The intimate register

Crippled Wolf and Hubby Jim are sitting at Tenbucks on a Saturday afternoon, waiting for the dryers at their favorite "aging hippie" run laundromat to finish their cycles.

As they watch the people on the plaza outside, a toddler runs away from his dad, laughing gleefully.

“Escaped cultivation,” Crippled Wolf intones.

JimJim laughs.

“Huh?”  A friend sitting with them looks from one to another in puzzlement.

“It’s a long story,” Crippled Wolf explains.

A couple decades ago when they were hiking in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Crippled Wolf and Jim had stumbled on the phrase in the Audubon Field Guide to North American Wildflowers.

They were trying to identify what turned out to be Scotch Broom and discovered that it had been brought to America by gardeners and then…escaped cultivation.

Now, almost anything which manages to get “out of place” might find itself so labeled in their private banter.

Sociolinguists use the term intimate register to refer to the informal language used among family members and close friends.

Technically, the intimate register is the private vocabulary and nonverbal cues exclusive to a pair or group.  However, it can be said to include the whole private lore of those people—whatever allusions, punch lines, etc., have historical reference within their tiny circle.

Crippled Wolf can be grasping for a word, and Jim will say, “…thing.”

Or Jim can start to murmur, "No, I can't forget the evening...," and Crippled Wolf will run away screaming.

Ever single person shares intimate registers with someone: a lover, a co-worker, a group of friends.  It's part of what connects us a social animals, the ability to evoke a whole shared memory—and attendant emotions—with a trivial cue no one outside the intimacy would recognize.

It's not all that different from people privately wincing in their pews when the preacher calls for "Almost Persuaded."

[Haha! Got you, Jim, if you're reading this.]

So why has Crippled Wolf become so fixated on the intimate register recently?

Anticipatory grief.

Another day, a different evening.

Crippled Wolf and Jim are at their favorite sushi cafe, sharing a moment of "baby madness" as a couple sit down next to them with their eleven-week-old infant and the daddy gets all mushy—as new daddies tend to do.

In the midst of enjoying the moment, watching Jim grin and googoo at the kid, Crippled Wolf feels a spike in his heart.

"This won't always be here," he thinks.  "He won't always be here...or I won't."

And then what will happen to the intimate register?

It will be like the death of a sun, a solar system, a galaxy.

Such cold and emptiness.

It takes a moment for Crippled Wolf to get back into the present moment.

He's getting better at this. So much practice from escorting first his mother and then his father to their deaths.

But how does one practice losing the other half of one's heart?  

And so it is.

Blessèd Be,

Michael Bright Crow

---

Baby madness is that momentary "Awwww....I wanna baaabie" feeling one gets—just before the kid bawls and cures you of it.

Twenty-six years

JimJim rarely lets me take portrait photographs, but I managed to get this one.

Warm hands.

I love you, Jim

James Urban Gleaton, Jr.
and
Michael Austin Shell

Marriage Under the Care of Columbia Monthly Meeting
of the Religious Society of Friends

Saturday, December 17, 1994
Saturnalia
Full Oak Moon

And so it is.

Blessèd Be.

Greek philosophy

Tonight, Hubby Jim served Walhydra one of his exquisite gourmet dishes, a new recipe out of the current Fall Entertaining magazine from Cook's Illustrated: farfalle pasta with sautéd shiitake and cremini mushrooms and thyme.

In gratitude, Walhydra took JimJim out for fancy dessert at Biscotti's—where dessert and coffee cost the price of a meal.

As they were leaving afterwards, Jim quoted Walhydra's recent commentary:

"I've always wanted to be an Epicurean, but I can only afford to be a Cynic."

:-)

WNYEEP, Part 10: The conclusion

The final chapter of the serialized adventure Walhydra first published on The Crone Thread in 1996. The story is posted on Walhydra's Back Porch.

Part 1: Dr. Bob
Part 2: Matchmaking
Part 3: Jim
Part 4: A Virgo harangue
Part 5: Introductions
Part 6: The “brownie”
Part 7: The concert
Part 8: The seduction
Part 9: The crisis
Part 10: The conclusion

Blessèd Be,
Bright Crow

Tying the knot

Well, Walhydra and Hubby Jim are going the long way around, step by step, to make each other legal...no thanks DOMA and that wimpy, people-pleasing excuse for a liberal, Bill Clinton, who signed it.

Walhydra won't repeat her whole marriage rant, since you can find it here.

Even so, Walhydra says she resents having to find a lawyer, pay $600, and go through weeks of gyrations for two sets of six documents, in order to even approximate what any two heterosexual fools can do cheap with a license and a justice of the peace...even by accident.

Anyway,...yesterday morning, sometime around 10:30 am, Walhydra and JimJim met in front of their lawyer and two witnesses and each signed a Last Will and Testament, a Letter of Escrow Instruction, a Durable Power of Attorney for Property (and a backup, in case the designated attorney-in-fact is incapable of acting), a Health Care Surrogate Designation, and a Living Will.

How romantic....

Feeling a bit safer now, nonetheless, since they can take care of each other in hospital and inherit from each other, Walhydra says, "It still doesn't count as marriage."

She and Jim became a couple in 1985.

They were married under the care of their Quaker Meeting in 1994.

But they are still having to look for and plug loopholes, one by one, in order to protect each other as a family.

Feeling somewhat like the surly librarian she usually is, Walhydra instructs her readers to do their own research, for a change:

"Look up all the benefits that married couples get in your own municipality and state, as well as all the Federal benefits. Don't forget about all the retail discounts and give-aways and other special offers for married couples. Look it up!"

Meanwhile, Walhydra is happy. She and her Sweety are getting cuddlier by the minute.

And vacation calls.

Blessèd Be, despite it all.

JimJim

In the latest episode of "Walhydra's New Year's Eve Eve Party," Walhydra tells very briefly the story of her first love...and, in more detail, what keeps drawing her back to Hubby Jim.

Walhydra and her hubby are now getting ready to escape to the coast of Maine for a week. She thought it would be fun to post her favorite picture of JimJim as a way of filling the gap in her blog till she gets back.

Ain't he sweet?

WNYEEP, Part 9: The crisis

A note from Bright Crow: This continues the revision of a serialized adventure Walhydra first published on The Crone Thread in 1996. The story is posted on Walhydra's Back Porch.

Part 9: The crisis

Blessèd Be.

WNYEEP, Part 8: The seduction

A note from Bright Crow: This continues the revision of a serialized adventure Walhydra first published on The Crone Thread in 1996. The story is posted on Walhydra's Back Porch.

Part 8: The seduction

Blessèd Be.

Walhydra's Hermes Altar...sort of....

Walhydra's buddy Grumpy Granny recently left a comment on the Back Porch about the image in the blog header:


Walhydra figures it might be fun to give her readers a bit of a tour. She feels rather silly about this, but then she knows she likes to show off. Why else publish a blog to begin with?

Now, Walhydra doesn't usually think of this as an altar. It's just the worktable that holds her PC, keyboard and monitor.

Even so, she's strewn it with precisely arranged geegaws, just as she does any surface she can get at.

When she lived with Nikki (Husband #3) in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, they had this ongoing teasing match about surfaces: dressers, credenzas, coffee tables and so on.

To Nikki, surfaces are just something to put things on. To Walhydra, of course, surfaces are something to display things on.

Every item aligned with every other in a sort of arcane aesthetic geometry which Walhydra herself doesn't actually understand. She never sees or assigns any "meaning" to the arrangements. Nonetheless, she can just tell when they aren't right, when this book is just a smidge too many degrees rotated in relation to that knickknack...and so on.

Hey. Virgo. Whadaya expect?

Once, Nikki caught Walhydra moving a stone on their coffee table slightly to the left.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

"I'm making it look more random," she said, grinning at her silly self as she did so.

From then on, whenever they had a spat, at some point one or the other of them would threaten: "I'm going to rearrange the stones on your dresser and break the spell!"

Of course, Hubby Jim (#4 and holding) has caught onto this trait of Walhydra's...and he doesn't hesitate to tease her about it. She, in turn, teases him about the eight-year-deep midden heaps of letters, bills, printouts, books, floppy disks, etc., all around his work area.

Anyway, back to the altar. This being a workspace for communication—Virgo communication, at that—it presumably ought to belong to Hermes/Mercury.

Walhydra relishes the hodgepodge realm of rulerships ascribed to this deity: messenger of the gods, patron of boundaries and of the travelers who cross them, of shepherds and cowherds, of thieves and road travelers, of orators and wit, of literature and poets, of athletics, of weights and measures, of invention, of general commerce, and of the cunning of thieves and liars.

She takes an especially perverse satisfaction in the trickster aspects, which she associates with other favorite dieties and totems.

Crow, Ratatosk, Loki....

Um...Severus Snape....

She's much less satisfied with that business about Mercury Retrograde, though she sometimes manages to deal with it in her own grumpy, anti-social way.

In any event, looking at this image of her workspace, the gentle reader might notice that Walhydra is what a snide friend of hers once called a "crystal queen."

There was a time when Walhydra gave serious study to the alleged metaphysical powers of crystals. Now she tends to just have them about or carry them as the whim moves her.

With extremely few exceptions, she prefers uncut, unpolished crystals. Those prettified stones in the New Agey stores, the ones with all their facets polished smooth, give her the willies! They feel dead—or, much worse, alive but trapped in deaf, dumb and blind bodies!

"How would you like to have all your unique character, your wrinkles and warts and birthmarks, sanded off?" she asks. "It's criminal!"

But crystals aren't really the point. Arcane alignments aren't the point.

The point—all joking aside—is that Walhydra genuinely delights in being surrounded by beautiful, vibrant beings, and this is what she'd done with her Hermes Altar.

Above the desk on the west wall is what's left of a Vietnam 1972 red dragon poster (the borders were trimmed to remove spaghetti sauce splotches from when this used to hang over her stove).

The blotch in the lower left of the frame is a yellowed fourleaf clover, brought to her years ago by one of her counseling clients, when this dragon hung in her office in a medium/maximum security men's prison in South Carolina.

To the right on the north wall is a small Green Tara tanka.

Neither image does justice to the clarity, detail or power of the originals, yet the reader can at least get a sense of color.

Hubby Jim always teases Walhydra that her favorite color is bland. But that's just because, on a day-to-day basis, Walhydra wears "uniforms." Khaki and mildly colored business shirts to work; black on black, sometimes with an autumn-colored shirt, on her own time. It keeps things simple.

In any event, here's the sweet little character who keeps Walhydra company as she types. He sits to her left on a wooden stool. A little rag doll she found at the Christmas Made in the South trade show, the second year she and Jim were in Florida.

The little guy was made of found cloth fragments by an Appalachian craftswoman. Although he may look forlorn, he actually has a funny smile made with Xs of black thread.

Walhydra thinks of him as that happy inner child, pre-polio, who loved magical adventures and the the color yellow.

His neighbors are a pottery frog candleholder, a moss agate bowl, a jade bear totem and a tangerine quartz point.

Then there's a cluster of stuff on the left back corner of the worktable.


No, that's not one of the monoliths from 2001: A Space Odyssey, although the little mannikin in front of it might feel like he's surrounded by monoliths. It's just a speaker for the PC.

This little guy hasn't revealed a persona, as the rag doll has, but Walhydra found him at her favorite art supply store...so that says something. He raises his right hand over a big quartz crystal. To his right are both selenite and smokey quartz. That's an orange fire agate in front of the selenite.

The beautiful piece to his left is polished labradorite (one of those rare exceptions to Walhydra's taboo on polishing stones). Other odds and ends: a Tibetan quartz cluster (in the shadows), a tiny quartz wand, a coiled snake netsuke (polymer, not ivory), black tourmaline, a black tektite, a quartz ball and an apophyllite pyramid.

And, of course, the eyes of the Compassionate Buddha—in case Walhydra ever bothers to notice that she's being looked upon lovingly by the cosmos she grouches about so much.

Best for last....

Yes. That's Hubby Jim.

In the late 1980s, Walhydra took a darkroom course—remember way back in another century, when photographs were recorded on film and had to be developed?

She could never get JimJim to pose for her without his making a silly face, but he finally let her take this one while drinking cappucino in front of their favorite Columbia, SC, coffeehouse.

It's actually Walhydra's favorite picture of her Sweet Man, because it captures his Leonine Urban-ity (that's a private joke).

The little guy in the corner is JimJim in around 3rd grade. (The pink tint is not because he already knew he was gay then, but because the photo faded.)

The odds and ends: rough faceted rubies and garnets, witchy finger rings, and a long quartz crystal. (There's some purple flourite, amethyst and lepidolite off camera to the right.)

Oh, and, yes, she is left-handed. Of course!

So there you have it: way more than you ever wanted to know about Walhydra's obsessively organized work space.

And maybe a hint that, even though she's learned (through many painful mistakes) that it's best to laugh at herself in public, she also knows that any stone can vibrate with life.

And so it is.

Blessèd Be.

Walhydra's Health Attack

[Note from Walhydra's amanuensis: Here's another story written late in 1997 for the Crone Thread, a private listserv to which Walhydra still belongs. Walhydra and hubby Jim were living with Miso the Cat in a tiny, two-room apartment in Columbia, SC.

Rereading the story over my shoulder, Walhydra observes that she "used to be a lot more preoccupied with astrology than she is now."

"Oh, really?" I reply, ducking....]

If there's one thing Walhydra doesn't like, it's stereotypes about Virgos. All that dull, second‑fiddle stuff about efficient, health‑conscious, analytical, service‑oriented—and, of course, fussy, obsessive, perfectionist, critical....

Sheesh! What's a person supposed to do?

Keep everything she knows and observes to herself and let the whole world just slide on down the tubes? Ignore self‑care, avoid pointing out other people's errors, disregard both ethical principles and pragmatic realities, just because most people can't appreciate the salutary order which Goddess built into Creation and...?

"Hoooold on thar!" as Quick Draw McGraw would say.

Okay, so the Moon's been void of course since four‑something this morning and it's gonna stay that way for the next...oog!...32 hours.

Walhydra sometimes wonders, stuck as she is for this incarnation in a middle‑aged gay male body, whether void of course is the male equivalent of PMS.

Eek! Every few days?! Suddenly the monthlies don't seem so bad.

Or maybe—returning to the original topic of this rant—maybe it's just that VOC and Virgo don't go together all that well. Especially natal Pisces Full Moon Virgo.

Granted, there is an obscure orderliness to the pattern of VOCs. And, if one could through practice and discipline...ugh!...attune oneself to the timetable....

"But it doesn't suit my timetable!" Walhydra whines—having by now completely forgotten what she set out to tell about in this story.

Oh. That's right. Health.

One of the things for which Virgos are infamous...grr!...is "obsession with health and purity." Virgos, we are told, are highly sensitive to the esoterica of diet and nutrition, medicine, environmental integrity, etc.

"So...?" Walhydra challenges. "It's just that my whole body—including the astral parts—is one big homeostatic device. If conditions are healthy, I am. If conditions are unhealthy...."

She glares at her audience of average mortals.

"Actually, your bodies are, too. The difference is I notice. A real pain in the [bleep] it is, too." She tries to unkink her [bleep].

"Every food additive, every suppressed emotion, every solar storm, sets off some sort of bodily alarm. And if we don't pay attention, the noise and static build up until we can't ignore it anymore...but probably have forgotten what the alarms are about."

Glumly she stalks away from the podium and sits down, hoping that in her next life she can come back as a full‑tilt, sensual Aries—or at least a Taurus, if she's gotta be stuck with Earth signs.

Anyway, all last year Walhydra was way too busy saving the world, raging against the system and cursing her luck to notice. Until around Samhain, when the corporeal rebellion became too chronic for her wonder chiropractor to unkink.

It only took a couple more months for her to make the necessary connection. "Oh," she said around New Year's Day. "I'm not paying attention."

(That tends to happen when one is busily fixing everybody else.)

Fortunately, Walhydra has finally learned a few things about "moderation in all things"—even Virgo things. So...she did not make any New Year's resolutions. She just went back to work "mindfully."

(She loves that word. It's so...mercurial.)

First thing she noticed, to her delight, was that she didn't want to drink coffee on the job any more. Not "decided to give up coffee," but "didn't want coffee."

She took to carrying a coffee mug of water around all day. Decided to "reframe" (good social worker jargon, that) all those extra trips to the restroom as "improving health" rather than "leaky plumbing."

(Although, you know, this middle‑aged male body thing about the last drops always going in your pants, no matter how many times you shake "it"…?)

Then chiropractor said, "I've adjusted everything obvious. I think your aches are maybe congested liver, expressing as pain elsewhere. You ought to try this herbal kidney and liver cleansing program."

Time for today's Virgo Lesson #2: Virgos are simultaneously the ultimate skeptics and the ultimate believers.

They will approach any new theory or fad with an utterly pragmatic, "show me" attitude. What's more, if the new theory involves new effort—like, shall we say, ten pages of detailed instructions about how to mix and use a recipe of eleven hard‑to‑find ingredients prepared through a complicated, multi‑step process and consumed daily for six weeks—they will wonder if maybe there isn't a simpler way.

Like reincarnation, maybe.

All the same, Virgos are...shh!...closet idealists, and they long for there to be some process whereby they can finally get themselves (and the world) perfectly and once‑and‑for‑all cleansed, realigned and on the way into the Kingdom of God. Or Goddess.

So, after a month of humming and hawing and grousing about how everyone from the FDA to the Gnostic Pleroma was trying to keep her from finding chopped gravel root (not extract, please!), Walhydra finally called the 800‑number her chiropractor had given her at the start (Virgos don't take easy advice till all else fails), got all the stuff, and settled in for a Saturday of kitchen witchery.

"Hmm," she said, as she started to hunt for a place to store the eleven bottles of herbs, vitamins and mineral supplements. "There's too many old bottles—oh, my goodness, unlabeled old bottles—of herbs and seeds and condiments on this shelf."

"Hmm," she said, as she rummaged through the containers on top of the cupboards over the sink (this is a tiny apartment). "These mason jars have no lids. And these other jars still smell like artichoke hearts or kalamata olives...or something."

Returning from the hardware store with a dozen pristine pint‑sized mason jars (ever try to buy just two?), "Hmm," she said. "I don't have enough quarters to dry the laundry I started two hours ago."

Several hours later, the whole herb and spice shelf had been reorganized and relabeled. The smelly jars from three years back had been recycled.

The last three day's worth of Crone Thread emails had been replied to.

And Walhydra was in Virgo heaven, measuring and stirring and brewing and measuring again and bottling and refrigerating and freezing.

"Ahh," she said, tucking the last freezer box of elixir away for the night. "I've put the universe back in order. I feel better already."

Sunday morning. This is where Hubby Jim comes in. Jim is Cancer‑on‑the‑cusp‑of‑Leo.

"But with Virgo rising," Walhydra jibes.

"Hopefully," Jim leers.

[Brief intermission.]

Jim and Walhydra have a marriage based on teasing. Pretty good for two utterly nerdish sissies who were teased beyond repair all through childhood.

Walhydra sometimes thinks that the main reason for astrology is to have something to tease each other about.

It's also important for the reader to know that, while Walhydra's mother was not at all obsessive about house‑cleaning (she's a Sagittarius), she was, after all, Swiss/German Lutheran—a sort of alternate universe Virgoism.

Jim's mom, on the other hand, was Southern Baptist with a vengeance, and had a fervor about house‑cleaning that went so far as to include covering the bathroom floor with newspaper (except for guests) to catch the water spills.

Walhydra alternates now between putting off for as long as possible the big chores, like scrubbing and dusting, and making a meditative practice of her Saturday morning plant watering, laundry washing and tidying‑up rituals.

Jim, by contrast, believes one oughtn't to do any household chores before they are needed. When Walhydra explains that the garbage can needs to be emptied when it's full, Jim's solution is to press down on the garbage.

It should be noted that usually—usually—Walhydra remembers to laugh ha ha ha at this mismatch, which their couples counselor years ago designated as both negotiable and teasable.

One other note, on semantics.

Walhydra, when they go shopping, says, "We need another can of bathroom cleanser."

Jim says, "You mean 'cleaner'."

"No, I mean 'cleanser.' It says so right on the label."

"Yankee!"

Slow burn.

So, anyway...Sunday morning. Jim is cooking Cream of Wheat. Walhydra is taking her first dose of The Potion.

Jim: "So, does the rule apply about 'medicine having to taste bad to be good'?"

Walhydra (frowning): "Well, look what the recipe adds to make The Potion taste good."

"Oh. Black cherry concentrate."

"Yes. Bleech."

"But black cherry is...."

"...I know. Good for kidneys."

Walhydra grins, getting in the mood to tease herself. "You realize, of course, why I got convinced to try this rigmarole after all?"

"Hm?" Jim peruses lengthy instructions and recipe. "Ah. 'Kidney cleanse.' How Virgoish."

"Um‑hmm."

Jim pulls out American Heritage Dictionary.

"'Cleanse....To free from dirt, defilement, or guilt; purge or clean...'," he reads. "'Usage: Cleanse is largely figurative and literary, with special reference to spiritual and ceremonial matters; Clean (verb) is literal."

He gives his best Q.E.D. smile.

"Humph. But that fits anyway," Walhydra says, brightening. "The whole point here is that I've realized I need a change of attitude. It's not just that my physical health has been sliding. I have needed the spiritual process. Deciding to start this herbal stuff is already a healing process."

Virgo touché.

Jim (pensive): "You know. I think that when my mom cleaned house, she was cleansing. When I had to help, she was cleansing—I was just cleaning."

[Scene dissolves. Witchy cackles on both sides.]

Walhydra’s Thanksgiving Kitchen Disaster

“I HATE this machine!” Walhydra shouts politely.

She shakes the whole cylinder and base of the blender viciously. A few more cranberries deign to drop into the path of the tiny blade as it whirs away in the slosh of orange juice and pulverized rind.

“This thing obviously wasn’t designed for what I’m trying to do!”

Intelligent design has never stopped Walhydra from believing that material objects should obey her command—regardless of the laws of physics. Force of will should be enough, shouldn’t it? She rattles and bangs at the blender, jabbing at berries through the half-closed lid with her narrowest spatula.

At this moment, hubby Jim comes into the kitchen. “Oh, no...!” he exclaims.

There is a horrible, panicked silence as he pulls his famous “secret recipe” maple walnut gingerbread out of the oven, its edges all returned to elemental carbon.

“Did you...do something to the timer?”

Walhydra sinks through the floor. “Oh. Babe. I’m sorry. I forgot you were using the microwave timer and warmed up some coffee.”

Jim says nothing as he sets the baking dish on the stove. There is a horrid moment during which the ghost of Jim’s Mom wrings her hands at the ghost of Jim’s Dad. Then he quietly opens the fridge for more eggs and flour, the kitchen cupboard for more spice.

“How can I help?” Walhydra asks meekly. “Should I get the walnuts ready for you?”

“Yes.”

“How much.”

“A cup.”

Walhydra remembers horrible fights over domestic life a few years earlier. Fights in which the shades of all four hurting, angry parents—plus siblings—had loomed over them, brandishing swords of well-chronicled resentment.

The disrupting move to Florida from their childhood South Carolina home had left the two of them suddenly with none of the habitual escapes and safety nets of their marriage. It took some years of terrifying loneliness—both of them trying to signal “I still love you” across the no man’s land—while they worked separately with counselors to name and tame their respective family curses.

Now, second batch of magic gingerbread in the oven, Walhydra goes back to her blender, while Jim returns to his computer. Walhydra feels a bit chagrined that her silly anger at the machine still wants to outweigh Jim’s grief over the baking she ruined. She pokes cautiously at the cranberries....

BrzzBANGfloopfloopsplat!

“G*@-d#$!ed f%^&ing piece of s#@^!”

She flings the remaining half of the spatula into the dining room. Grabs a towel to wipe slaughtered cranberries off her face and shirt—and counter and floor and walls. She finds bits eight feet away on the refrigerator door.

Jim, wisely, does not come to see what happened.

Walhydra is convinced she learned to curse from her Dad, the Lutheran pastor...even though he managed to keep it all inside throughout her childhood. Jim says it’s genetic.

Walhydra’s Grandpa, the Lutheran pastor father of her Mom, Senior Witch, was a much more restrained and proper nineteenth-century gentleman. His only, only swear word—which Walhydra had seen written in books, with its odd, nineteenth-century spelling—was “Pshaw!” Or “Oh, pshaw!”

However, he could make it sound like “G*@-d#$!ed f%^&ing piece of s#@^!”

It must be a guy thing. Sissy that she is, Walhydra nonetheless carries on the male tradition of cursing objects which disobey. As usual, she soon witnesses once more the damaging repercussions of this stubborn trait.

Back in the kitchen, Walhydra cooks up a new, alternative version cranberry sauce, one which entails no use of heavy machinery. She fishes the blender pieces out of the trash can, where she had tossed them in fury, and does the washing up. She glances around.

“Oh, s#@^! There’s cranberry on the ceiling!”

Later, as she reads Anne Rice on the back stoop, Walhydra hears the timer beep through the open mudroom door. Then she hears this long, mournful groan.

Hubby Jim has just discovered that the oven somehow got bumped up to 450° from 350°. Another carbonized baking dish comes out to sit atop the stove.

Hours later. Walhydra and Jim are dinner guests of their friend from the gay/lesbian bowling league and his new flame.

Just before the excellent turkey dinner—graced with a lonely bowl of jellied cranberries—their host asks them to join in a tradition from his home in Phoenix. There, at Thanksgiving, all the Buddhists and Druids and Jews and Navajos and other “outsiders” would gather in a circle and, each one in turn, voice personal thanks, before sharing the holiday feast.

By now, Walhydra and Jim have retold the kitchen disaster story with comic embellishment. Walhydra takes the blame for the second fossilized gingerbread as well as the first, since she figures she discombobulated Jim with her cranberry theatrics.

In the circle, Jim gives thanks jokingly for a number of things, and then gives googoo-eyed thanks for his loving partner.

Walhydra says, “I’m thankful that we finally rediscovered how to be married.”

And so it is.

Blessèd Be.

In which Walhydra reconsiders: or, Isn’t there a way to turn this thing off?

Walhydra wonders if it was such a good idea to let the would-be writer back out of his closet.

Ever since she allowed him to do that first blog post, he won’t stop composing. He wakes her at all hours of the night. He interrupts her in the middle of conversations, while eating, while driving, attending to nature….

He acts as if he has to catch every insight in metaphor at once, before he loses it. Walhydra hopes bloggers eventually hit a rhythm with all of this…but meanwhile she’d like to get some sleep.

Worse, this is happening while Walhydra is on a week-long visit with her dear mother, Senior Witch—away from any practical, 21st century connection to the ‘Net. Senior Witch’s dial-up Windows 95-era browser keeps shutting Blogger down as an illegal operation. The would-be writer just knows he’ll forget everything before they get back to civilization.

Walhydra and hubby Jim call her mother “Senior Witch”—secretly, of course—because she is such an unselfconsciously enlightened soul. In her eight-plus decades, she has passed through Christianity and out the other side gracefully, without even noticing.

She protests that she is “not at all spiritual.” She wishes she knew what having a religious experience was like. Meanwhile, she does spontaneously what Jesus would do and walks lovingly into situations which Walhydra is still trying to intellectualize.

When the Lutheran Church was going through its latest round of squabbling over the supposed danger of affirming same-sex couples, Senior Witch said to her pastor: “I don’t understand what my son’s marriage has to do with my marriage. I don’t know what he does in bed, and he doesn’t know what I do—except in the textbook sense, of course.”

Walhydra is visiting because, as eldest and physically closest of three children, it is her assignment to help her mother make the transition into elderhood. Senior Witch has been a brilliant mother, housekeeper, pastor’s wife, college professor, grant-funding agency manager and neighborhood organizer. Now short-term memory loss and the attendant anxiety keep her from balancing her checkbook. Ex-social worker Walhydra has to summon all her patience and courage to coach Senior Witch through a loss of self-reliance which is both frightening and painful to experience—and as much so to witness.

Fortunately, Walhydra and her mother have been frank and loving adult friends for over 30 years. When either catches herself trying to avoid distress by “protecting the other’s feelings,” there is almost always some new opening of intimacy to follow. They are not at all good at hiding from each other.

So, Walhydra finds herself wondering when Senior Witch picks Iris as the rental DVD for their last night together. Judi Dench, one of their mutual favorites, portrays the rapid decline into Alzheimer’s and death of philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, in a screenplay based on the memoirs of Murdoch’s husband John Bayley (Elegy for Iris and Iris and Her Friends).

Walhydra keeps glancing sideways at her mother as the love story of Murdoch and Bayley unfolds. “Is she trying to tell me something? Does she recognize her own future in Murdoch’s losses?”

But all of Senior Witch’s comments are about how well they have done this movie of two books she greatly appreciated, and how great an actress Dench is. As usual, she seems to enfold someone else’s tragedy within her own compassion without personalizing.

Which, of course, Walhydra almost always does.

Once the film ends, Walhydra concentrates through teary eyes on teaching her non-techie mother for the umpty-umpth time how to use the DVD player—after Senior Witch says, “Maybe I’ll watch that again once or twice after you’ve left.”

They end the evening searching, first in Senior Witch’s concordance and then through Google, for the last words of the movie. The elderly Murdoch concludes a lecture on love and goodness, her highest ideals, with the Psalmist’s words to God—which she speaks while holding the eyes of her husband in the audience (Psalm 139:7-10):

Whither shall I go from thy Spirit?
Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?
If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there;
If I make my bed in hell, behold, thou are there.

If I take the wings of the morning,
And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,
Even there shall thy hand lead me,
And thy right hand shall hold me.