Remember this

We are having such a nice morning. I'm sure it won't last. But I have cleaned the kitchen and the bathroom (well, almost), the house is redolent of rosemary & lavender, Henry helped fold laundry ("I'm a big boy, so I know how to fold things!) and is now single-mindedly constructing a folly of a garage for a Hot Wheel car out of blocks, and James is drawing with colored pencils on beetle-sized bits of paper he tore up.

Last week's iteration.

Last night we were all lolling together before bed and James plunged toward Henry saying "Mmmmmm"--his idea of a kiss. They grappled for a moment. Then Henry sat up and said, "I guess James wanted to pour his love into me."

Some days I don't really enjoy my life much until everyone is asleep, so I want to remember this.

This is for you, Ray Canoy

Police Boy

And Fire Baby

The goddamn wine

Today was dividing-up-the-wine day. The house has been sold, Julia's moving, the china cupboard that once crossed half a country in a covered wagon is coming to live with me, and now I have picked 17 bottles of Dad's wine, my communion supply for the rest of my life. Is it wonderful or horrid, to have this tangible, intimate, but fragile and finite legacy? I certainly don't love wine as Dad did; I wish my legacy were a letter instead, some words, clear and explanatory, meant just for me. I would trade all the half-bottles of Chateau d'Yquem in the world for that letter.

But Dad & I shared our best words over wine. I wish it weren't so, but it was. I needed to be the littlest bit drunk to unlock my tongue with him, and wine unlocked him too. I remember talking one night long past dinner about wine and wool and terroir, the quilts of Gee's Bend and the aesthetics of authenticity. I remember him telling me once, in tears, some while before Henry was born, how much he wished his mother had lived to know him as a full-grown man. We drank champagne on his father's 100th birthday. We tried out variation after variation on rum punch, trying to recreate the cocktail that was a la mode in November of 2000 in Paris, where we spent a month together, eating and drinking our way around the neighborhood restaurants. Most often, whatever we talked about, we seemed to me to be using a code of indirection; I imagined us as miners, pointing our (wine-burning) headlamps not at each other's faces, but at the same vein of ore in the rock, each knowing the other was seeing it too.

So a letter, telling all, would have been entirely uncharacteristic of our relationship. Wine is a much more fitting patrimony. Dad's wine was memory: this wine he had drunk on that occasion, with this person. He bought wine to drink with his grandchildren when they grew up. Dad knew, far better than I did, which wines I had drunk before and liked, which wines I would like that I hadn't yet drunk. His remembering, and paying attention, was like--or was?--love.. Without Dad's thoughts behind it, without Dad to talk to while drinking it, without Dad to invest it with meaning, without Dad to tell me which is good, which is valuable, I don't know what to make of the wine by itself. It just IS. 

The real man behind the curtain

This morning, Henry was wrapping himself up in the bedroom curtain, in a variation of Strange Bumps.
"Who is in here?" he asked.
"I don't know," I said. "All I see is a big bump in the curtain."
His head popped out. "It's Magic Henry!" he said. Then his whole self popped out. "It's Richard of Oz!"

Gender trouble

Henry fell asleep before 7 last night (an exciting development!) and woke up this morning at the usual time just bubbling over with piss and vinegar.
"I had an imagination, Mama," he said, "that we went in a limousine to a restaurant and upstairs was Go, Dog, Go, and downstairs was a kitchen and men made the food and you served it to us. Men make food, you know. Some men do, and some women do."
"Yes," I cautiously agreed.
"I like men," he said. "If they have round heads and short hair."
"Ah," I said.
"I don't like most women," he said. "I just want to be next to you." A pause. "I like Karen (whose office at the Banneker Center was full of toys and sympathy) But Karen moved to a different city."
"Do you like women if they have round heads and short hair?"
"No, I like women's hair to hang down." He gestured to his shoulders.
I remember very well the physical aversion I felt toward my friends' fathers when I was small child, I suppose because I was in love with my own. Some of them even had -- shudder-- moustaches. And it was just the day before yesterday that Henry told me he was married to me. So I suppose we are going through a stage.
Still, I was curious about his views: were they purely Oedipal, or was there something else? "Do women tell you what to do too much?" I asked.
"Oh no," he said, surprised I was asking. "Women don't talk to people. They just talk to grown-ups."

Henry reports on the weekend

Some things we did:

Jump!
Eat chocolate!
Eating breakfast. Go to friends' houses. Digging.
James worked with drawers with me. I drilled. I sanded them. Tumbling.
Drank a tremendous bump of milk.
I'll do some sawing now, then I'll talk.

Oma & Opa's visit, part 2