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.

On donkeys, or not

Does it really matter whether it was a donkey or a horse, or even a mule, upon whose back the very pregnant Mary rode to Bethlehem, and who was then a spectator at the manger? It matters to me.
Twice in my life I have ridden donkeys and, strangely enough, I remember both instances, though not for their ease of travel or comfort. Au contraire. The first time was on the volcanic island of Santorini, known for being volcanic and for its rare and delicious white eggplants, which are so sweet they can be eaten raw. (I am very fond of eggplants – see previous posts re blue food for further information – but have yet to eat one raw.) If you arrive at Santorini by boat, and you will because there is no other way to arrive, it is a long and circuitous climb from the harbor up to the village at the crater’s rim. For reasons that presumably have to do with an ancient Santorinian’s wicked sense of humor, tourists are encouraged, even compelled, to make that ascent – the “traditional way” - on the back of a donkey.
I cannot recommend this little enough.
The second time I rode a donkey was on Mount Tubkal in Morocco. Experiencing knee problems on the descent, I briefly rode a donkey along the winding rocky paths where a misstep would plunge us both into a rocky abyss. I realized that no knee pain was bad enough to overcome the sheer terror, not to mention extreme discomfort, of riding that donkey. I walked.
So when I consider the gravid Mary, already struggling to keep down her last meal of wild locusts and honey, traveling atop a cantankerous and bumpy ass, I am full of sympathy. I refer to imagine her riding an onager, the wild Asian ass native to the deserts of Syria and Israel. Onagers are more horselike and larger than donkeys, and bear on their backs a distinctive black stripe edged in white. Sadly, onagers are untamable and always have been.

But if you are still interested in acquiring a donkey, there are about 44 million in the world today, mostly in China, but easily available here. A certain relative of mine described them as expensive lawn ornaments. Though it is not clear whether he was referring to the initial expense of acquiring said donkeys, or the expense of feeding them and garbing them in Louis Vuitton saddlery.


Arrival of the Holy Family in Bethlehem, by Cornelis Massys, who interests me because he is the son of Quentin Massys, for whom there is a plaque in the square in front of the Antwerp Cathedral at the exact spot where a young man (who would have been my great-uncle had he lived) and his beloved landed when they jumped from the cathedral spire.