Another Life

Yesterday I took my mother to a regular check-up with her doctor. Nothing has changed. Aside from Alzheimer’s she is healthy. All her former complains (arthritis, costochondritis, GIRD) have been forgotten, and so they no longer trouble her. (Some insufferable Pollyanna’s would argue that this is a positive aspect of Alzheimer’s, but I would rather keep my aches and pains and still remember your name and why I loved Bob Dylan.) I have never before considered impacted earwax to be a medical event, but that was the main topic of our visit. I will spare you the details of my mother’s earwax and its removal. There will be no illustrations. Let’s just say that it was, for me, a uniquely appalling and disturbing experience. In order to calm my queasiness, I resorted to Wikipedia. (The efficacy of factoids as a means to allay anxiety is seriously underreported.) I learned that there are in fact two kinds of cerumen: moist and dry. Asians and Native Americans have dry cerumen, while Europeans and Africans have the moist kind. The difference could, possibly, be related to diet. This distinction has lately proved useful to anthropologists in studying the migrations patterns of Eskimos. Even mom’s doctor, who is an adept at cerumen removal, did not know this factoid. I am hoping she will share it with other patients. I look forward to cerumen classifications becoming Common Knowledge.
After the doctor’s appointment I took Mom to lunch at Mint, a lovely restaurant in Tarrytown owned by Hassan, who is Moroccan and charming and always gives me tastes of several cheeses. Mom assured me she had been to Morocco many times and spent time on the wide beaches there. She asked me how many children I have. The instant I answered, truthfully, that I have two, I regretted it. For years, I longed for a third child or even a set of twins, and now I can rewrite my history and have as many children as I like. I can name them according to my obsession of the week: Abelardo, Ishmael, Daphne and Hyacinth.
The possibilities do not end with offspring. Since Mom daily asks me what I do, (Why are you leaving me? What are you doing?) it seems that this may well be my chance to have the careers I once imagined for myself but did not pursue, due to lack of talent or circumstance or living in the wrong century. My career as a professional Ping Pong player, for instance. It never got off the ground, off anything. But I dreamt of it. I dreamt that when the journals wrote about my exploits, they would call me Careening Christine, the Joan of Arc of Table Tennis. Then there was my vocation as a cartographer, back when maps were hand drawn and decorated with mythical animals. There are also my careers as a defrocked nun and a botanical explorer and an opera set-designer, all imagined, all unrealized.
The next time Mom asks me what I am doing, and there will be a next time, because any question worth asking once is worth asking twenty times, if I do not tell her that I am mapping the newly created country of Surlandia, and then granting an interview to Sports Illustrated about my proprietary line of Ping Pong paddles made with sustainable tropical wood, I will have only myself to blame for my pedestrian and monochromatic life. Again.

The Joan of Arc Park

First I abjectly failed what must surely be a litmus test for determining who is – or is not – a true New Yorker. I drove in town for a party and was extremely pleased with myself for having found a legal parking spot on Riverside in the high 90’s. (After a few lengthy sojourns at the Impound Lot on Pier 40, I now read the parking signs carefully, and repeatedly.)I backed in and did the parallel park dance (I may not be a certified urbanite, but my parallel parking is RAWTHER good.) when suddenly an SUV completes a U-turn and pulls along beside me and starts honking. I stare blankly. He lowers his windows and says some unfortunate things about my character. He claims that he had his eye on this space all along and who am I to steal it. I mention that I had not seen him, and by the way, didn’t he just pull a Uey? My character is further castigated.
But here is the insane part. I pulled out of the cozy space, and gave it to him.
I can’t explain this.
(If my one-legged Chilean psychiatrist were still alive, we could have a lovely time parsing the meaning of this. But he is not. I did, however, speak with a gentleman at the party in question who had an Argentinean psychiatrist with a shriveled arm. In both cases they were geniuses who spoke with thick accents.)

So you can imagine my delight when, after finding another parking space, I am walking down Riverside Drive and come upon the Joan of Arc Island. There is such a thing. (I am a Joan of Arc fan, and not because we have anything in common. I don’t ride horses, hear voices, or want to save the kingdom of France. But I admire her enormously. To prove it: my cup of tea is this very moment sitting on a Joan of Arc coaster.) High upon a Gothic pedestal is an equestrian statue of Joan of Arc. The horse’s right front leg is raised, presumably because she was injured but not killed in battle. The statue is by Anna Hyatt Huntington (1876-1973), an American sculptor who specialized in animals, and especially horses. Because Joan is atop the horse, which is atop the pedestal and also because it was nighttime, I could not make out Joan’s attire in any great detail. In fact, from my vantage point, what I could see most clearly were the horse’s testicles.

I plan to return with binoculars.

Joan of Arc would never, ever, have given up a legitimate, legal and well-deserved parking space.

Hagiographic costume excesses

I like to think that CSB is not, in the normal course of events, happy when I leave town for a few days.
But this is clearly not the normal course of events. We heard this morning that our church is encouraging children and adults if they so desire, to dress up as their favorite saint for next Sunday, November 1st, which is of course All Saints Day.
Naturally I thought this was an excellent idea. In no time at all I was mentally outfitting myself and debating the stylistic merits of Saint Agnes bearing her breasts on a salver versus Joan of Arc in drag and full armor. What about Pelagia the Penitent as a bejeweled first century stripper? Or Saint Apollonia brandishing pincers for tooth extraction?
And just as naturally, poor CSB was imagining how mortally embarrassed he would be by my hagiographic costume excesses.
But, sadly, I will be in Boston next Sunday and so CSB will be spared his role as escort to a virgin-saint. Until next year.

Not these saints

Have I mentioned that a baby bunny died on my watch? That I buried him (I use the male pronoun advisedly, because I thought I espied a tiny leporine penis; most likely as a result of too much exposure to spam offerings of 101 ways to enlarge your member and satisfy your girlfriend.) in the bamboo grove?
The matter of bunny mortality is just one of the many ways in which I do not resemble Saint Melangell. She (an adamant virgin) fled a suitor’s unwanted advances and resided for fifteen long years alone in the forest, with only the rabbits and hares for companionship. She always protected the bunnies, and they looked after her.

If you are wondering which saint I will make reference to when I make a few gracious remarks this evening on the occasion of the rehearsal dinner for Tristram and Nika, you can breathe a sigh a relief that – after some serious vacillation, it must be admitted – I will not mention Saint Theodosia as an example of female strength and leadership. Theodosia lived in 8th century Constantinople. When the Emperor decreed that all Christian images be torn down, Theodosia was the ringleader of a group of defiant woman who shook the ladder supporting the functionary attempting to tear down the image. The man fell and died. (It must have been a very tall ladder.) Then Theodosia and her gang stoned the palace of the pseudo-patriarch.
I don’t need to add that she was gruesomely martyred soon thereafter. (A ram’s horn was hammered through her neck.) Butler adds, wryly, “It is not difficult to suggest reason why this nun is not found in the Roman Martyrology.”
So as much as I admire Nika’s strength and leadership skills, I will not be comparing her to Theodosia, whose feast is today.
On the other hand, tomorrow, May 30th, is the feast of Joan of Arc, who was burned at the stake in 1431. And I am a great admirer of Joan of Arc.

To and from Rouen

I do not often think of Rouen, where I have never been, but when I do it is first of all as the sad place where Joan of Arc was imprisoned and then burned, on the last day of May 1431, which just so happens to be the year François Villon was born.
Even now, half a millennium later, I still lament the auto-da-fé of young Joan. A girl. Years ago when I was in the habit of swimming laps in my then mother-in-awl’s swimming pool I started thinking about Joan, burning in Rouen, and now all I have to do is start swimming in a relatively straight line, and I will think of her again. It is my fervent hope that some kind soul slipped her some hemlock before they ignited the faggots.

After Joan I think of Flaubert who was born in Rouen and lived there all his life, writing perfect sentences. He did not become a doctor like his father and brother, and for years I thought that his father was the French doctor and father of a great writer who was responsible for the concept of the cordon sanitaire, a quarantine to keep sickness from spreading. But in fact that was Proust’s father, Dr. Adrian Proust, not Flaubert’s father. Still, it seems a reasonable confusion, given that Proust and Flaubert are both French, obsessive; they never married, they wrote brilliantly and I read them both in French class decades ago. My dictionary was attached to my wrist.

But I am thinking of Rouen because today, no yesterday, was the feast of St Leo of Rouen (who is not in Butlers Lives of the Saints at all, putting his entire existence in doubt). Aside from his being bishop of Rouen – known for its rather fabulous ecclesiastical architecture (viz. numerous paintings by Monet) what we know of Leo is that Saracen pirates beheaded him in 900 AD. But that did not stop him. His headless body picked up the removed head and carried it back to the church where he had given his last sermon. And then fully died. Another glorious cephalophore.
And if you know me, you know that I have an unjustifiable fascination with cephalophores. There is something compelling about the notion that the body would object to its untimely truncation. And poignant about the literally mindless impulse to bear one’s head to a place of safety.
The theory I have read, and it makes sense, is that the concept of cephalophores results from the frequent representation in art of beheaded saints holding their heads. If you are carving a saint for the front of a cathedral (St Denis for example) it is much easier to have his body and head be in the same place, even if not in their normal relations. And seeing such images the populace came to the conclusion that the represented saint really did carry his or her head somewhere. However it evolved into yet another category of saints, it clearly relates to the human impulse to make whole what was sundered.