On the plane to D.C., Christmas Day 2009, we see the blue split of the Seine on the viewing screen above. There is that steady backward drag of cruising altitude which draws the spine into the seat. We are on our way home.
As it turned out, we spent Christmas Eve, 2009 in the hotel airport, bumped from our flight; three days of bad weather in Europe leading up to our departure, trains were snarled and stranded, a monstrous backup, and we found ourselves among the thousands missing the celebrations.
Poor AirFrance lady was scared of me at first. I didn’t respond well to the news that our seats had been lost. Wasn’t a total freak out – I just started to speak, quite upset, “We can’t fly today? Really? Well… that’s… just…” and I kind of stalked off to a spot ten feet distant. Maybe she had me pegged for a heavier type than I turned out to be, once I’d counted to ten.
Obviously you can’t take this out on an employee. Poor thing, she’s been looking into her share of pissed-off faces.
We take the shuttle to our humble digs just outside the mechanized warren of the vast Charles DeGaulle Airport, an ecosystem of metal, glass, and wire, and featuring every species of vehicle in all stages of mutation. The world looks cloudy and spoiled, petroleum-stained and grey as sorrow this wet north-winter day.
Everyone’s at least vaguely depressed, from the shuttle driver to the passengers to the hotel staff. No one should be here. There’s a room inside a memory that calls, someplace fire-lit and warm against the cold. This is where we should be, in innocence and expectation.
Instead we are holding vouchers and carry-on bags, two hours to kill before dinner and the bar closed. The room is small and touched with mold at the corners, clean enough but meant for quick passing. What would it be like to live out your life in this room, I wonder?
As a kid, I would stare into the display environments of furniture stores, those three-walled rooms where the bottle of wine on the counter is always empty, the books too, and the TV/VCR is a hollow rectangular box of molded plastic. So welcomingly sterile they seemed. You could curl up in this false space somehow, make it your home by filling it with your warm body, your life function. You could make it your bed. Who would feed you, tell you where to work, collect the money- where would you do your business? Clearly this false space could never accommodate animal me, but I would fantasize about trusting my fragile body to it.
Years ago, in those terrible months after my Dad passed way, I found myself jailed for the night in New York City, sick from drugs and trying to sleep, lying with a hundred others on a bare, piss-smelling concrete floor. We were cheek to jowl in the famous “Tombs” of lower Manhattan, awaiting our place on a docket backed up 48 hours thanks to the Columbus Day holiday. I remember I was turned sideways, trying to sleep, when I felt the pressure of a cellmate’s back against mine- we were too packed in to quibble over intimacies, by circumstance obliged to touch one another. Into my agonized state there suddenly flowed the warmth of contact, a physical balm like mother’s caress, and, instead of recoiling from the proximity of another debauched and filthy like myself, I relaxed and felt sleep finally cover me after hours of tortuous waiting. Couldn't this mammal's option exist for us refugees in our far-flung airport hotel this sad and stranded Christmas Eve?
Free dinner at the Hotel Campanile, CDG Airport, Paris; man, buffets make me sad! Speaking of mammals, nowhere do we seem more basic and vulnerable than here before the trough, leaning in with our snouts to sniff out the possibilities. Why bother with these colored rags of clothes? We’re just beasts in the barn, shuffling our way towards the evening’s feed.
That being said, we eat pretty well. The French know food, among other things. The table attendants are dark black women with golden cornrows, speaking beautifully in the language of this country. In my American mind, I hear the cadences of Virginia when I imagine a black person speak so it’s still a surprise to me when, instead, there’s the falling pearls of French.
Exhausted from an early AM wake-up call and the turbulent travel day, we shut out the lights just shy of ten. I’m lying in the dark, thinking about the year.
It felt short, like every year, but in the middle of certain periods it seemed to drag and stretch and test the endurance. Winter was grey and endless and Spring came in wet and late. The month of August presented a string of livid, blazing afternoons from which the fall of night might never bring succor. The sweat never dried and there was no natural movement of air, only our weak electric fans which oscillated lamely against the wall of heat.
In the late spring and early summer I struggled to teach my English classes while generally abhorring but doing little to break a quotidian inertia in which I wrote and drew and played music little while permitting myself too much obsession time over US current events.
I found myself hanging absurdly on the hasty scribblings of political bloggers, each one, right wing and left, chewing over scraps in a zone of impotence, muddling the world with half-truths and hyperbole. In their eagerness to predict the worst they shit on any sense of possibility Obama’s election might have suggested. He made his mistakes too; watching this year's politics go down was like watching the Pack lose to the Vikings in the dome. A blanketing sense of sheer impotence mixed with overwrought emotionality.
We went to Puglia with the Speras in June, back to our little lamia just outdside Ostuni. The space was perfect for two couples. I was chewed on like a beast of the field by the ravenous southern mosquitos which hover in their legions near the many cisterns. We played Bridge almost every evening but Mr. Spera and I couldn't get a good card, it seemed. The ladies destroyed us. L., Mr. Spera, Mary, and I would go the the pocket beach we discovered and cleaned up in '08; Peg doesn't prefer beaches. I could dive off the little rock in four meters of water and watch my blue shadow slither by on the white sand floor of the sea. We cooked sea bass on the outside grill and, during a quick break in the action, I carried my wine up to the roof of the lamia where there's a deck with a great view of the groves. The moon was bursting full and hummed like a motel sign. There was the famous Big Dipper, a truly distinct, unmistakable shape amongst the million blinking stars in the Heavens. You can see how it's made such good company over the centuries.
Lying here in bed, Hotel Campanile, CDG Airport, Paris, not sleeping very soundly 'cause I'd turned in way too early, I'm thinking about my mother, thinking too of all the departed along this road of life which lengthens as it contracts and on which we travel, increasingly burdened.
Remembrance of Jack Rose, guitarist, our friend from Richmond days, passed away in '09. When L. and I met, Jack was living with Laura and Barb in Richmond, in that big wooden house next to Eggleston's Restaurant. We were all rock n' rollers. I immediately saw that Jack was a special player, also quite the drinker though everyone was drinking a lot then, no one more so than me. In any case, we had some good times. Once Lawren said, by way of greeting, "Hey Jack….boffed any girls lately?" I loved the way she said 'boffed'. Jack, unfazed, replied 'sure'. L. and I moved down to Richmond winter of '94 and we saw a lot of Jack. I used to watch him play with Uglyhead in one of those near-condemned row-house basements on Leigh Street. We would drink National Bohemian beer in the red cans. Richmond is a beautiful city and those were my first days and nights there, hanging out in that scene.
Remembrance also of Pio Quinto, painter, passed away in '09 during the Summer. Fede had told me how Pio was suddenly diagnosed with a galloping cancer which had already laid him out in a hospital bed, a few weeks to live. I hadn't seen Pio for awhile and that was why. He was a flawed but passionate painter, a guy who always gave L. and me the time of day, even offered to show me his studio and hang out. If only my Italian had been better! Pio had a quick tongue and would break your balls; it was a little intimidating sparring with him in Italian and he didn't speak English.
Truth be told, I blew off swinging by his place a couple of times and now he's gone- I missed my chance. He is survived by his companion Laurella. They had a boy together, also called Pio. Pio's around eight I think. All the Parco Lombroso guys are in love with Laurella, she's really wry and sharp, quick to laugh but a skeptical soul. She came to my art show at ai Preti. Farewell, Pio.
After our restless night in the Hotel Campanile, we are offered free breakfast, buffet style, for our sorrows. I have a new xMas Carol- 'Saw a French breakfast buffet on Christmas Day in the morning.' Not a bad buffet, though no eggs, sadly. They're playing a jazz radio station on the speakers, not loud but present. I hear Giant Steps by John Coltrane. Every few moments, a recorded woman's voice stage-whispers, 'jazz!'.
I saw a French breakfast buffet on Christmas Day, on Christmas Day
I heard Giant Steps by John Coltrane on Christmas Day in the morning
Our passage from momentarily huddling arrestees on the forsaken stretches of international travel to well-washed and on-time passengers is seamless and cheerful. We're on our way, plus AirFrance gave us the exit seats as a way of apologizing for our delay so I'll be able to stretch my legs.
As the plane rises, I write "On Christmas Day, 2009…."
We arrive at Dulles around 4:00. Rich is there to meet us. I get L. and me a tall paper cup of coffee at the Starbucks just outside the arrivals area, as per tradition. Guess I'll always look for my Mom in that crowd of expectant faces. Rich is cheerful and all fired up about politics. We have a great talk on the ninety minute drive from the D.C. area to Goochland County. L. is really fond of my eldest brother. She wants to buck him up. I'm worried about him, like I'm worried about all of us. Gotta stop worrying so much. We'll be okay.
It's the Land of Christmas at the Spera's house. We arrive in a thick blue winter dusk and the warm lights calling from inside seem to sing at me like that "do you see what I see" carol, heard in a state of seasonal enchantment years ago in the back of Mom and Dad's old Pontiac station wagon.
This was my favorite time of the year as a kid because my brothers would be back from college. We were always running to Dallas-Fort Worth airport to pick someone up. The Ingham family had strong Christmas traditions- we made a pretty big deal out of the whole occasion. We would wait 'til Christmas Eve, when prices had been slashed, to purchase and put up the tree. Stockings always came first, opened on Mom and Dad's rumpled waking bed. All those pictures of Dad in his bathrobe, half sitting up and smoking as we tore open our stocking gifts! There was the Italian sugar cookie from the New York Times cookbook Mom always made, the cardamom rolls with their spiral shape, Fred Oscanion's eggnog and the Venetian turkey.
I can appreciate a good effort around the holidays so I find myself well situated in the home of Peg Spera, Queen of Christmas. There's so many delicious varieties of cookies, a carton of Food Lion eggnog in the 'fridge; Mr. Spera likes to indulge in a little caffeinated coffee when I'm around. At this point, the Spera Christmas is my own past. I can feel at home here, watching bowl games in my "soft pants" as L. calls them, digging Peg's decorations, the luxury of having a dryer.
Running through the woods one morning just after sunrise I see a bank of winter trees, stripped bare save for clusters of leaves still clinging past the Fall. They are the color of parchment and flutter in the passing breezes. The spreading dawn bleeds pearl pink onto the blue sheet of sky, producing an electric contrast with the parchment color of these last dead leaves. They explode into frantic motion, like startled birds.
We saw everybody; L.'s brothers and their families, a few of the Spera's friends, Aunt Jean and family, the Richmond crew, Colette, Jeff and Deb in Crozet. As for C'Ville, we only got as close as 5th Street extended where we were spooked out of a Taco Bell by a pair of wasted and somehow dangerous seeming rednecks who rolled in just after us. It occurred to L. that, here in America, people do actually get gunned down in public places from time to time, something almost inconceivable in dear old Verona.
It was a good holiday for football. I saw some good games. Saw Brett Favre, #4, three-time MVP and Super Bowl champion lead the Minnesota Vikings. For those of you who know, you'll know what an offense to nature this represents. Saw a lot of college football where our blustery, hungry American nature is so well displayed in the production, those giant truck commercials still, all that simple and self-encouraging patriotism.
We go to a big salad bar restaurant for my sister-in-law Miranda's birthday. Man, you eat badly on Broad Street! The dressings taste of rancid oil, the tomatoes make me think about petroleum as they were clearly brought in from a long way away, there isn't even any rucola. We have become spoiled by Italian produce and Italian ways of eating. Why would I pour some hideous, creamy sauce over my salad when there's golden oil from the groves of Puglia? And all these fat people – every fifth person you see walking about in the endless parking lots is just morbidly, impossible overweight! I mean, I've had a few pounds on me in the past but the profile you see these days in the States goes way farther.
Oy, I shouldn't be so critical but I can't help it! I love my country, I love Virginia; just that I'd rather stay in Europe. Does that make me an elitist of some kind? I like to be from outside the tribe, I like to have to fit in. I don't feel superior, or at least I constantly remind myself that I shouldn't and try to behave accordingly. In America, I really begin to miss the funkiness and loveliness of Europe pretty quickly, after a few days or so. But I love hanging out at the Speras. I love the woods.
