My dear cousin from New Orleans, the psychiatrist, called me yesterday* to say that she was in Boston on business. Was I free later that night to have dinner with her and her colleagues at Fancy Eyetalian Restaurante across from the hotel? Yes, I was, thank you for inviting me, I'm broke, no it doesn't matter, etc etc.
In the five or so hours before dinner I was an emotional mess. She's wonderful, but having seen her the last two times at funerals, it opened up stuff. With her being a psychiatrist, I imagined all sorts of conversations: should I ask her for advice? Will I babble inanely about stupid stuff? Family has almost never come to see me in Boston; only my brother visited in 2004 or 2005, so that in itself was an Event. My cousin and I were closer when I was in my early teens, which made those times look unfairly distant, and of course, blurry from all the damned vaseline on the lens.
While doing an emergency load of laundry to have something to wear, I wrote a bit, because while one has a great huge sobbing fit, one tends to say things to one's self that one might be useful later. For a few hours I was afraid I wouldn't be able to go. However, the storm passed. I made a small fuss over clothes and basically ended up looking like a conservative choirboy, and had a very nice time. We talked of string and ceiling wax and other things. In addition, there was family gossip traded back and forth, because everybody knew everybody else until the young people started to move away. Moreover, she had access to events before I was born, which for some reason seemed to come up over dinner. She treated me with two gems of insights about my biological parents that has little importance to anyone but me:
I knew my father was pretty good at all kinds of sports, and she reminisced that he was at one time, known for a position in football that involved catching but which has long since been subsumed in another position. She couldn't remember the term (half-back? split-back?) and I only know about tight ends. He could catch anything. She pointed out that his prowess at each sport seemed to come from the fact that
he never liked to be a dilletante at anything, but once he learned it, would go on to something else.
Sound familiar?
I also knew my mother was not the most outgoing type, but one of the things she mentioned is that there were all sorts of clues that she might have had a kind of social phobia --long before such things were identified and which could be treated with medication-- that made her seem to my cousin shy and afraid. I told my cousin that if that was the case, and if it were genetic, then it would explain some things. There were a number of things in my lifetime that we were trying to arrange neatly on a timeline. It was oddly comforting to talk about even the unpleasant things, in a way, I suppose, it might be nice to find every last one of the broken parts of a vase.
She gave me some advice about school plans and about a handful of things that came up, which shall be taken under advisement. It was tremendously nice to talk to someone with that particular mix of familiarity and detatchment. I don't know what we'd do if we were constantly around each other, but several hours were comfortably filled up.
I gave her a ladybug whistle for her 11-year-old named after my grandmother, and the blue and green painted vase, which was among the first of the ones that I made public. The Extended Family hasn't got any current information on me, and the vase very satisfactorily surprised her. She was very appreciative, and I know it's in the family. In fact, she called from the layover on the way back home to thank me again for it.
Overall, her visit was a very nice surprise, I had my meltdown and recovered, and have been busy with current art projects all today with a kind of lifted-load feeling. Temporary, of course. But there's been a bit of a context readjustment which is kinda pleasant.
Back to work......
*You should know that the cousin and I both love
Moonstruck. She would have been amused, I think, to know that when I saw the home-town area code in my phone from a non-parent number, I remembered one of my favorite lines of Olympia Dukakis' character,
Rose**. In the scene where her husband and daughter appear at her bedside in the middle of the night to tell her something, she opened her eyes, "Who died?"
**The other favorite line of mine is also hers: "Old man, you give those dogs another piece of my food and I'm gonna kick you 'til you're dead!"
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