How to Party When You're Dead

My niece got married yesterday, and I loved how the wedding decor included those who are no longer on this earth. While I don't really believe that they were watching from above, literally, the way that we were all watching when the bride and groom danced their first dance, they were there through us. People say I look a lot like my mom these days, and my brother's resemblance to our father is almost uncanny.

parents of the bride watching the first dance

So there we all were. All of us. Present in our earthly bodies. Present in the stories told, present when we catch a glimpse of one another out of the corner of our eye, and think, whoa, for a second, I thought....

At one point in the evening my youngest grandniece came up to me out of the blue, and said, "I remember Great-Grandma Ethel." And I said, "Well, let's go look at her picture." And so we did.

Report from the Love Shack

Hahahaha. Just kidding.

I went to a wedding today though. The bride and groom kissed like crazy.

That looked like fun.

And in other news:

My mom got accepted into hospice care this morning.

Hold your horses.

All it means right now is that there's better pain management--and I'm happy beyond measure about that. I had a glass of champagne (all by myself) when the nurse left. The champagne was already in the fridge, opened and re-corked. Because friends.

And it made a big difference in my mom's day, taking those pills in four hours instead of six.

The big thing--and this is huge. I can call a nurse any hour of the day or night. The nurse will come to the house if I say we need her. Amazing. I keep looking at that piece of paper on my fridge, thinking, oh my god, there is a number I can call and someone will be right over.

That's what people do when you live near family members, right? I was away at college when my dad died very suddenly of a heart attack. It was evening. February. The roads were probably icy and it was mostly likely colder than hell. People came over. Yes, I have friends, excellent and generous and gracious friends, but I find it harder to impose on friends, especially in the middle of the night. Shortly after my divorce when I was living alone, I took a bunch of pain pills and bandaged my eye and went to sleep after my dog poked her toenail in it. I knew I had a scratched cornea. In the morning I drove myself to the eye doctor while holding a towel over half my face.

And here's the really amazing part--my mom can still go visit relatives in Maryland (which means I can take a trip with a friend) and be on hospice there. And then come back and be on hospice here. Well, the arrangements aren't totally solid yet, but it's in the works.

Originally, the word hospice meant simply an inn for travelers, I think.

And we're all just traveling through.

Sleep well.

Traveling the World(s)

Ideally, when one goes off for the weekend to stay in a swanky-ish spot, one would not be wearing pink flannel pajamas and be in bed alone. However, I survived. I even had fun. A lot of fun.

My godson's wedding was completely charming. The after-party for the older generation (plus the groom's brother as a representative of the younger generation) was delightful and involved a lot of wine, some really good goat cheese, and one of those irresistible confections from Trader Joe's involving chocolate and nuts and coconut. I have no solid recollection of what exactly we talked about, but I do remember laughing a lot. I was afraid I'd feel like shit this morning since I barely drink these days, but I woke early and hit the road. Driving does weary me though. More than drinking too much wine. I got off the road  for a while and went exploring in a beach town a couple hours north of where I live. It was full of tourists eating salt water taffy, and  fro-yo and the sidewalks looked as though they had suffered a lot of fro-yo and taffy spills. I like where I live better.

So it's lovely to be home. I took a long walk and met an acquaintance/friend for a glass of wine which turned into dinner with more friends of hers, and god, we older women are fascinating. There were five of us and the collection of life experiences was not for the faint of heart. But there we were.

I've been trying to prompt myself to dream of Dan this past week or so. A couple of nights before I left, I dreamed I was at a party and ran into an old college friend who'd heard that I had a wonderful boyfriend. Oh, he died, I told her. He's dead. Her eyes filled with tears and she seemed shocked that I'd been so blunt. I had another dream a couple of nights ago and it slipped away before I could solidify the memory of it. I remember only touching his face.

And so it goes, I move through these two worlds, communing with both the dead and the living.

The Weather Saints

Main Street store: West Point, NE

Going back to the Midwest always evokes a mix of emotions for me. I hate the heat and the humidity, the infernal buzz of biting insects, the endless array of fried foods, and the jello weirdness of salad bars. But C and I drove through postcard prettiness yesterday from Minnesota to Nebraska. Billowing clouds over fields of perfect corn, the silver-green waver of soybeans, the greener-than-green glow of alfalfa. We stopped in a roadside antiques store to browse, and when we got to where we were going, we walked into the little town in search of a dinner. I want a steak in a dark bar or supper club, I told C. She was game. We almost had to settle for the golden arches, but at the far end of Main St., I got my wish.

I don't usually eat meat. I'm a pescatarian--in other words a vegetarian who eats some fish. But I had a steak last night. You gotta eat the good thing that's local, right? And there was no jello at the salad bar. Pea salad, carrot salad, and cole slaw instead. They were all delicious. We returned to our motel without a single mosquito bite and woke this morning to a day of unbelievably pleasant weather. We're here for a wedding, and my ex-mother-in-law has a routine of imploring the appropriate saints for perfect wedding weather. This is her 10th grandchild wedding, and she is currently 10 for 10.

Hugging

In the hug-fest that constituted the departure from my ex-mother-in-law's house, she explained that, in her day, hugging was pretty much verboten. "I never even hugged my own mother," she said as we clustered around her waiting for our turn to be folded into her arms. "Not even once?" someone asked. "Mama always said that we should keep our hands to ourselves," she said. But the hugging continued. Both my daughters, my daughter M's girlfriend, my niece, me. "I've had to learn to hug," my ex-mother-in-law said, "but at 92, I think I'm getting pretty good at it."

There's a lot to ponder there. I've been a huggy person my whole life. This makes me wonder about my ex-husband. Did he learn to hug from me? Or was it a generational thing--the fallout from the summer of love-make love not war-love is all there is-free love zeitgeist of our generation? My parents hugged me. My parents hugged each other--though they would have given the ix-nay to the free love stuff. Somehow down this long and winding road, it seems that a hug is both hello and good-bye with all the people I care about.

The reason I had a chance to hug my ex-mother-in-law this weekend was due to a family wedding in Nebraska. When I arrived at the party the evening before, the entire group of ex-in-laws stood up to hug me and my daughters. There was so much jockeying around, it's a wonder none of us backed into the pool.

There was hugging as a prelude to the in-law hugging, too. I met my daughter's girlfriend for the first time prior to the drive to Nebraska. Dinner was arranged and the young couple met me and the girlfriend's mother at one of my favorite St. Paul restaurants. We mothers arrived first, and via our cellphones the daughters coached us mothers into recognizing one another. We hugged--a bit awkwardly, flailing between outstretched arms and extended hands. Maybe we're prepping to be mothers-in-law.

I am a fan of the hug. Being the Francophile that I am, I might go for the double-barreled cheek kissing, but Americans are awkward at that. And of course hugging can be awkward, too. Mr. Ex was at the wedding and at his mom's house the next day. We didn't hug. Not hello. Not good-bye. That would have been awkward. The vibe I get from him is that he finds me despicably revolting. I've discovered that I don't really care at all about him anymore. In fact, I found myself recalling the philosophy of the man who loves me more than once this weekend--"at the time, in that place, you did the best that you could." In this way he gives the benefit of the doubt to almost everyone. When we first met, I scoffed at this tolerant idea as I mourned my own past mistakes and railed against those of Mr. Ex. This weekend as I watched Mr. Ex, I thought those very words. But I'll save my hugs. The hugging door between Mr. Ex and me is closed.

The Maine Event

My daughter is married.

Somehow the baby that could barely tolerate being out of my arms is now, a quarter of a century later, a married woman.

It's a lot to comprehend.

It's been over four years since my own marriage fell apart, and although the trail of destruction the divorce left has not exactly been scoured away by the winds of time, there's been some pretty significant erosion. Oh, it's true that there were separate tables for him and his relatives and for me and mine, but there were incursions into one another's territory.

He danced with my mother. More than once. God knows what she said to him, but the music was so loud that regardless of what either of them said, it's doubtful that they could hear one another. I had a chance to chat with all of his brothers and sisters, and spent plenty of time with his niece who happens to be one of my favorite people.

And so the story of a divorce segues into the story of a marriage. Stories do that. They have a mind of their own, stories do. A baby girl is born, and some time later all hell breaks loose. There's heartbreak. A reversal. The story continues. There's a divorce. There's a wedding. And at this wedding, for the first time ever, four generations of  a rather unusual family find themselves in one place at the same time.

And now I'm home on my couch with my ancient cat purring on my lap. The man who loves me is at his place--savoring the solitude--or, who knows, rattling around in it, lost and wondering what happened to all the joyous hubbub. The relatives and friends are home, too--or making their way there by car, ogling fall foliage as they go. The younger daughter is running victory laps around my mother's trailer, having carried out her Maid of Honor/Party Captain duties, and safely returned my mother and her oxygen machine.

It was a peak family moment, this wedding.