Untrammeled water

The day before yesterday.
First of all my computer guy’s Emotional Support Dog (Ozzie, a Papillon, admittedly a very appealing dog) peed on the red club chair in the living room. Being about 6 inches high, Ozzie stood in front of the chair, lifted his tiny leg, and squirted the red fabric. (See below. Not to scale.)


I’ve had that chair and its mate forever, at least since my grandmother moved out of her house and no longer had a sewing room. The chair and its mate were made in the 1940’s by Italian craftsman (apparently, or according to my mother, Italian craftsman made all the finest furniture) in Egypt, and resided in Bon Papa’s study in the house in Mahdi.
I had forgotten about the Italian craftsmen and their furniture, until we moved my mother into the Red House next door. Much of the furniture she chose to take with her was from her parents’ house in Egypt, and whenever she showed anyone around her new home she explained that certain pieces were made by Italians in Egypt. She had a spiel, and that was a key part of it. My mother still refers to Egypt and often will say she spent most of her life there, as if those first 15 years (minus a 4-year wartime hiatus) comprised most of her life. I don’t correct her. She no longer knows where ‘there’ is, or what Egypt is. A country? A state of mind? A French novel?

In 1956, Bonne Maman and Bon Papa moved to America, instead of the south of France or Belgium, because their children were here, spawning more children. The club chairs, along with all their other furniture, were shipped to America in a huge wooden crate. A kind of ancestor to the intermodal containers that are currently plying the seas. My mother hired a carpenter (perhaps he was Italian?) to transform the crate into a playhouse for us, the grandchildren. He installed a pitched roof, and created windows with window boxes; there was a front door and even a front porch. I spent hours in that former-crate-now-playhouse reading aloud from the Green Book of Saints for Children.

As for the club chairs, from 1956 until she moved out in the 1980’s, they were in Bonne Maman’s sewing room, and were upholstered with the strangest red, yellow and black plaid linen. It was a plaid as imagined by a Belgian lady in Egypt. They were situated nearby the large bookshelf (ditto Italian craftsmen) bearing Journeys Through Bookland, ten volumes and a guide. This series was, at least in 1909, proclaimed as a “New and Original Plan for Reading, Applied to the World’s Best Literature for Children”. In Volume IV I read, and wept, over The Dog of Flanders. I read The Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog: “But soon a wonder came to light,/ That show’d the rogues they lied:/ The Man recover’d of the bite,/ The Dog it was that died.” In Volume VIII I read Kingsley’s The Three Fishes and Poe’s Annabel Lee.

Ozzie the Emotional Support Dog peed on the chair I had curled up in and read of dead dogs, and mad dogs, and beautiful beloved Annabel Lee in her sepulcher by the sea.

I cleaned it up, of course.

Then I flooded the downstairs guest room.

It happened thusly. I needed to wash the plastic trays from our handy countertop dehydrator, because I have been making vast quantities of dried tomatoes lately. I placed the trays in the kitchen sink to soak, and turned on the water. While the sink was filling with water, I ran downstairs to check a certain closet where I thought I might have stored, for safe keeping, my mother’s collection of Middle Eastern, Asian and African jewelry. I had no need of ethnic jewelry just then, or perhaps ever. But for reasons buried deep in my obsessive psyche, I had determined that what I needed to do was photograph all my mother’s ethnic jewelry and then disseminate those pictures to my siblings, children, nieces and nephews, so they could choose pieces and I would cease to be responsible for all this ethnic jewelry. In our world of cellphone cameras and instant downloads and email, this sort of dissemination is, theoretically, easy.
I guess it is obvious that my mother also had an obsessive psyche that compelled her to amass this collection of largely unwearable jewelry (unless you are a six-foot tall Berber nomad).


The box I sought was not in the closet downstairs, so I went through the basement hearth room and up the other basement stairs and then I noticed the postman delivering the mail. I said hello to the postman, but as usual he didn’t say anything. Unlike Richie our old postman who was friendly and always told me golfing stories, our new postman is extremely shy. That is what I have come to believe. He must be pathologically shy, unless he finds me so objectionable that he will never say hello no matter how cheerful I try to be. I prefer not to think that. I still say hello and wave whenever I see him pull up, as if I were Doris Day in an old comedy. That’s how I see myself. What he sees is Bette Davis in a creepy gothic movie.

Then I had to check the mail, in case someone had written me a love letter, or written to say I would be inheriting a small Caribbean island from a distant relative, or maybe just written me a postcard of a Jackalope. None of the above arrived. But I got the idea that I might have stashed the box of Mom’s ethnic jewelry in one of the cupboards in my office, because that would be so tricky, and then I checked all four cupboards. There was no jewelry of any kind, but I did find a small Moleskin notebook which would be perfect for Leda’s drawings. She always needs more notebooks. That reminded me that when she was visiting last weekend, she left behind certain articles of clothing, mostly socks, that I had washed. I went down to the laundry room to fetch them, so I could mail her the socks along with the notebook.

I still hadn’t found the box of ethnic jewelry and I wondered if it had been stolen, but that because I had hidden it away so well, I had never noticed. Who would steal weird unwearable jewelry? Who could even think such a ridiculous thing?

I got to the laundry room and heard water dripping. Somewhere. I thought it might have started raining again, and I would need to shut some windows. But it wasn’t raining. Could the dishwasher be leaking through the guest room ceiling again? I thought we had fixed that leak. I went down the hall to the guest room and water was leaking QUITE A LOT from the ceiling. Water was coming from a certain crack and then seeping out all along a crack that meandered from the center of the room almost to the molding. But this part of the ceiling was not underneath the dishwasher. Could it have traveled so far? Or could it be from the rain earlier? But that made no sense, because there is a whole room above the guest room, not a roof. Whatever. I went back to the laundry and got a pile of old beach towels, and a couple of buckets, and put them on the floor under the dripping.
Finally, I went back up to the kitchen. Sometime long before the search for the jewelry and the postman’s non-loquacity, I had left the water running in the sink. Water was pouring from the counter onto the floor. The puddles were impressive.

Yet there is something about watching footage of hurricane flooding that puts things in perspective. In the midst of obsession, perspective.

More False Departures / Encore les Faux Departs

The project continues, and I am getting to know this grandfather who wrote so lovingly of his family, and especially his wife – and in that matter I trust his judgment because she would later become my own beloved Bonne Maman.

Since you last heard, Bon Papa was en route to the Caltex headquarters in NY, planning to go to Cairo. He and his colleagues are traveling aboard the “Challenger” of the Union Pacific RR. He writes in loving detail of the towns and landscapes they pass through, especially the western vistas he so extravagantly admires: “Several ranches as described by Zane Grey”. Or: “Evanston, Utah = it was here I had my troubles with our Dodge car, 7 months ago, but that turned out well.” Or: “This evening we arrived in Omaha, the capital of Nebraska, the state always “dry”, which did not allow us, all evening, to enjoy our whiskeys. Frigid wind and we didn’t leave the station during our half hour stop.” Or: “From Albany, the capital of NY, we passed the Hudson River, whose banks are covered with ice. It is a beautiful spectacle – seen from our well-heated Pullman. The large factories on the riverbanks that I know: Phelps Dodge, Anaconda Copper Co, Fisher Body, De Lavat Steam engines…and many more. We arrived at the formidable Grand Central Station at 9 am.” (I translated formidable, the French, as formidable, the English. I know that is not properly correct, that it means something more on the lines of wonderful. But I like the word.)
While awaiting his Egyptian visa, Bon Papa worked at the office and toured New York, methodically and enthusiastically, and wrote about it for his wife.

On the 6th of February he learned that the Egyptian authorities had refused to grant him an entry visa. This news shocked my grandfather and shocked his boss at Caltex and even shocked the Egyptian consul. He had lived happily in Alexandria from 1931 to 1939, and had many friends and contacts in Egypt, friends who awaited his return.
That same afternoon, the General Manager asked Bon Papa if he spoke Spanish (he did, quite well). The G-M said (This is all written in French; the shabby translations are mine), “You know, perhaps, that the US is investing nearby to Santiago de Cuba about 20 miles from Guantanamo. $18 million for development of nickel and manganese, 2 metals absolutely necessary for war. And we miss a great deal of that. Time is pushing. The development will not be late in starting. This representation (“un chiffre d’affaire”) of the turnover of an oil field from $3 to 4 million per year, and we want it. You need to arrange that we will get this business. …Besides this, you know that the sugar business of Cuba are the largest in the world. Certain mills produce 15,000 tons of sugar cane per day. They are situated in the eastern provinces. Yours. We have to accept we have no clients; it is not acceptable and you need to correct this situation. There is the Cuban RR, but we have never had anything to do with them, and we would like to take our share of the profits. That would be one of your missions.”
About this new posting to Cuba, Bon Papa wrote: Here is the good American method. Precise, quick and broad. This work pleases me at the outset. I saw right away all the possible risks. There is a director and vice- director already in Havana, who would be the obvious ones to fill this spot. But they haven’t succeeded, it seems, and we have more hope in me.
I didn’t wait to study all that can help me in my new functions. I studied for 8 or 9 hours a day to better know the technical side of the exploitation of the mines, of sugar mills and railroads.
Every day I read aloud about 50 pages from a novel, in the Spanish language. I prepare eagerly.
And he went to movies. He went to a movie almost every day. As I translate, I am compiling a list of the movies he went to, imagining that I will see the same movies and know him better. Movies he saw from mid-January to the end of March, 1942 include but are not limited to: Tobacco Road, The Corsican Brothers, Chocolate Soldiers, Hudson Bay, Design for Scandal, Ruggles of Red Gap, Woman of the Year, Louisiana Purchase, The Mutinies of Elsinore, The Last of the Duanes, White Fang, Mister V, Remember the Day, Two Faced Woman, Riders of Sage Brush, Adventures of Martin Eden, Bedtime Story, Reap the Wild Wind, and Sullivan’s Travels.
He loved the moves, but I think he loved the Rockettes more. I have not kept count of his visits to Radio City Music Hall.
.

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.

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?

How do you say Happy Birthday in Flemish?

Today is my mother’s 80th birthday. And where is she? Is she celebrating this significant milestone with any or all of her five devoted offspring? No. Or with any of her countless grand-offspring? No she is not. She is in Belgium with her second cousin thrice removed who is, admittedly, a far better cook than any of us. Last night they dined on Maigret de Canard and an apricot tart we will be hearing about well into 2011.

Eighty years ago today my grandmother gave birth to her first child in her parents’ house in Schooten, near Antwerp, in a bedchamber newly painted white for the occasion. By the time the birth was accomplished, the walls were splattered with blood, but that was just because of the uncoiling flailing umbilical cord, and everything was actually fine.

Their time in Schooten was brief. My grandmother had spent her pregnancy in Switzerland, where she and my grandfather lived at the time, and if the photographic evidence is to be believed, she spent much of that time sledding in the Alps. She returned to Belgium in order to give birth and having accomplished that, the three of them moved to Egypt, where my mother would spend her delightful childhood and where my grandmother would become the belle of the Costume Balls.
They never moved back to Belgium.
They never again lived in Schooten or even pretended to speak Flemish or attended mass at Schooten’s massive Gothic church of St Cordula. In case you don’t know, Cordula was one of Saint Ursula’s 11,000 virgins. However, when the Huns were ruthlessly beheading the young ladies, Cordula became fearful and hid herself. The next day she repented her cowardice – though some might define it otherwise – and presented herself to the nearest Hun for immediate slaughter. He complied. In the 13th century, her body was discovered in Cologne, smelling sweetly and with writing on the forehead to facilitate identification: Cordula, Queen and Virgin. But this remarkable head is not to be found at Schooten.
Instead of St Codula’s, my parents went to church last Sunday at an Art Deco basilica in Brussels, where attendance has dropped to such low levels that it is now used as a training space for speleologists and climbers.
Schooten’s other claim for notice in the global marketplace is as the site of the first-opened Quick, the Euro fast food chain uncannily similar to McDonald’s.
Eighty years later, will my mother return to Schooten today? Not very likely, and perhaps Quick is partly to blame. Or perhaps it is because she would not understand a word spoken or any written sign, because now Schooten is solidly in the Flemish camp, and my mother is an unrepentent Francophone.
Instead she may visit another bee museum. As earlier noted, Belgium has more bee museums per capita, per square mile and per honeybee than any other country on earth. My parents visited one last weekend and because it was in Belgium, they drank honey beer, and my mother became fast friends with the 2 gentlemen who run the museum and upon whose mutual sexuality my mother enjoyed speculating.
As for her birthday meal, we await the menu.

More on the merits of actual books

In the parental basement a while back I found an old copy of Lytton Strachey’s Queen Victoria. The flyleaf told me it had belonged to my Uncle Claude while he was at Lawrenceville in the fifties, and reading through his annotated copy was heart-rending. First I should tell you that my beloved uncle’s first language was French; he was born in Alexandria, Egypt, went to school in Egypt, then in Saigon, then in California during the war & then again in Cairo (where as a scrappy young boy he got into fist fights with Edward Said – see p 89 of his acclaimed memoir, Out of Place). When his older sister (my mother) left the fragrant gardens of Maadi, with their nights sleeping on the roof to catch desert breezes and their afternoon pastries at Groppi, and went off to Smith, their Belgian parents thought it would be a great idea to send young Claude to Lawrenceville. It was not. He would have preferred building things with his American friends in Cairo, or scuba diving in the Red Sea, or camping in the desert. He would have preferred anything but sitting in hallowed classrooms filled with sophisticated New Yorkers.
Instead, he struggled through Lytton Strachey – every single page bears witness to those struggles as he deciphered the precious locutions, and looked up vocabulary. His penciled definitions adorn the margins of every page: annuity, odious, nonentity, asperity, imbroglio, gyrations, piquancies, exegesis and on and on to reticence and platitude of her phraseology. Not one page is absent evidence of the assiduous study required to read this short book.
Though he now reads the engineering tomes he loves, and journals of undersea exploration, my uncle’s handwriting is still small and precise, and he still uses a mechanical pencil.


Also in the parental basement, on a shelf otherwise filled with 25¢ luridly covered paperback mysteries, and the signature all-white covered French novels, I extracted my college copy of Freud’s Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, with an introduction by Philip Rieff (best known to me as Susan Sontag’s one-time husband). I cannot even begin to imagine how that particular book came to rest that particular shelf in the parental basement. Inside this classic analysis of the real Ida Bauer’s aphonia (I insert that word esp. for Uncle Claude), her dreams and her sexual feelings for her father as well as Herr and Frau K, I found a scrap of lined paper with my handwriting. On it were written directions to the Planned Parenthood clinic in Carpentaria, California where I got my very first contraceptives.
Because this is Freud, for whom a cigar is never just a cigar, I cannot see the inclusion of this scrap in this book about a ‘hysterical’ young woman as random. What with the word ‘hysteria’ coming from the Greek “hustera” for womb or uterus, that very organ I was striving to keep from becoming impregnated. We won’t even go into the whole sordid history of the attributing female ‘hysteria’ to malfunctions of the womb. I prefer to recall this long-ago extraordinary college class on Freud and Reich (yes, orgone Reich), and the daunting excitement of taking responsibility for my own sexuality. Another good reason to read books, write in books, stick scraps of paper in books, and save the books.

In apicultural news, this morning I watched the queen in our observation hive laying eggs. She walks across the comb checking out likely cells and when she finds one she likes, she backs up and sticks her tail down. I counted and by my very unscientific timing (1-Mississippi, 2-Mississippi etc), she spends about 8 seconds laying an egg.

Why I am not a bird watcher

Because, with even with the most perfect view of the sweetest mother bird in her nest, I cannot identify said bird.

Her nest is situated conveniently atop the capital of the corner column of the balcony, off what is referred to as ‘the old bedroom’, to distinguish it from the new bedroom. The old bedroom having been my parents’ bedroom for about 40 years, and before that it was empty and before that it was the bedroom my father shared with his brother when they were growing up and coming to the Orchard on weekends. The Egyptian themed new bedroom was devised when my grandmother came to live with my parents in the hope that even as her memory disintegrated, the presence of her mouche arabie screen and her Coptic crosses and the incised brass urns and hanging mosque lamps, that all of that would reassure Bonne-Maman of the happiness of her life beside the Nile and perhaps stave off the insinuating tapeworm of memory loss.
Now it is my parents’ room, still Egyptian themed, not because my mother has forgotten but because she remembers so well. The camel collection is relatively new. I don’t know which bedroom my father remembers.

All I need to do to view the nest is stand on the balcony railing. Of course the mother flies off indignantly when I do this, but she always returns. Inside are her four white eggs and the other one, the one spotted with brown, the intruder, the one my sister identified as the cowbird’s egg. That was the easy part. Cowbird’s are opportunistic creatures, who lay their eggs in any handy nest not their own, because they have none of their own. I am told they developed this trait following the buffalo herds across the Great Plains, because the buffalo fur was loaded with tasty insects. Life on the move precluded nest-building, hence the opportunistic egg-laying. Don’t ask me why a bird best known for its affinity for buffalo bugs is laying eggs mere feet from my parents’ old bedroom.
And who is the mother bird, the nest-builder?
I checked out my Audubon’s guide for smallish birds of the northeast. That narrowed it down to a few hundred. Then I narrowed it further to birds that lay white eggs, not speckled or blue or green. More narrowing ensued. Then I looked again at the bird. I feel confident she is not an owl, a pigeon, a parrot or a woodpecker. Elimination is a good thing.
Are those feathers blue or grey? Would you describe that tail as flat? Or notched? Is it similar to the Pipit? How big is bigger than a swallow? Are those pale brown narrow streaks along her side, or are they black stripes in a field of brown? Could it be a nuthatch? Or aren’t they the ones that walk up the sides of trees? What about goldfinches? The females aren’t gold; maybe they are this mysterious brown or gray with mysterious stripes.
Is that stuff on top of her head a feathery crest, or is it just this morning’s bedhead?
The only thing that remains clears is my failure as a birdwatcher. On the other hand, when I sit & stare at Bonne Maman’s Middle Kingdom funerary ornaments (a gift from an admirer at the Cairo Museum, back when)I know exactly where I am and who I want to be with.

Bridesmaids in Fezzes

The dreaming mind is an amazing thing. Consider this pre-dawn conflation: a parade of francophone bridesmaids wearing fezzes.

Of the three weddings we’ve been to in the past months, only one featured bridesmaids, the traditional gaggle of pretty girls – but none so pretty as the bride - wearing matching unflattering gowns in colors named for fruits.



I would be lying if I said that the fate of the Odd Fellows Hall in Bingham, Maine has not been on my mind. It was last used by a genuine Odd Fellow 13 years ago, though its current owner and recent inhabitant (David Jones) says that he was made an honorary Odd Fellow when he lived there. It is 10,500 sq. ft., of post and beam construction, and in perfect condition. Mr. Jones was hoping to get $100,000, but says he will take $85,000. The sad part is: if he gets anything at all he will be lucky. The Odd Fellow plaque just doesn’t have the cachet it used to.


And then there was the obituary of Richard Hagan in the Morning Sentinel, listing his Masonic memberships and titles, a list that cries out to be set to music.
"He was also an active 32nd degree Mason, a lifetime member of the Riverside Lodge No. 135 of Jefferson, Ancient Brothers Lodge No. 178 of Auburn, Bradford Chapter No.9, Dunlap Chapter No.8, Pine Cone Council No.31, and Valley of Portland Consistory; Past Officers Association No.1, Lewiston Commandary No.6, Eusebius Conclave No.3, Red Cross of Constantine, Maine Lodge of Research, Pine Tree Priory No.65 York Knight Cross of Honor, Valley of the Androscoggin, Dirigo College No.103, Lake View Chapter No.179 Order of Eastern Star; High Twelve Mid Coast Masonic Club No. 738 – Rockport, and life member of the Keystone Royal Arch Lodge No.24 – Rockport, past district deputy for Masonic District No.7, member of the Scottish Rites in Auburn and past high priest of Scottish Rites.”

Neither the Odd Fellows nor the Masons wear fezzes, but the Shriners do, and the Shriners are an offshoot of the Masons, and they are all secret societies featuring elaborate rituals, initiation rites, mystical titles, hierarchies and yes, funny hats.
(Not being a Mason, or even of Masonic material, I don’t know what Scottish Rites are, but I hope and pray they involve bagpipes and flaming torches.)

Bon Papa, my Belgian grandfather used to wear a fez when they lived in Egypt, but only when he smoked a pipe. Only when seated in his special armchair. When he was settled in with his pipe and his fez, Ahmed would bring Bon Papa exactly 10 ounces of chilled Belgian ale, made by Trappist monks back in Wallonia and shipped regularly to Cairo, and he would pore over maps of the Upper Nile and Sudan. In all ways except the beer, my grandfather preferred his life in Egypt to life in Belgium.

Somewhere in my mother’s attic is my grandfather’s fez, wrapped in tissue paper and labeled: Fez of Arnold Brancart. My mother labels everything, in detail, in permanent markers, with dates & provenance; she is to Labeling what YoYo Ma is to the cello and what Meryl Streep is to acting and what Serena Williams is to tennis.

I am told Bon Papa spoke perfect English, but he forgot it in his later years, so I only spoke French with him.

One of the ‘floats’ in the West Athens Fourth of July Parade, was the perennial “Always a Bridesmaid.” I had o explain the joke to CSB, who oddly enough had never heard the old saw, Always a bridesmaid, Never a Bride. As you can see, he was not wearing a fez.



Fezzes are named after the city of Fez in Morocco. Once my sister and I stood on a rooftop in the Medina and looked down on other rooftops covered with raw leather curing in vats of colored dyes, and then drying in the sun. The active ingredient – the fixative- in the dye, was pigeon guano. The vats were tended by young men whose skin became permanently colored to match the fezzes.
We spoke French in Morocco, did not wear fezzes, and did not encourage my mother to use her kitchen Arabic.

The Beekeepers Ball

So how was the Beekeepers Ball?
The venue was the Water Taxi Beach at South Street Seaport. This is a new beach, which initially strikes one as odd since beaches are generally - like mountains - a longstanding part of the landscape. The sand came from elsewhere. Which gives rise to all sorts of questions.
The Costumes were better than the honey-coated food. The chef's dictum that honey is not at its best cooked remains true. The most egregious offender was a hamburger in a "bun" of a honey-glazed donut. The most delicious was a strawberry, rhubarb & honey Popsicle (hence not cooked) made by the People's Pops.
As for the duct tape and pipe cleaners, you can see below and judge for yourself. The best part of the costume, however, is that which you cannot see. My pockets were filled with pollen, pure local pollen. Now if I were a worker bee the pollen in my rear saddlebags would be quite visible, but I didn't have transparent pockets and it wasn't until I was lying abed (l'esprit de l'escalier, or a variation thereon, strikes again) that I had the brainstorm: staple clear plastic bags - full of pollen - to my pockets.
Now it is highly unlikely that CSB will be going to any more Beekeeper Balls. He is a man of simple sartorial inclinations, and dressing in costume in not one of them.
In this he reminds me of Bon Papa. When my Belgian grandparents lived in Egypt in the 30's and 40's, costume balls were all the rage. And Bonne Maman loved to dress up. Somewhere - properly labeled, archivally kept, in its proper place because that is the way she does things - my mother has an album that consists entirely of Bonne Maman in various costumes. Some are more tasteful than others. And what about Bon Papa? Bonne Maman liked to say he always went as a headwaiter, that is to say, he wore a tuxedo or tails.
CSB went as himself, a beekeeper in white who can't remember where he put his veil.
There was much creativity to be admired and everyone was happy to be photographed. A favorite was the couple below who are not beekeepers but enthusiasts: those are lingerie bags on their heads as bee veils and they are wearing $4.99 disposable painters' suits. I also liked the woman who wrapped herself in a tufted bedspread and became a skep. But the two couples below were the liveliest, and you can see why.

The Latest Verboten Item to take on an Airplane

Not cuticle clippers, not a fountain pen (ink is, after all, a liquid), not pruning shears, not e-coli in a vial or any of the other wonderful and dangerous things you might want to travel with.
It is sand.
I have a charming uncle who collects sand. Perhaps this is because he was born in Alexandria, Egypt, which is perched above the Sahara. Or perhaps this is because he used to dive in the Red Sea. Or perhaps it is because he designs, builds and occasionally travels in submarines. He has sand from deserts and beaches all over the world. And being an engineer, he is extremely well organized and hence his sand is well organized, and labeled. Naturally. His sister (my esteemed mother) brings him back sand from wherever she goes, assuming there is sand there.
So when we were on the coast of El Salvador this past week, walking along the black (volcanic) sand beach, I wanted to bring back some sand for my uncle’s collection. It just so happens that along with gazillions of coconuts in varying states of decay, the beach is also home to more litter than is lovely. We found a littered Gatorade bottle and rinsed it in the warm ocean and then filled it with black sand.

Hopeful, the Ridley turtle, at the beach, heading out to sea

What could be better?
Almost anything not sharp or liquid, it seems. After going through the X-ray machine at San Salvador airport, a security guard looked at my Gatorade bottle full of black sand from many different angles. Finally, I took pity and said, “Es arena. It’s sand.”
“Aha, said he. “That is not allowed.”
“Sand is not allowed?”
“No,” he said, but looked dubious. So he showed my bottle of sand to another security guard (repeat looking at from all angles) who nodded sagely in a negative fashion.
My guard returned and said, “It is not allowed.”
“I can’t bring back sand?” I said.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“You can’t bring in any earth. No puede traer la tierra.”
We all nodded sadly, repacked my suitcase, then CSB and I continued on to gate 6.
But upon later thought I was perplexed. I have brought sand back from Morocco, Tunisia, Costa Rica and New Jersey, and no one has ever objected. Was this a security decision, a customs decision (in which case it wasn’t his to make), or a spontaneous & illogical decision?
Naturally, I go with the last.

The Queens have arrived

Our friend at the PO called this morning to let us know that the new Queens were here. They are all Italians, all marked with a blue dot. If you enlarge the picture below you can see the dot on the Queen to the left. All the others are nurse bees who fed and groomed the queen during her journey north from Georgia, and will keep tending to her in the days to come; they will munch their way through the sugar patty that corks up the box and release her into the hive, by which time, so we hope, the thousands of bees will have accepted her pheromone and embraced her as their new Queen.

When we first started beekeeping I always named the Queens. Our very first one was Camilla, for Prince Charles' lady friend (I identified with the old farts finding love in middle age). The next ones we named for CSB's old girlfriends from his days in New Mexico. (Not the x-wife, I'm not that crazy.) When we ran out of ex-girlfriends (CSB was debonair but not a Casanova) we named them for attractive female friends. But we kept getting more hives, and existing hives swarmed, taking the Queen off to new digs, and it became too confusing. So we name them no more. But every time they arrive the old impulse rears itself up, the naming impulse, the impulse to differentiate and specify.
A few years ago I was in a bus outside Cairo and another impulse, the curious one, caused me to ask our guide about bees in Egypt. He told me a story. When he was a boy his grandfather had a melon farm beside the Nile in Upper Egypt and kept bees. He decided to repopulate his hives with European bees and so ordered a Queen from Italy. This Queen crossed the Mediterranean on a freighter and then traveled by train down to the grandfather's village. Our guide was visiting the day the message came from the stationmaster that his grandfather's Queen had arrived. He remembers the happiness on his grandfather's face as he said,"My new Queen is here, and she is Italian."
That was the sum total of what he told me about bees in Egypt. I have since learned that there is quite a bit more. The Egyptians in Pharaonic times kept bees on barges on the Nile and when the trees in one spot had finished their flowering, the keepers moved the barges at night to another fruitful mooring.

Punica granatum

The sixteenth century Blessed John Licci’s life is a list of marvels and since his life went on for an inordinately long time (110 years), it is a long list. But it all began with crushed pomegranates. Absent a mother (she died in childbirth) John was raised by his hapless father who fed him crushed pomegranates. Or so says one of my sources. The source of all sources, Butler’s Lives of the Saints, does not mention the pomegranates, though the hapless father, the marvels and the longevity all figure.
Pomegranates figure largely in my family’s cuisine as well. The first things I knew about pomegranates were that they were messy to eat and delicious. The next thing I knew was that back in Egypt my grandparent’s cook in Mahdi cleaned pomegranates for my mother and every day after school my mother ate a bowl of perfectly removed pomegranate seeds.
Sometime after that I learned of Persephone (presumably in Edith Hamilton. Where else?) who was abducted by Hades, King of the Underworld. While she was down there she ate six pomegranate seeds, and because she succumbed to that sweet and sour delicious-ness she was condemned to spent six months of every year in Hades, while the rest of us got the seasons.
What do pomegranates have to do with John Licci’s longlived-ness?
Why do I insist that one must eat the white seed and not merely the succulent red flesh, believing as I do that this was the reason for Persephone’s half year sequestration?