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mallorys_cameraYesterday was one of those days.
Meaning: I spent the day in a mild panic attack.
Why? Who knows?
In the morning, I got a call from my insurance company: They’d tried to run my annual DMV report except the DMV told them that I don’t exist.
“But I do exist!” I said. “I’ll send you a copy of my driver’s license to prove it!”
Obviously, someone had mistyped some letters in my exceedingly ethnic name into the vast and cumbersome digital New York State motorist databank.
Vast and cumbersome digital databanks scare me on some primitive level, so I immediately started thinking that I’d done something, committed some act that seemed trivial at the time – so trivial, in fact, that I didn’t actually remember committing it. Clearly, though, it had been an act with a rebound effect, a butterfly effect so overwhelming and inexorable that now it was threatening my very existence in this time/space continuum –
No shit. I think stuff like that fairly often.
Anyway, crippling existential doubt seeped into the morning.
There was also some bureaucratic unpleasantness with the Tax-Aide people. I passed the tax recertification exam with a perfect score the second time around, but Gawd, the people who administer that program are fucking idiots, and I wasted a couple of hours dealing with them.
Lunched with Doris, the intrepid Democrat, who chided me for my absence from Bernie Sanders petitioning efforts.
“But he’s not gonna win, Doris. I mean, I love the guy, I’ll vote for him. But campaigning for him? That seems like wasted effort.”
“You don’t know that,” said Doris.
“I do know that,” I said. “The Paris bombings changed everything. Americans aren’t interested in economic equality. They’re obsessed with national security. And Bernie’s too honest to play that card.”
Somehow we started talking about the End of Doris’s Long-Term Live-In Relationship, which had taken place only this past April.
Linda had filled me in on some of the Doris backstory. Linda knows Doris socially because Hyde Park is a small town, and everyone knows everyone in Hyde Park, plus Doris was the Democratic candidate for the 19th District Congressional seat a billion or so years ago – the very same Congressional seat that Gore Vidal ran for a billion years or so before that.
“Her boyfriend was incredibly good-looking,” said Linda. “But arrogant. And, I don’t know. Seedy.”
‘We’d been together 20 years,” said Doris. “He was a lot older than me. And one day, we were arguing about going to the movies – I wanted to go; he didn’t. Finally, I told him, ‘Well, I’m going. I’ll bring you back some popcorn.’ And I went. And when I got home, he wouldn’t talk to me. I thought he was just being a jerk, and cooked dinner. But he wouldn’t eat. He just sat there. So finally, I said, ‘Look – if you don’t respond in any way, I’m going to have to assume something’s physically wrong with you and call 911.’ So I did.”
“Wow,” I said. “A lot of effort to maintain umbrage.”
“Well, as it turned out, it wasn’t umbrage,” Doris said. “He’d had a stroke.”
“Oh,” I said.
“If you catch it within the first 12 hours, they can reverse a lot of the neurological damage,” said Doris. “I went to visit him in the hospital. ‘Look,’ I told him. ‘I’ll be happy to do what I can for you. But I’m not a nurse. And if you think you need more care, you ought to contact your children.’ Then I had to go off to a political convention in Philly. And while I was gone, I got this very odd email. From Delta airlines. A flight confirmation. My partner, you see, did not have email. So when he made the flight reservation – to go to California where his children live – he used my email account. And when I got home, he was gone.”
“Oh,” I said. I couldn’t think of any remark more insightful. She certainly didn’t look bent out of shape. “Do you have children?”
“Two daughters. One in Massachusetts, one in North Carolina.”
“Do you miss them?”
“Oh, I smile at their photographs occasionally when I pass by them,” Doris said. She didn’t seem particularly bent out of shape by that either.
###
Coupla weeks ago, as reported here, Pat and I had had a shortish conversation about the advantages of having children who live at a distance. “They’re always scrutinizing you for mental lapses,” Pat said. “It gets tiresome.”
###
Who will take care of me when I have my stroke, I wonder? I certainly wouldn’t trust either of my kids. I mean – I have no doubt that my kids love me, but they’re censorious, they view me with some embarrassment.
No, I think the person I’d want to live out my doddering last years with is Summer.
Summer and I had quite the jolly time at the Metropolitan Museum of Art day before yesterday. She likes to do what I like to do, which is basically not to check out any one particular exhibition but to get lost, to view great works of art and exquisite, timeless treasures at random.
She has a good eye for pattern recognition. Thus, when we looked at a pair of Ingres landscapes, she was able to point out to me that the laurel tree in both paintings was exactly the same.
“Ohhhhh! You’re right!” I said. I would never have noticed this on my own.
I was still under the influence of a conversation I’d had with Lorenzo, the new occupant of the downstairs rental along with his wife Markie. Before he decided to go to CIA so he could take the culinary world by storm, Lorenzo had been an artist and an art teacher.
“Thing is,” Lorenzo told me, “one’s perception of color is always biased. When you look at snow, you see it as white. But the truth is that snow isn’t white; it’s reflecting the sky. If you could really see it, train yourself to really see it, you’d know that on a sunny day, snow is blue.”
Summer and I had wandered into the French Impressionist Hall – the Met really needs to give me back all those Monet water lilies I loaned to them in an earlier incarnation as a filthy rich industrialist – and looking at those colors, I marveled at their magic. Up close, they look like seemingly random blobs of color on a canvas; step back six feet, and only then, do they resolve into images. But how does one paint like that?
“I am thinking that the Internet is very bad for painting,” said Summer. “Because they have those color charts. Where color is numbers, you know? And everybody think: Aha! This is the truth about color. But color is not numbers.”
Not entirely true, I thought. There is a difference between the behavior of colored pigments and the behavior of colored light. And light is essentially what you’re seeing on a computer screen.
But I knew what she meant.
We lasted three hours at the Museum. Three hours is usually all I can take. Being inside a museum is a bit like being inside a nuclear reactor: It’s very intense.
Afterwards, we took the train into the Brooklyn where I introduced her to BB. Handed the ESL baton over. They seemed to warm to each other. We’d been doing weekly English lessons via FaceTime, but for all sorts of reasons, that really doesn’t work. And she needs people with whom to practice her English. More importantly, she needs friends.
Meaning: I spent the day in a mild panic attack.
Why? Who knows?
In the morning, I got a call from my insurance company: They’d tried to run my annual DMV report except the DMV told them that I don’t exist.
“But I do exist!” I said. “I’ll send you a copy of my driver’s license to prove it!”
Obviously, someone had mistyped some letters in my exceedingly ethnic name into the vast and cumbersome digital New York State motorist databank.
Vast and cumbersome digital databanks scare me on some primitive level, so I immediately started thinking that I’d done something, committed some act that seemed trivial at the time – so trivial, in fact, that I didn’t actually remember committing it. Clearly, though, it had been an act with a rebound effect, a butterfly effect so overwhelming and inexorable that now it was threatening my very existence in this time/space continuum –
No shit. I think stuff like that fairly often.
Anyway, crippling existential doubt seeped into the morning.
There was also some bureaucratic unpleasantness with the Tax-Aide people. I passed the tax recertification exam with a perfect score the second time around, but Gawd, the people who administer that program are fucking idiots, and I wasted a couple of hours dealing with them.
Lunched with Doris, the intrepid Democrat, who chided me for my absence from Bernie Sanders petitioning efforts.
“But he’s not gonna win, Doris. I mean, I love the guy, I’ll vote for him. But campaigning for him? That seems like wasted effort.”
“You don’t know that,” said Doris.
“I do know that,” I said. “The Paris bombings changed everything. Americans aren’t interested in economic equality. They’re obsessed with national security. And Bernie’s too honest to play that card.”
Somehow we started talking about the End of Doris’s Long-Term Live-In Relationship, which had taken place only this past April.
Linda had filled me in on some of the Doris backstory. Linda knows Doris socially because Hyde Park is a small town, and everyone knows everyone in Hyde Park, plus Doris was the Democratic candidate for the 19th District Congressional seat a billion or so years ago – the very same Congressional seat that Gore Vidal ran for a billion years or so before that.
“Her boyfriend was incredibly good-looking,” said Linda. “But arrogant. And, I don’t know. Seedy.”
‘We’d been together 20 years,” said Doris. “He was a lot older than me. And one day, we were arguing about going to the movies – I wanted to go; he didn’t. Finally, I told him, ‘Well, I’m going. I’ll bring you back some popcorn.’ And I went. And when I got home, he wouldn’t talk to me. I thought he was just being a jerk, and cooked dinner. But he wouldn’t eat. He just sat there. So finally, I said, ‘Look – if you don’t respond in any way, I’m going to have to assume something’s physically wrong with you and call 911.’ So I did.”
“Wow,” I said. “A lot of effort to maintain umbrage.”
“Well, as it turned out, it wasn’t umbrage,” Doris said. “He’d had a stroke.”
“Oh,” I said.
“If you catch it within the first 12 hours, they can reverse a lot of the neurological damage,” said Doris. “I went to visit him in the hospital. ‘Look,’ I told him. ‘I’ll be happy to do what I can for you. But I’m not a nurse. And if you think you need more care, you ought to contact your children.’ Then I had to go off to a political convention in Philly. And while I was gone, I got this very odd email. From Delta airlines. A flight confirmation. My partner, you see, did not have email. So when he made the flight reservation – to go to California where his children live – he used my email account. And when I got home, he was gone.”
“Oh,” I said. I couldn’t think of any remark more insightful. She certainly didn’t look bent out of shape. “Do you have children?”
“Two daughters. One in Massachusetts, one in North Carolina.”
“Do you miss them?”
“Oh, I smile at their photographs occasionally when I pass by them,” Doris said. She didn’t seem particularly bent out of shape by that either.
###
Coupla weeks ago, as reported here, Pat and I had had a shortish conversation about the advantages of having children who live at a distance. “They’re always scrutinizing you for mental lapses,” Pat said. “It gets tiresome.”
###
Who will take care of me when I have my stroke, I wonder? I certainly wouldn’t trust either of my kids. I mean – I have no doubt that my kids love me, but they’re censorious, they view me with some embarrassment.
No, I think the person I’d want to live out my doddering last years with is Summer.
Summer and I had quite the jolly time at the Metropolitan Museum of Art day before yesterday. She likes to do what I like to do, which is basically not to check out any one particular exhibition but to get lost, to view great works of art and exquisite, timeless treasures at random.
She has a good eye for pattern recognition. Thus, when we looked at a pair of Ingres landscapes, she was able to point out to me that the laurel tree in both paintings was exactly the same.
“Ohhhhh! You’re right!” I said. I would never have noticed this on my own.
I was still under the influence of a conversation I’d had with Lorenzo, the new occupant of the downstairs rental along with his wife Markie. Before he decided to go to CIA so he could take the culinary world by storm, Lorenzo had been an artist and an art teacher.
“Thing is,” Lorenzo told me, “one’s perception of color is always biased. When you look at snow, you see it as white. But the truth is that snow isn’t white; it’s reflecting the sky. If you could really see it, train yourself to really see it, you’d know that on a sunny day, snow is blue.”
Summer and I had wandered into the French Impressionist Hall – the Met really needs to give me back all those Monet water lilies I loaned to them in an earlier incarnation as a filthy rich industrialist – and looking at those colors, I marveled at their magic. Up close, they look like seemingly random blobs of color on a canvas; step back six feet, and only then, do they resolve into images. But how does one paint like that?
“I am thinking that the Internet is very bad for painting,” said Summer. “Because they have those color charts. Where color is numbers, you know? And everybody think: Aha! This is the truth about color. But color is not numbers.”
Not entirely true, I thought. There is a difference between the behavior of colored pigments and the behavior of colored light. And light is essentially what you’re seeing on a computer screen.
But I knew what she meant.
We lasted three hours at the Museum. Three hours is usually all I can take. Being inside a museum is a bit like being inside a nuclear reactor: It’s very intense.
Afterwards, we took the train into the Brooklyn where I introduced her to BB. Handed the ESL baton over. They seemed to warm to each other. We’d been doing weekly English lessons via FaceTime, but for all sorts of reasons, that really doesn’t work. And she needs people with whom to practice her English. More importantly, she needs friends.
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no subject
Date: 2016-01-22 03:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-01-22 03:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-01-22 03:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-01-22 03:53 pm (UTC)Yeah, I read her response as shock. Although presumably by the time she'd talked to you she was no longer in the moment and had had time to process that shock. Twenty years, wow...
no subject
Date: 2016-01-22 03:57 pm (UTC)What I got from her story was that they did not have the most sanguine relationship, and that snits and long punishing silences were commonplace between them. Which is sad. Although not nearly as sad as failing to notice that someone in close proximity to you has stroked out.
EXCELLENT video.
no subject
Date: 2016-01-22 04:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-01-22 04:02 pm (UTC)That does provide helpful context, yeah.
no subject
Date: 2016-01-22 04:03 pm (UTC)This LJ is kind of my warm-up scales for my fiction writing. :-)
no subject
Date: 2016-01-22 04:05 pm (UTC)Raymond Carver could do it!! :-)
no subject
Date: 2016-01-22 05:42 pm (UTC)Haha – that statue looks very unpleased with your shenanigans!
Now I’ll spend the rest of the day singing the F.A.S.T. song. Which should get the theme from The Roadrunner out of my head.
no subject
Date: 2016-01-22 06:41 pm (UTC)I see I've managed to turn poor Doris into an unsympathetic character, which she isn't actually. :-) I like her. She's eccentric in some regards, but I generally like eccentric people. I almost get the sense that she grew up meek and after the failure of her marriage, reinvented herself as a brassier version.
no subject
Date: 2016-01-22 09:32 pm (UTC)