, the tugboat’s crew were unable to reattach the ship. A few days later a Canadian vessel, the Atlantic Hawk, secured the ship and managed to get her out of range of drifting into off-shore oil rigs and platforms, where a rogue Russian ice breaker/cruise ship could do a lot of damage. Once they had her in international waters, out of danger’s way, the Atlantic Hawk cut her loose. So there she floats; she could end up anywhere from Norway to West Africa, or she could just get caught in the North Atlantic gyre and spend eternity. A Loose-Fish if ever there was one.
But if you do hear of MV Lyubov Orlova being made fast anywhere, I would like to know, because I think my missing hairbrush is still on board, in Cabin 417, along with my sister’s lovely fleece hat with pompoms.

My so-called life in hip-disturbia

At first I had no idea what was going on. All those emails from old boyfriends and ex-colleagues, giving the strange impression that - after years of radio silence - they would like to be in contact with me again.
There was even a message from Amber, congratulating me for finally going gluten-free and vegan; years ago we had this ridiculous-in-retrospect falling out over butter. I had no idea I felt so passionately about butter, in a positive way; she felt just as passionately in the other direction, and suggested that my pro-butter stance verged on the lurid/kinky. Our friendship was sundered. Until now.
Joe D., who cast aspersions on my lineage, my intelligence, my sexual proclivities and even my taste in pets, when we broke up after the unfortunate incident with the capybara, emailed me to say that in the intervening decades he has embraced the varieties of human experience, that all is forgiven, and do I know any real estate agents? (Everyone in hipsturbia knows real estate agents. There are more real estate agencies than yoga studios. Though there are more hair salons than either.)
Strangest of all, by a factor of a gazillion and three, was hearing from Sister Flight into Egypt. Back when I was reading Nancy Drew mysteries on my lap during religion class in parochial school, I thought Sister Flight was about a hundred years old. I was very wrong. She is still very much alive, she has left the order, come out of the closet, and works on a biodynamic herb farm in upstate New York. She and her partner had apparently wanted to move back to the city and had set their sights on Brooklyn, until they read about our own hipsturbia up the river. I have no idea how she found me, but she did, and she said she had always know I was reading Nancy Drew mysteries while she expounded on the difference between mortal and venial sins; though now she understood my creative noncompliance as an early harbinger of the hip adult I must surely be, living as I do in hipsturbia. Oh, and she is no longer known as Sister Flight into Egypt. She is once again the Susie Shaughnessy of her youth.
I was beginning to see a pattern. And then CSB clued me in: it wasn’t me, it was Hastings. Apparently the paper of record singled out our village, though only in a “Wittgensteinian sort of way”, for the dubious distinction of “hipsturbia”.
I have no idea what it means to be a village in a Wittgensteinian sort of way, or even a Augustinian sort of way, or even less a Nietzschean sort of way. No more will I abide by Wittgenstein’s famous dictum from the end of Tractatus, in which he says: Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

The ever-increasing body of questions I don’t know the answers to:

On President’s Day Leda and I went to Sushi Mike’s for lunch. Leda loves sushi and is quite a connoisseur. At her age the only fish product I ate (and complained about it) was a Mrs. Paul’s fish stick, so this sophisticated palate of hers continually amazes me.
Upon entering Sushi Mike’s we passed by a tank of water full of brightly colored tropical fish.
I asked her, So Leda, what’s your favorite fish in the aquarium?
Nana, that’s not an aquarium.
Then what is it?
A fish tank.
Point taken. Ok, so what it your favorite?
The pufferfish.
That’s not a pufferfish, I said.
Of course it is.
A pufferfish is the second most venomous vertebrate in the world, I said. It would be a very bad idea to have one right at the entrance to a restaurant. What if it jumped out and bit you?
It’s not going to. What’s the most venomous? Leda asked.
The golden poison frog, I said, pleased with myself. I was on safer ground here.
Leda said, But this is a pufferfish, and they don’t jump.

Then we sat at our table near the window, with this elegant view of two ceramic sumo wrestlers.
Leda asked, Aren’t they allowed to use their hands?
I checked, and – at least in this lovely piece of sculpture – neither wrestler was touching the other with hands. Yes, their bodies touched and strained again the opposite’s number’s vast weight and effort, but hands were not involved.
I have no idea, I said. This was true.
I guess they just squash each other, Leda said.
That appears to be the goal, I said.
What if a golden frog jumped on of them? Then he’d be dead and the other guy would win without using his hands.
I doubt golden poison frogs are allowed in wrestling rings, I said.
Oh Nana!

Later I checked on line and it seems Leda was correct: that was a pufferfish.

Every family has their myths, the stories they tell in lieu of the real stories, the stories they tell to make themselves appear interesting or sane or law-abiding, or not. Our family had the story of my mother’s belly dancing past.
We presume the story started with my father, but he is dead now so we can’t check that fact, and even when he was alive, his memory of the sixty-plus years that constituted his life with my mother was the part of his memory that was largely eviscerated by the stroke. What remained intact, oddly, was his capacity to fully engage in the myth-making.

The myth was not complicated. The myth was that she was a belly dancer in her youth. My mother (known to my readers as SBM, or Sainted Belgian Mother) grew up in mostly in Cairo, Egypt. She was not Egyptian. She was the lithe and elegant daughter of a Belgian oil executive and his beautiful Belgian wife. Whatever African blood my mother had was last seen when her earliest ancestors departed East Africa and the mitochondrial Eve, headed north, crossed the Red Sea during the African Ice Age, and ended up in the Anatolian/Caucasian region. Eventually they traveled west in Europe, coinciding with the spread of the Aurignacian culture. As you can imagine, from there it was a mere matter of a few thousand years to waffles, frites, moules, 800 varieties of beer, TinTin, and Manneken Pis.
My mother did not have a belly dancer’s build, which as children we were led to believe involved serious avoirdupois, particularly in the mammary glands and the ventral region, that undulating belly of a thousand and one nights. But according to the myth, despite her slenderness and flat chest, the young Belgian schoolgirl one of Cairo’s most sought-after and scintillating belly dancers. Her specialty was the Dance of the Seven Veils, which she performed with seventeen veils. It was on an early business trip to purchase cotton waste from purveyors of the famously soft Egyptian cotton, that my father was taken for a night on the town, and encountered La Monica of Belgica, Belly-dancing sensation. He was smitten, and the rest is history.
My father loved to tell us this story. When he and Mom returned from vacations or dinner parties, he often vividly described how my mother, only slightly inebriated, would willingly belly dance atop a table and impress the assembled friends, and business acquaintances with her skill and dexterity. As children, we too were impressed and frequently told our friends that our mother was a belly dancer. As far as we could tell, they all believed us.

Then this morning, I read in the New York Times, that the popular Al-Tet ‘belly dancing channel’ is being forced off the air for ‘operating without a license’. You can thank the Muslim Brotherhood for another cultural icon thrown to the infidels.
Is it possible that SBM must now single-handedly carry the banner of belly dancing into the New World?

A question of sexing

So this morning I wake up rather early, but nowhere near as early as CSB, who is already in the kitchen listening to the morning news.
I greet him and ask if he wants to hear my dream.
He does not.
I have some bad news, he says. O dear, I think, what else could the pope do?
What? I ask.
I heard some noises in the chicken coop earlier.
Oh no, I say.
We have a rooster.
A rooster! Is that all? I thought a fox had gotten into the henhouse last night.
It must one of the new ones, but it’s unmistakably crowing.
I guess chicken sexing is not a perfect science, I say.

Later today I spend some quality time in the henhouse trying to discover and photograph the rooster in question.This is the result and no, he/she did not make any effort to stand still for the camera.
Last fall we got 24 new pullets, Rhode Island Reds, Buff Orpingtons and Ameraucanas. When you get that many chickens McMurray’s throws in a bonus exotic breed, also, presumably, a pullet. The sad news, on top of the bad news, is that it appears that the rooster and the exotic bird are one and the same. I don’t know exactly what kind he/she is, but – except for that white patch on the wattle – he looks like a Welsummer. Rather handsome too, I think.

This is a certified Welsummer rooster, from the Internet.

And later the same day