Another myster solved, sort of

Yes it is true. Or not true, depending on what you thought. St DIGITassa of PHALANGEville* is no more apocryphal than so many other saints whose stories I have related, and no less so. That is to say, I made her up on the occasion of April First.

I could become very fond of her, and perhaps she will catch on in hagiographic circles.

*As one of my sharper readers pointed out: Phalangeville? A town named after a finger bone??

This is not a Joke

This is not a joke. We did not play an April Fools Joke on Ned this year. I feel terrible about this. In my vast experience I have never found a better person (victim?) upon whom to play April Fools Jokes. Ned’s perfection for this role derives from his uniquely charming combination of gullibility, innocence, and passionate attachments to all sorts of odd things, e.g. The Green Egg. I felt so badly about this that I apologized to his wife that circumstances beyond my control, as we like to call them, prevented me from moving forward with our plan to have Ned contacted by the Irish Golf Board. She assured Ned that he would not be fooled, at least not today.
But did he believe her? Or me?

I do have an excuse. Yesterday morning I was driving back from my chest x-ray mentally putting the finishing touches on my plot. Then I got home and learned, through her tears, that my niece’s* Slovakian boyfriend had just broken up with her via email. What a Bratislava shit. The focus of the day radically shifted from foolery to solace.

This was followed by more familial drama, which unusual discretion forces me to merely allude to but not explicate. Use your imagination, but I promise you won’t guess. (HINT: one drama involved a B&B, one of whose rooms features a “private prayer nook”.)
Plus there was way more plaster dust everywhere than I anticipated or even thought possible.
And you’re right if you think these are pathetic excuses. That is the nature of excuses.

*currently staying with us.

What to do when it is rain rain raining at Pleasant Pond for days on end?

• Wrack your brain for synonyms for rain & its attributes: deluge, precipitation, perilous precipitation, burst clouds & cloudbursts, torrential downpour, monsoon, cataract, pluvial unloading… swampy, malarial, foetid, muggy, miasmic, wet.
• Study the sky and look for cracks in the clouds that will reveal a leakage of blue; interpret every shift in light as “the sun coming out”.
• Get out the puzzles. Luckily for us – or not? - CSB’s grandmother, L.M., was very fond of puzzles and amassed a collection of wooden jigsaw puzzles featuring bucolic rural scenes. L.M. was born in Bingham, Maine, back when Bingham was a good place to be born. Now that the lumber mill has closed, “hoodlums” hang out on every corner and the Odd Fellows Hall is for sale, along with most every other building. She favored a brand of Wood Interlocking Jigsaw Puzzles made in England and sold at Glencraft, in South Windham, Maine.
• Read the local papers. CSB has turned me into a devoteé of the Morning Sentinel. He has taught me to appreciate obits written by family members: in central Maine every deceased was married to “the love of his/her life” and they are without fail “avid” hunters/fishermen/ outdoorsmen. Women are always “devoted” to their children and/or their husbands; absent those basic appendages it is their nieces, nephews and/or cats to whom the female in question was devoted. Given the state of the local economy, the obituaries are often the most cheerful section of the paper.
• Read about Madame de Staël (1766-1817) and Benjamin Constant (1767-1830). Whenever I see the name Benjamin Constant my ears/eyes perk up, and not on account of my encyclopedic knowledge of French literature. Many years ago I went to the Colombian Amazon. Colombia has a sliver of land that extends down to the Amazon, because of course they want a piece of the Amazonian shore, as any self-respecting country would, and at the tip of the sliver is a town called Leticia. That is where we went. Leticia was a muddy, swampy, humid (Sound familiar? Leticia was MUCH hotter.) dump populated by escaped convicts, three-headed tapirs and defrocked priests. If you walked across the border into Brazil you were in the town of Benjamin Constant*, also a fetid agglomeration of shabby decaying houses. We walked to Benjamin Constant and visited a lopsided church on stilts. Inside the church (Saô Lorenço I think) a tape recorder was plugged into a long extension cord running down the nave, and all day long it played a recording of a Mass, including the music, the sermon in Portuguese, and the mumbled responses. Someone had rigged the recorder to play continuously, though I don’t know how. I didn’t know then that Benjamin Constant had been a lover of Madame de Staël, and I certainly didn’t know that his novel Adolphe (1816) is considered to be, by some, the forerunner of the modern psychological novel. On the other side of Leticia was Peru.
• Play full contact Scrabble. This means we thumb or arm wrestle to determine the correctness of a challenged word. Does TRAVELLER have one or two L’s? I would like it to be 2, because then I also get CURL from CUR. I lost the wrestle.
• Make collages from newspaper and NYRB cuttings.
• Listen to messages on the home answering machine. Long lost friends visiting from afar; a neighbor heading for the beach; a recording of the county executive expressing his deep concern about identity theft and encouraging us to bring our papers to the county’s mobile shredder (little does he know how excited I get by the very thought of a mobile shredder); my dentist reminding me I am six months overdue for a cleaning; and CSB’s x-wife gratuitously casting aspersions on my looks and moral character.
• You know it has rained for too many days when Listening to the Answering Machine is considered an Activity.

* It seems that for all these years I have been mistaken, in error and very wrong about the eponymous Benjamin Constant. The town, according to Wikipedia, was named for a Brazilian military man (1836-1891), who, having been born 6 years after the death of THE Benjamin Constant, I have to assume was named for the French writer and lover.

Fooled

Well I didn’t play a single April Fools joke but my favorite son Tristram did, and was rather successful.
I returned from White Plains mid-afternoon (and trips to White Plains always leave me shaken and disoriented, as if I’d barely escaped the underground laboratory of Balkan jellybean manufacturers) and there was a message from one Sam Rodman, who identified himself as the rector of St Michael’s who would be marrying Tristram and Nika in May. He said he wanted to “better understand Tristram’s religious background” and would I call back at my convenience.
I completely believed this.
But I did not call back immediately and for that I am grateful, because had I called I would very likely have said some rude and inappropriate things about Tristram’s amusing and brief career as an acolyte as well as alluded to my struggles to teach my children the most elementary hagiography in the face of opposition from my ex, the Unitarian.
I was saved by Tristram’s sister who got the same call and spoke at some length to the putative rector. Then, upon hanging up, she realized – and clearly her intuition is better than mine – that it was a hoax.
She shrieked with indignation, but also admiration. She had been truly had.
(Later, CSB pointed out that I should have turned the tables and told Tristram that I lost the phone number (it was Nika’s brother’s cell number, it turns out, their partner in foolery) and looked up the number for the real rector and spoke with the real Sam Rodman who disavowed the whole thing and was rather annoyed.)

We gave Ned B a year off, resting on our laurels from previous successes: the Incident of Parking Enforcement Officer Uriah Binfuled (U. Binfuled) and The Visit of the Green Egg™.