On our way to Brunch (woohoo!) with Didi, JJ and Laura.

Waiting outside at (mmmmm)Millies. GAWD, the food is good.

Hey! That’s our lamp!

Colette drove from C-Ville to visit.

New Year’s Eve I spend with family in F’Burg while L. hangs with her best buddy DiDi in Richmond. On the drive back to Mom’s house, I take in the blinking expanse of Boulevard and Broad, all that bagged ice for sale, the car dealerships and the thousand hamburger options. Perspective is a funny thing. I must say, I still really love this mess, though I feel in my bones we cannot continue on this way.

Manage to see Jeff, Deb, Gate, Darby and the rug-rats if only for an instant. We are very much commandeered by the family forces this visit, could never have done a proper Richmond/C’Ville giro. Sadly, this means we can only squeeze in a couple of hours in the wilds of Lake Monticello. We have to do this like a group interview. Can’t get loose, have a smoke, play through some tunes. We must move on to Richmond to see DiDi and JJ.

This is actually a most restful interlude. I get calm around DiDi and JJ. I love their house on Dundee Avenue. There’s always something great about Bob Dylan to read, I can see a few of my old pictures which JJ bought. Plus, Richmond is such a beautiful city. It’s the one place I could come back to.

XMAS day first in F’Burg, then on to the Spera’s where Peg, Paul, Chuck and Miranda are in place. Ken, Cindy, Matthew and their soon to be born (should be Summer of ’07) arrive later. Usual good food, football, rock talk with Chuck and a hundred cookies. Chris, Johnna, Corey, and Cameron slog through Northern Virginia traffic for the traditional day after X-Mas visit. There’s so many boxes and presents, so much paper flying. Guess I’m still jet-lagged, ‘cause it’s kind of blinding me. Fun nonetheless. X-Mas will stress you to death, but it’s always vale la pena (that means “worth the pain”).

The Dinner Table.

We spend a fine X-mas eve at Mom’s house. We have made all the proper cookies. Mom is sleeping on her little blow-up bed in the living room. I believe her when she says she digs it. We’re the same this way, Mom and I. She likes camping out, sleeping in a novel spot from time to time, same as me. I’ll never forget us pitching a tent on the Kaibob Plateau and eating pork and beans, Summer ’94 was it? The temperature dropped down to thirty that night. I went out to pee and I never saw such a moon in my life, cutting straight down through the naked pines to the forest floor.

I always say the moon looks different in Italy.

Down in Mom’s studio, finishing up my Susan and Kent Flury dog pics. with ESPN rolling on the tube, when the Vermont Inghams arrive. Ciao belli! Harriet is gay and full of life, “so glad to be out of the box” as Lenny Bruce says. Nate is finally a real, shuffly, lanky teenager, just like his old man and his old uncle Steve once were. Wow, time flies. Alice seems radiant and relaxed, Ted is playing some of the finest music I’ve ever heard from him.

A fun lunch with Ted and Al at Let’s Eat in downtown F’Burg. One couple overhears us talking about Italy and wants to get the whole story. At another table there is a couple of real estate brokers from Montpelier, VT. We’re chatting it up with the whole ‘Let’s Eat’. Nothing is more brutto than shopping at these Route 3 strip malls. So much crap in a three mile radius, enough to choke the world it seems to us. We’re in this flow just like the rest, I suppose.

Working on two little commissions. I set up shop in Peg’s little wooden potting shed in the back yard. Listening to old-time radio on Mr. Spera’s 70’s transistor radio. In between songs I can hear the warm hum of old-school amplification through the single speaker. Weather unseasonably warm.

Over the weekend Chuck and I try to record ‘We Three Kings’ at the house of one of his friends. It’s fun to sing into a sweet mike with a backing track, wearing headphones. I call it Self-Karaoke. Somehow the session is thwarted and Chuck’s disappointed. I attend a party with he and Miranda at a cat named Charlie’s house. What a crazy scene! The dude is odd, lives a shut-in kind of life obviously. He has a little scared dog with crazy long toenails, like it never gets outside. His Dad is there. The old man seems displeased by his mess of a son. He stays in the kitchen with a drink, saying little. The turkey Charlie serves is actually undercooked in parts, which no one has the heart to tell him. You can see everyone treats him with the deference usually granted a partial madman. I stick with the mashed potatoes.

We see this crazy “spettacolo” in the Richmond Coliseum. L.’s brother, Chuck, and his wife Miranda, bought us tickets to this show. It’s maybe three or four heavy-metal guitar virtuosos and their giant group, string section and all, performing X-Mas themed stuff. A good bit of bombast and hair-flinging, some cheesy lyrical content and a touch of pro-Iraq War rhetoric. It was what Tom Scharpling calls “awefulsome.” I have to admit, though, I kind of loved parts of it. Those cats could play.

We have a fun couple of days at Casa Spera, cleaning up and mounting Peg’s three trees. I learn to love their “central vac” system. After Italy, Virginia seems too spacious. All these big cars, acres wide parking lots. You could drive a Hummer down the aisle of your average supermarket. Jet-lagged and sappy, I’m almost weeping at the strains of X-Mas radio songs. We feel strangely at home.

Rich meets us at Dulles. It’s fun to buy a giant “Caffe Americano” at Starbucks, just past the international baggage check. In spite of the late hour, I help myself to a fine dollop of half and half. The Italians would be appalled.

Rich is in fine spirits, struggling a bit under work pressures but full of life, outraged by the U.S. political environment from his nearby perch at the FAA and full of fine Beltway detail. We gripe about the current administration all the way back to F’Burg. Mom is good shape in spite of all. In her own house she is still unsteady, very careful as she moves about; makes me angry with these grand forces in our lives which can impose such heavy change. In the face of it all she is strongly herself. I count myself lucky that she’s willing to work so hard, otherwise I’d be sick with worry being so far away.

We have a nice evening, though we’re all a bit blazed with travel and the late hour Stateside. Before going to bed, I stare at the family photos on the TV room wall. So strange to look at photos of Dad. He seems more real in my thoughts than he does in these old pictures. It’s not that I don’t like looking at them. It’s just that I feel this funny, queasy disconnect when I see my old man’s image, frozen like that. In my mind he’s always in motion, talking or gesturing. Sleep is full of brilliant, hectic jet-lag dreams.