Stuff you didn't know you treasured.

Due to other commitments (my mother, the book I am not finishing, my mother, chickens, my mother, Bruno’s apathy, blindness and deafness, attending an Alzheimer caregiver support group, and a tendency to malinger) I have not been able to participate lately in the ongoing process of dismantling and emptying the family home, the Orchard.
But my sister is there. She is valiantly risking Hanta virus while throwing out six decades of New Yorkers, Yachting and National Geographics; she is bravely opening up trunks that have been locked for generations; she is unearthing vintage 1960’s travel posters; she is finding new homes for antique bird cages; she is delivering dozens and dozens of hats to a local theater company. Random crucifixes and holy medals and ‘holy’ books, she wisely donated to the local monastery. She made the tough decision to throw out my father’s school notes from middle school through college. She discovered multiple silver sets of dressing table objects no one uses any more (on Ebay they appear to be called Vanity Grooming sets), poignant testimony to a time when all ladies had silver backed brushes, combs, mirrors, shoehorns and powder boxes. Not to mention glass jars filled with mysterious unguents and powders. We cannot feel good about discarding multiple dressing table sets. There has to be a place for them.
In the matter of jeopardizing one’s health in the interest of an empty barn, this is my sister’s latest find: a Precisionaire Column device, made once upon a time in Dayton, Ohio, to weigh and tell the temperature of cotton. A similar but newer device recently sold for almost $400 on eBay, advertised for its Steam Punk value. Or maybe it was something else, because this particular device is filled with mercury, and hence must be brought to a HAZ MAT repository. Apparently it is leaking mercury even now.

Less toxic, but no less interesting is this record:

One of our family myths concerned my mother’s career as a belly dancer. My father found this concept uproariously funny, and presumably, so did we. Dad loved to tell strangers that he met Mom when she the star belly dancer at a Cairo cabaret, and he fell in love and brought her back to Hingham where she metamorphosed into a proper Boston Matron. If you have ever seen a belly dancer, it will be completely obvious that my mother was never a belly dancer and never could have been. She was slender. Very slender and largely curve-less. Her brother-in-law referred to her as an ambulatory hat-rack. (My mother deeply resented this sobriquet, but as we discover the multitude of hats she acquired over the decades, I am developing a new appreciation for its accuracy.) Belly dancers are not slender. A good belly dancer needs to have a belly which she is capable of undulating and shaking with a speed and precision that defies belief.

Victorians were fond of human hair, or so we might think given their fondness for mourning jewelry filled with a loved one’s hair. I saw an exhibit of such Victoriana once, and had to leave when I began to have trouble breathing; it felt as if my throat was lined with hair. So I can only be grateful that my sister found my mother’s famous hair pieces in the attic, where they have been since the 1960’s, that heyday of beehive hairdos and ‘real hair’ hairpieces.
Oddly, my sister refuses to tell me what she plans to do with the hair. The imagination boggles.

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?