Before we depart Nicaragua there remains the mystery of San Benito of Palermo or Saint Benedict the Moor or Saint Benedict the Black.
Having not expired in the earthquake or its aftershocks, we woke the next morning to ride the top of the bus to El Viejo, then to Chinandega, and then we drove back to León, where we couldn’t drive anywhere we thought we needed to go because the streets were all blocked with Passion Carpets and children dressed in white gowns sweeping. Passion carpets (nothing to do with rug-burn) or alfombras pasionarias, are religious images created on the streets with colored sawdust.
You will note that what started, presumably, as families and friends creating street art, has now fallen into the snake pit of corporate sponsorship. Yet another paradigm of life’s disconnects to be found on one dusty street in Nicaragua: the Central Bank of a Sandinista country sponsoring a Christian holiday that features a cruel crucifixion, and a foretold resuscitation, in neon bright colors.
I have not discovered why there was a festival and parade in honor of San Benito in León on the Monday of Semana Santa. It was not the feast of San Benito, which I have since learned is April 4th. (He died of natural causes, nothing gruesome to report in that department.). In order to celebrate San Benito, the folks of León dress in white robes, and by that I mean that all over town, from the supermarkets to the restaurants to insurance agencies, random people wear white robes over their clothes. And they carry brooms and they sweep. There is a lot of sweeping going on with no visible reduction of debris. Several inquiries by me elicited that San Benito was a baker and that is why people carry brooms and sweep. Huh? Sweeping up the flour? No one would explain, though several people clearly thought I was minus a hammer & wrench in the cerebral tool chest. Later in the day there was a parade and San Benito, along with a cohort of other holies, was carried aloft through the streets of León by swaying bearers. Since León’s streets are crisscrossed by webs of electric and telephone wires, the parade is accompanied by men with long crotched wooden sticks to raise the wire over the passing saints. We watched and held our breath, anticipating tangles and sparks, but that never happened. The saints passed through.

The next day we flew out of Sandino International Airport.

Back in Nicaragua

Have I mentioned the heat? It is overwhelming, overpowering, it is overcoming my capacity to come up with adjectival hyperbole; it is too hot to even speculate about what degrees F or C it is. It is so hot that all day long we lie in the hammock or rock in the rocking chair – an iteration of the rocking chairs that are found in every house in the village, the same rocking chairs that are lined up and sold by the sides of the dusty road – and move as little as possible, and only move enough to stay out of the direct sun and watch the mangoes fall from the trees. That’s right: mangoes falling from the trees. But don’t let hammocks and mangoes fool you into paradisaical fantasies. It is too hot to even imagine picking up and peeling the fallen mangoes, mangoes that fall with a thud onto the packed earth and send up a small eruption of dust upon impact. More dust to inhabit every pore and orifice you have, and some you don’t have.

In the morning we learn that last night’s clanging of metal and shouting was a certain drunken man smashing his neighbor’s house with his machete. Drunk and angry about an unspecified insult, he banged his machete against the walls and windows and tin roof of his neighbor’s house and bellowed out threats, and banged even harder when the inhabitants and other neighbors shouted for him to stop. This morning, we are told, he on the other side of the sugar cane field, persona non grata, sleeping it off.

Of course while we are weighing heavily upon the hammock and rocking chair and nodding listlessly in the direction of the plummeting mangoes, men are out in the fields cutting sugar cane, and men and women are harvesting a sweet variety of bananas favored by the inhabitants of Granada, and women are washing clothes and baking in earthen ovens and bathing babies, and children are cranking wells to bring up water and gathering firewood and kicking makeshift soccer balls in the packed dirt. And Rojita is snarfling up food and water.

Later when it is marginally cooler but still stratospherically hot we go visiting with Colby to the house of the lovely Paola with the curly eyelashes, she whose smile disperses even the heat. Earlier she brought fresh tortillas and avocados to Colby, whose name she loves to pronounce, like a magical incantation. Paola’s smile is clearly a direct defendant of her mother’s. Her little brother will do anything to elicit that smile.
Because Doña Pastora is away at cult, we go have dinner at Colby’s neighbor. There is something about Doña Indiana’s demeanor that inspires respect, and a little apprehension. Her ducks wander in and out of the house as we eat. One duck waddles coyly up to CSB, stares at him, and then piddles onto the dirt floor. He will not forget the piddling duck inside the house for a long time. The menu remains the same rice and beans.

That night, lying on the Chinandega bedframe, we are almost asleep when the dogs start their barking obbligato. It is a symphony of canine pipes and reeds and strings. Then our corrugated tin roof rattles and then – or more likely at the exact same moment – the earth trembles. We are jostled in our bed. Everything is making noise now: objects in the house, roosters, pigs, hens and especially the skinny dogs.
I say to CSB: It’s an earthquake.
He shouts outside to Colby: It’s an earthquake. Are you alright?
Colby answers that he is fine.
I say: Shouldn’t we go outside? What if the house falls on us?
CSB says: I don’t think so. There’s not much to fall.
I say: In 1972 most of Managua was reduced to rubble.
CSB says: I think this one is over.
But I stay awake for a very long time awaiting the aftershocks and after-trembles and tremors. I could tell you how many I felt, but I could not promise you that I did not imagine them.

We arrive in rural Nicaragua, and what we discover

Initially when I was organizing our trip to Nicaragua, I assumed that after Ometepe we would all three drive our compact rental car to Colby’s PC site: past Chinandega, past El Viejo and over dusty rutted roads to Monte Rosa, the sugar cane refinery and farm that surrounds his tiny village.
Wrong.
Colby made it very clear that we would not be driving to his village, we would be arriving by bus, because that is how everyone in the village travels, and that is how he travels throughout Nicaragua. Given the reputation of Nicaraguan buses for comfort and safety, you can imagine my trepidation. (See previous post on this subject.)
It is a measure of my limited perspective and privileged travels in the country, that I have never before ridden a Nicaraguan bus. This would change. Colby was absolutely right. Simply arriving by bus, the same bus the locals ride, gave us a certain cred, if not exactly respectability, in the village. Plus we did not embarrass Colby. And one should never miss an opportunity to NOT embarrass one’s offspring. (Or do I mean the opposite? Ask me tomorrow.)
So we parked our rented vehicle in Chinandega, and took the bus to El Viejo. In El Viejo (home to the silver Virgin statue brought over by a brother of Teresa of Avila, a long time ago, about which I wrote thousands of words in my novel Absent a Miracle, and then deleted most of them.) Colby bought a 100-pound bag of pig feed for his pig, Rojita. She is named for his favorite, red-flavored, Nicaraguan soft drink. We tried to visit the inside of the church but it was closed. There were, however, a gaggle of very young nuns in pale blue habits looking for money, and I have never learned the art of saying no to a nun.
Then we took the bus from El Viejo to Monte Rosa. The 100-pound bag of pig feed rode atop the bus. A young man carried it up there. I have no idea how such feats of strength are possible, but they are, Because there it was, a 100-pound bag of pig feed on top of the bus, and no crane, pulley or winch in sight.
Inside the bus, I glanced across the aisle and noted that the leg of CSB’s seat – yes, we were lucky to have seats– had pierced the floor of the bus and dangled in midair. It hovered over the dirt road like a nectar-gathering hummingbird. I watched and waited for the inevitable crash. I wanted to photograph the incongruity of CSB’s un-Nicaraguan tall frame perched upon the suspended seat in the ancient school bus, but I was dissuaded.
Then we arrived at Colby’s village.
In years past, I have driven past villages like this in Nicaragua and other Latin Countries, and I have had friendly chats with the people who live in these villages, small farmers, cane-cutters, and teachers. But I had no idea.
Here we are staying with Colby’s host family: Doña Pastor, Pipé, her autistic 23-year old son, and Bryan, a grandson. Their house is built of cinder block and plywood, and loosely roofed with sheets of corrugated tin. There is a well in the garden, so it is quite easy to pump water into a bucket, or send in through PCB pipes into a cement ‘sink’ inside. The latrine we won’t speak of. Personal ablutions take place inside a cement enclosure, with a bucket and a bowl. The heat is such that I do not miss hot water. Which is saying quite a lot, since my devotion to hot water is legendary. While here, Colby has graciously given us his bed, which we learn is a typical Chinandega style bed Chinandega bed: a wooden bedframe supporting a platform of woven cane. And Colby will sleep outside in the hammock.
After making a few visits to various families, we are back for an early dinner. It gets dark early, and so dinner is early. Even though the village got electricity about a year ago, there are still very few lights and the current is unreliable and weak. Still, any electricity at all means that those who have them can charge their cellphones. They can talk on cellphones will sitting on latrines in the middle of sugar cane country. Doña Pastora prepares dinner, the usual rice and beans, with the special treat of plantains cooked in coconut oil; Colby (along with his backpack and his 100 pounds of pig feed) brought home a plastic jug filled with coconut oil for his host mother. Colby relishes the coconut-fried plantains. CSB not quite so much so. Then, as the darkness quickly descends, Doña Pastora and Pipé and Bryan head off for cult. That is what they call it: cult. Me voy para cult. I had to hear this to several times to believe it. I know that in my prejudiced & narrow mind I may think of their evangelical meetings as cult-like, but I certainly didn’t expect to hear Doña Pastora refer to it as such. Yet she did, repeatedly. I did not hear wrong. Almost every night she goes to cult.
When she doesn’t go to cult, she and the family watch the news. Because they have a television, bought from a traveling salesman who drives around the countryside selling shoddy goods at inflated prices. They will be paying for this television long after it has died. The reception is terrible; the television is more like a radio with suggestions of black and whites shapes moving across its screen. Still, they gather around the television to watch the news. Colby suggests that we do the same, and this seems like an excellent plan. But first I take a bucket shower with the aid of my headlamp. Then I hear some oddly familiar strains of music: Que barbaridad! Those are the opening credits for Downton Abbey.
For some reason there is no news on tonight at the usual time. Instead, in a sweaty dusty village in Nicaragua, the people are watching and listening to the dramas of the upper classes of the early 20th century in the English countryside. It must be the first season: Lady Mary is the early phases of her romance with the self-made newspaper mogul who will turn out to be such a cad. I am trying to consider how I can sleep and yet simultaneously be vigilant against the Chagas vector, and also thinking ahead to Lady Mary’s later romance and marriage with Matthew Crawley and then the craven, distressing, and yet utterly predictable, ending to last season: crash.
Then we retire in darkness. Lady Mary’s fate is still an open question. I read Giaconda Belli’s memoir of love affairs and revolutions by headlamp, and fall asleep.
It may be the countryside, but it’s not quiet. Crickets bellow. Roosters crow at surprising hours. Dogs wander and bark. But suddenly this noise is more than ordinary wandering & barking dogs. The dogs are barking a lot, and loudly, and in unison, and without stopping. In the interstices we make out angry voices, the clang of metal upon metal, and more angry voices coming from other directions. We are resting upon the caned surface of the Chinandega bedframe, wondering if this goes on every night. Along with Downtown Abbey. Or not.
CSB converses with Colby, still in his hammock. Much later things quiet down, and we do not get bitten by the Chagas vector that night.

Things I cannot tell you about Nicaragua

There are several things I cannot tell you: how many billboards we saw featuring the smiling well-fed face of Daniel Ortega. This is not for lack of trying. I stopped counting at 165 because it was a) depressing, and b) driving CSB a little nutty. I can tell you that I saw more billboards sporting Daniel’s mug even than telephone poles stenciled with the silhouette of Agosto Sandino. We saw other fine murals as well.

I cannot tell you what was the meaning of the caravan of straw-covered wagons or why they were washing their horses, though I will point out that the horses (& cows) in Ometepe also were being washed, and either horses in Nicaragua tend to get washed in Lent, or horses in Nicaragua tend to get washed all year long, but we were only there to see it happen in Lent. Or the meaning may have nothing to do with horses or Lent or bathing, but instead be about a certain incredibly loud cricket, the loudest cricket I have ever heard, a cricket that sounds like a siren, or at least like the wailing of a not-mythical two-legged creature.

There is very little I can tell you about the buses in Nicaragua, except that they are very old American school buses, so old that they never transported you or your children. Possibly they transported your parents to school, a very long time ago, before environmental regulations. After having been deemed unfit to carry American children to school, these buses were sold to Mexican entrepreneurs, and when they were too decrepit for Mexico, they were sold again to enterprising Nicaraguans. I cannot even show you a picture of a Nicaraguan bus, because I neglected to take one, possibly because I was focused on staying aboard, or upright, or alive. Even after having wasted a considerable amount of time scouring the Internet for a suitable picture, I have not found one that captures the Nicaraguan bus as I came to know it: crowded or extremely crowded; still advertising its long ago provenance as the Southern Willits County Union Free School District; blasting Mayan Reggae music; having at least one young salesman squeezing up and down the crowded aisles selling patent medicines; having seat legs piercing the metal floor and suspended perilously above air, with views of the rutted road below; and with baskets of fruit and 100-pound bags of pig food on the roof, and also, us. Here is the view, on the roof, heading from Monte Rosa to El Viejo.

I wish I could tell you that the rash that returned with me from Nicaragua, or rather, appeared almost immediately upon my return from Nicaragua, has a name and a cure. But I can’t do that. Aside from making me very itchy and hence very cranky, it – the rash – has the additional attribute of making me paranoid. I may have wasted quite a bit of time looking for Nicaraguan bus photos on the Internet, but I have wasted far more time looking for possible causes for rashes upon returning from the tropics. The possibilities are legion. The first site I go to is Chagas, and Chagas is not anywhere you want to be. Chagas is a parasitic disease caused by a flagellate protozoan, and its very name fills tropical travelers with dread. In CSB’s son’s room, he has taped to the wall (Plywood, makeshift) a Peace Corps notice about the dangers of Chagas. If you get bitten by an insect vector – somewhere on your face - the bug will then suck your blood and defecate nearby. You may develop symptoms immediately, or you may not. One of the lesser symptoms is a rash. In the later acute phase of disease, things far worse than rashes will happen to you. At that point, I stop reading about Chagas disease, and change my search words, and come up with Miliaria, which is prickly heat rash and you probably won’t die from it. (But can you die of paranoia?)

In Nicaragua we witnessed several religious rituals devoted to obscure saints. I can describe them but not necessarily explain them. San Benito of Palermo and his broom, for instance. Naturally most Nicaraguans were delighted to have a Latin American pope, except for the Evangelicals, who think the Pope, whatever his provenance, is the Antichrist.

[Last week we were away in Nicaragua, now we are not. But in order to maintain the illusion of immediacy, I am going to pretend, here in SQD, that we are still in Nicaragua. Even though we are not. In Nicaragua it is very hot and dusty, and anyone can tell you that I will never use my laptop in a dusty or sweaty atmosphere because I am just a tiny bit OCD on the subject of keyboard cleanliness. Also in Nicaragua, we had infrequent Internet connections and dicey electrical power, conditions not conducive to blogging in the moment. That is why we have the willing suspension of disbelief.]

Ometepe is an island in Lake Nicaragua, now more properly called Lago Cocibolca, and it is the largest volcanic island in a fresh water lake in the world. You may not know this fact. I have been to Nicaragua countless times and I did not know this fact, but CSB’s son Colby, who is a Peace Corps Volunteer in Nicaragua, did know this fact. It was his idea that we go to Ometepe with him, and it was an excellent idea. However, while we were in Nicaragua we were told – often - that Ometepe is the largest island in a fresh water lake in the world – without that all important adjective: volcanic – and I spouted that fact to several people and insisted that yes, of course it is larger even than Manitoulin in Lake Huron. For which assertion I apologize. Ometepe is only the 10th largest island in a lake, which is still very large. It is the largest volcanic island. There are two volcanoes: Concepcíon and Maderas. Concepcíon is a perfectly symmetrical cone and still active, having most recently erupted in 2010; Ometepe’s residents declined to evacuate. Maderas is lower (1394 meters) and dormant; its slopes are covered with rain forest and there is a lagoon inside its crater. The two volcanoes are connected by an isthmus, which gives the island the shape of an hourglass, or a dumbbell, or mismatched breasts, or a bikini top. So quite naturally the island’s creation myth involves a pair of star-crossed lovers, Ometepetl and Nagrando; their parents will not allow them to marry and as a result they prefer to die together. In death, Ometepetl’s beasts swell up to become the twin volcanoes of Ometepe, and a furious rain floods the valley to create the lake.

To get to Ometepe we take a ferry from San Jorge to Moyogalpa. The ferries are famously old and rickety, but you can sit on the bridge and have spectacular views of the island.
At Moyogalpa we get off the ferry and walk into a cloud of tiny white motes, gnats, bugs, flying insects. We don’t know what they are, but they envelope the entire port, they fly into our noses and ears and mouths; they cloud our vision. They don’t sting or bite us, but they make us very nervous. They feel like a plague. Later we will learn that these are chayules, miniscule gnats that come with a change in the atmospheric pressure, and the wind blowing in from the lake. They hatch en masse, live for three days and then disappear. That was the explanation we got, and it is a relatively good one, until we start to wonder: why? Why do they exist? As insects go they appear to be entirely pointless, and yet the more I learn about insects, the more I realize that most of them have some kind of function; it may not be a function I can selfishly appreciate, but they have one. They rely on other creatures, and other creatures rely on them, for food, for aid in hatching, for dissemination, for the entomological meaning to life. So why do chayules exist? If you worry enough about that question, you will mind less picking them out of your nose and spitting them out of your mouth.
From Moyogalpa we drive along the shore and then across the isthmus. We drive very carefully because if there is one thing the Ometepeëños don't want, it is for you to drive too fast. The road, the only road, is interrupted randomly and often by sleeping policemen. If you chance to drive too fast over a sleeping policemen you can easily rupture your gas tank or oil pan, and then you can provide income to whatever local mechanic is lurking nearby in the shade of a palm tree. Watching the gringos slam on their brakes a few seconds too late is a schadenfreude-ish form of entertainment.
By sheer luck, and CSB’s brilliant mastery of Nicaraguan roads, we arrive unscathed at our hotel, a recently renovated banana finca on Playa San Domingo.
It takes about an hour to get there, and then another 15 minutes on the rough road through the banana fields. Until we see the vast lake again. It does indeed look like an old hacienda. A man with a high pitched – almost falsetto – voice greets us as if he knows exactly who we are;he brings us fruit drinks, and shows us to our rooms. We appear to be the only guests, until a bald & chatty Brit wanders over. Meanwhile, we never register and never tell Señor Falsetto our names. Perhaps he thinks Colby is a movie star and we are his aged handlers. We lie on hammocks that swing between the columns of the porch in front of our rooms. He tells us about the howler monkeys that will wake us in the morning. He is knowledgeable about local plants used as natural dyes.

Every morning and evening, a young boy on a horse leads his cows and a few horses down to the beach and they amble into the water to bathe. I assume they are bathing. Then they retreat to the shaded palm grove. I have no idea what the cows and horses do all day long.

Notes from the Animal Kingdom

In 3289 BCE, more or less, Ötzi was hunting in the Italian Alps when he was shot in the back with an arrow. He died immediately of hemorrhagic shock. Soon after his body froze and mummified naturally, and stayed that way for more than 5000 years until hikers found Iceman in 1991.
But only recently have x-rays of his stomach shown us that his last meal consisted of wild goat, or Ibex, an animal well known to crossword puzzlers and also to Copper Age mountain dwellers.

In 1539 CE Hernando de Soto arrived in Florida with 600 Spanish soldiers, 200 horses and 300 pigs. It was not de Soto’s first voyage to the New World. In 1514 Hernando sailed west with Pedrarias Dávila, the governor of Panama. De Soto was 18 years old. Dávila was 74 and did not expect to die in his homeland; so he brought with him an iron coffin. He did indeed die in León, Nicaragua (later a Sandinista stronghold) but the coffin’s whereabouts have remained a mystery all these years.
While the diseases (smallpox, typhus, measles, and more) the Spaniards carried wiped out vast numbers of the natives; it was the swine, their ambulatory meat locker, that destroyed much of the lush landscape and became the progenitors of the razorback hogs now so beloved of -- actually I have no idea if razorbacks are beloved by anyone at all. But they have given their name to several sports teams. Don’t ask me which ones.
It is entirely possible that one of Hamlette’s distant ancestors came to the New World with Hernando de Soto.

In the 20th century Chrysler produced a line of De Soto vehicles, each one surmounted by a stylized bust of a helmeted conquistador. Some of the De Soto’s of the 1950’s were the Firedome, the Fireflite and the Firesweep.


As I write these words there are eight stinkbugs perched on the outside of the window screen. Periodically I flick the screen with my finger and they bounce off and fly away, but soon they will return. Halyomorpha halys or the brown marmorated stink bud is native to the Far East. It was accidentally ‘introduced’ (nice euphemism there) into the US in 1998 and since then has been wending its way through the orchards and gardens of Pennsylvania up to New York. In case you care to check, the stink glands can be found under the thorax, between the first and second pair of legs. I read somewhere that the stink of the stinkbug resembles “the pungent odor of cilantro”; I have to assume that aspersion was written by someone who does not like cilantro, and would probably loathe my guacamole.

Three fat Rhode Island Reds are lined up on the ridgeline of the A-frame CSB built in their yard. It is either remarkable or completely obvious how chickens like to stand on bars and peaked things.

There are the memories evoked by the postcards with their bizarre images and unfathomable messages; it is as if each word is a portal to a memory palace.

And then there are the strange photographs of dubious provenance; and even when identified, still it remains unclear what I was thinking when I took them.
Here is a picture taken inside the Cathedral of León, Nicaragua. I know that because it says so on the back, and nothing more. The picture’s main feature is a dark green plaster dragon at the foot of a robed statue. Between its bared teeth, the dragon is biting something red and amorphous. Because it is in a church and inside a glass case, I am guessing this red dangling blob was once a bouquet of faux flowers; I only say this because on so many occasions I have been shocked to find plastic or silk flowers gracing a statue inside a tropical church, when just outside there are real flowers in profusion, agapanthus, datura, bougainvillea, jacaranda, birds of paradise, and wild ginger.

The statue is truncated above the knee by my photographic ineptitude, so without a renewed visit to the León Cathedral or a conversation with the current deacon of the cathedral (assuming there is one, which is an optimistic assumption given the dearth of clergy in Central America and everywhere else, except Rome), I can’t tell you which saint’s feet the dragon sits upon. I guess it is either Saint George or Saint Margaret of Antioch, because they are the two saints most commonly represented with dragons. St George is generally shown on horseback slaying the wicked dragon and thereby saving the princess about to be devoured by said dragon, as his daily meal of a beautiful virgin.
Recently I revisited the story of Saint George and the Dragon, on account of Leda, precocious and beloved granddaughter. As we sometimes do, I met up with Leda and her mother in Grand Central Station. They have come from hipster Brooklyn; I have debouched from Metro-North. The very first thing Leda showed me was a postcard of Raphael’s St George and the Dragon, this having been her choice of all the possible postcards in the bookstore in Grand Central. (In case you are wondering which Raphael version of Saint George’s heroic feat/ animal slaughter, it was the one in which the grateful virgin princess is off to the side in a prayerful position, not the one in which George’s candy-cane lance is broken and the dragon is nipping at his heels as the virgin flees in the background.) Precocious granddaughter explained to me that it was a good thing George was killing the dragon, which prompted us both to wonder exactly why are dragons always the villains (I am thinking pre-Puff.). We learned that one reason dragons were so fearful and feared, was that, along with their tongues of flame and their appetite for virgins, their exhalations spread plague over the countryside. Leda added, peripherally or perhaps not, that she sometimes has dragon breath in the morning. “But it’s alright, Nana,” she explained. “We all do. Even you.”
Back in Nicaragua, I am now persuaded that the saint only seen from the knees down is Saint Margaret, because she is wearing a gown and she is not on horseback, and the dragon is not dead. Saint Margaret of Antioch is the patron saint of childbirth for the very good reason that when she was swallowed whole by a marauding dragon, the crucifix she carried aloft tickled his throat and he coughed her right back up. Her emergence from the maw of the dragon being a rough version of childbirth, if you have a vivid imagination. If you perceive the dragon as representing Satan, as it generally was in medieval times, then the patronage becomes even more farfetched.




← Leda’s choice. Note praying princess. ←another Raphael St George, this time with the princess fleeing.
This morning – finding the postcard under our bed where it must have flown when Leda was practicing her somersaults - CSB asked me how Raphael died. Was this a trick question? (Would Watson know?) I knew he died young (37) but I didn’t know how. But I do now.
Vasari tells us that after a night of riotous sex with his beloved mistress, Raphael developed a raging fever and died on Good Friday of 1520. This was the same year Magellan sailed through the Straits of Magellan, though they were not yet so-named, and also the first year of the smallpox epidemic that would kill half the Aztec population (Gracias, conquistadores.) Most importantly, in 1520 chocolate made its first journey across the ocean from Mexico to Spain, so that 490 years later more than $1 billion could be spent on chocolate hearts on or about February 14.

After the holidaze

In the interest of underscoring the surreality of Christmas, a few random notes (I used to have a brain that could organize details and form a coherent narrative; but that was before the holiday sugar gluttony. Now I speak in palindromes & lick the insides of my pockets.):

I don’t know what your Clara looked like, but ours (The Nutcracker at the Tarrytown Music Hall) had braces. I think they were Russian braces. Also one of the Snowflakes was pregnant. Hence the pauses.

Christmas Eve brought the arrival of the Aged P’s, with their long and short memories and balms of forgetfulness. It is such multilayered forgetfulness that gives rise to variations on re-gifting, bringing that somewhat maligned but useful tradition to new and arcane levels of complication.
For instance: knowing my fondness of all things Nicaraguan my mother gave me a ceramic decorative plate from Nicaragua that was given to her about 10 or 12 years ago by a Nicaraguan friend. I know this because he gave me one as well. I have since donated my decorative (but ugly) plate to the church fair. So imagine my delight when I was presented with yet another.

The black handbag with gold chain and a bejeweled clasp also came with a back story. Many years ago a neighbor of my parents died. She was reclusive and in fact my parents barely knew her, but her youngest son was a great friend of all of us. It turned out that this reclusive lady – and this was long before the days of online shopping – was a compulsive telephone shopper, and her house was full of unused and often unwrapped boxes from Saks and Lord & Taylor, full of mink hats, evening bags, designer handbags, cashmere bed-jackets, and black negligees. Days after this neighbor’s death, my mother opened her door to find Fred (the son, our friend) bearing piles of boxes full of his mother’s treasures. In his wisdom, Fred considered my mother the most stylish woman he knew and therefore the proper recipient for this bounty.
The white mink hat (think Hostess Sno Balls before they made them pink) has already come my way, and it’s in my back hall with the label still attached – in case you are interested.

One of the ways my mother has entertained herself these past few days is reading my daybook. It takes a very special person to find this book interesting because (other than my collages which are either the work of genius or a mental defective, depending on your POV) this book merely lists my daily activity in the driest and most unadorned way I can manage. (I do not always manage.) That very special person is my mother, she who corrects the spelling on restaurant menus, corrects the architectural descriptions in real estate adverts and now corrects the spelling in my daybook. “Zut alors! Surely you know that cauchemar has a U in it.”

Maybe you’ve been finding the holidaze a tad stressful and gloomy. If that is the case, you could have found consolation for your condition at the Blue Service, designed especially for the miserable, rotten, brutish and short. But you chose not to go. No one did. You preferred to suffer alone.

Which brings us to Saint Fabiola, of lost portrait fame.