A Literary Christmas, Pureed

A Literary Christmas, Pureed

            Even without any traffic at all on 19^th Avenue, the mother and son had gotten home at an hour late for the mother on Christmas Eve because after dinner with friends, they’d gone around looking for a place to buy sweetened condensed milk for the flan she was making for their Christmas Day Spanish dinner.  So on Christmas Day she slept until 4:00 AM, when she woke to thoughts of cleaning and cooking—cleaning up the mess they’d left preparing the dishes they’d contributed to the Christmas Eve dinner and cooking the dinner they’d be eating for Christmas Day.  But she didn’t get to the kitchen right away.  First she bundled the down comforter and pillow all together and on another sofa so the new (slightly used but perfect) one in front of the Christmas tree could be seen in all its splendor.  Then after lighting the votive candle she settled into the recliner to re-read Paul Bowle’s  "Frozen Fields” from the volume A Literary Christmas.  It made her think of her own family and her own childhood and be grateful that she’d grown up.  Old age was much better than being a child, and even  her father had had a certain deliverance in old age, when he had grown mellower and kinder and gentler and less likely to yell at them and  call them names.  But even when he had filled her with fear and dread, she had never fantasized a wolf at his throat. 

            Then she rose and made the Spanish potato tapa, the only thing she’d ever learned to make without a recipe, and then the flan, which required patience as the sugar melted very slowly in the sauce pan and, once liquid, had to be poured carefully into four little custard cups, which after being filled with custard got placed in a pan on a wet dish towel and had boiling water poured around them. 

            Wasn’t cooking fascinating!

            She then started chopping all the vegetables—Mushrooms, garlic, onion, red bell pepper, green bell pepper, tomatoes, green onions. 

            Were olives vegetables?  What about when they were stuffed with pimento?  She arranged the vegetables on the cutting board and in bowls around the cutting board to add later.  She got carrots out of a bag in the chiller drawer and thawed frozen peas.  Then she began cooking, taking all the steps from the onion in oil through the adding of the vegetable broth to the Arborio rice.   

            She washed another batch of  dishes and at around 9:00 AM she stopped.  Her son was up doing knee exercises.  After jogging in Central Park for a few years, he’d had a knee problem but was now expecting to return to NYC on the morning of New Year’s Eve to run in the midnight race in Central Park along with 400,000 other people.  Or was it 4,000?

            It was time for her to get the presents ready for her brother and sister. There were plenty of gifts for him because his interest in gifts was waning, and there were always leftovers from the previous gift-giving occasion.  But she added a velvet frame—non-threatening because it did not contain glass, which was forbidden in his room at the Garfield care facility—and she put a picture of him with bunny ears from Easter and with a Santa hat and white beard from the previous Christmas.  She would have bought him another Santa hat and beard if she had realized the one from last year wasn’t in the Christmas trunk.  He must have worn it back to Garfield.  She made him a card:  “To David, who brings cheer all year.”  Then she made a card for her sister and enclosed a recent article about gift-giving that concluded that what people wanted most was money.  She also enclosed money. 

            She made sure her son thought that serving the salad leftover from Christmas Eve was a bad idea, and then she ate it herself free of guilt.  Arugula.  Grilled Brussels sprouts and butternut squash and other good things. 

            Their early November selection for the JoMama Book Club had been Gary Kamiya’s Cool, Grey City of Love:  49 Views of San Francisco, so as a follow up to their Thanksgiving time exploration by foot of places near the house, they were going to Lands End by car, and they were running a little bit late.

            Still they phoned friends to see whether they could drop a present off on their way to Lands End, and the friends were welcoming.   So was the weather, bright and crisp but not cold.  People they met on the path occasionally said “Merry Christmas” very softly, as if they wanted to be respectful of whatever feelings others might have on the subject.

            The son did better with the steps than the mother did, but when he checked the time and asked her whether she wanted to go back or do five more minutes of the path, she chose five more minutes of the path.  His aunt and uncle might be delayed by the checking in and checking out at the facility—even by the overworked staff’s slowness in responding to the doorbell when she rang it.  

            But when as they were driving back along Ocean Beach’s Great Highway, the son’s cell phone rang, and the mother took it because he was driving.  Her sister and brother were closer to the house than she and her son were, and sure enough, when she and her son arrived, they saw the car already parked there.

            She had wanted to straighten up a bit more, light the candles in the fireplace, put on Christmas music.  So she rushed into the house to do these things and joined her son on the street a couple of minutes later to help bring in her brother, who had trouble getting in and out of cars and up and down steps because of the peripheral neuropathy that had come after his lifetime of Dilantin to control his seizures.  He couldn’t feel his legs. 

            Once inside the son turned down the volume on the Christmas music and got everyone comfortably seated.  The mother continued with her cooking in the kitchen while her son served drinks and made hors d’oeuvres like the ones they’d taken to their friends’ home on Christmas Eve. 

            “I’d like some Christmas music,” her brother said, and the mother turned the volume back up.

            But in time he wanted the Beatles.

            “They should have a Christmas album,” her brother said.  Her sister gave their brother a pre-Christmas-dinner present, the pages on the Beatles that her tenant, who had become a friend,  had saved for him.

            And then he started in on the girl in the Titanic.

            “I suspect that her red hair wasn’t always red,” he said.

            When the paella was ready, the son came into the kitchen and pureed a portion of it for her brother, who wasn’t permitted solid food.  If he complained as he had done on Thanksgiving Day, they would remind him that he had a test coming up on the thirty-first to see whether he could swallow.  He remembered that he had “an operation.”  But he didn’t complain.  He ate the pureed paella and said it was good.

            “Would you like some more?”

            “Please,” he said.  And he ate another serving of it.

            He had two helpings of the flan dessert too. 

            Then he returned to the living room and to his obsession with the girl in the Titanic.

            The mother went to her computer to look it up and printed out pages of Kate Winselet as Rose.

            Yes, he said, that was the one  he was thinking of.  Rose.

            But he laughed when he saw Rose as an old woman.  He was unaware that they were closer to the old woman’s age than they’d been for many decades to Rose. 

            The rest of the afternoon blended all together.  There was the gift-giving, almost all of it directed towards her brother.  Her sister had bought him a lot of new clothes, but it wasn’t easy to get him to try them on.  He was willing, but the peripheral neuropathy made it hard for him to help them out as they undressed and dressed him, both at his feet. 

            There were still too many gifts for his interest span which was long only for Rose of the Titanic. 

            When the time came for him to leave, they debated whether it would be easier to get him down the back steps and through the garage or down the front steps, which he’d come up.  They decided to take him back out the front.

            Once on the porch he said to the son, “You’re a lucky dog.  You don’t have to go back to the fucking hospital.”

            Did he still think he was at Napa State Hospital?  He hadn’t been there for fifteen years.  What her son didn’t have to go back to was a neurobehavioral care center, a 24-hour locked facility. 

            Her sister had a CD of the Beatles in the car for him.

            “The Beatles are in the car waiting for you!” she told him cheerfully.”

            “That’s an out and out lie, you asshole.  You can’t fool me.  Fuck you!” he said. 

            The mother worried not just about the disappointment that her sister would feel that the day hadn’t been perfect after all but that he would forget how good it had been, so she reminded him.

            “Suzy has been a very loving sister.  She’s shown you a lot of love.  We all have.  I’ll bet you’d like to express some good feelings about that, wouldn’t you?”

            Sometimes this worked, not as a guilt trip, but as a reminder.  This might not be one of those times.

            Soon her sister and her were on their way back to not the fucking hospital but to the much better neurobehavioral care center 24-hour locked facility, and she was doing the first batch of dishes while her son, A Literary Christmas in his hands, sat in the dining room on the table that was now cleared and went wither her through the “Frozen Fields” page by highlighted pages.