Merry merry!
I’m so glad to be home, a place where I can remove my pants promptly upon entering. I’m not sure why that is, really, and I understand it’s not very girly behavior. However, I have discovered that there’s something about living alone that automatically grants you freedom from the obligation of clothing. It’s awesome. So, xmas at gramma’s with la familia was a mite bit stressful. I had high hopes after Thanksgiving there, which was great, and after family-xmas at the parents’ on Thursday night, which was amazing and surreal at the same time. They decided to splurge this year, so we all got big presents: they got me a microwave and a gift certificate to pick out any vacuum cleaner I wanted at the vacuum store and several other smaller items. Stephanie got me fancy stuff from Sephora, and Escobar a sizeable gift certificate to the iTunes music store, which will soon be turned into many many audiobooks. This was one of those strange moments when I had that sense of still being a group of kids shredding wrapping paper at the folks’ house, but at the same time all finally being successful adults, getting each other nice, well-considered gifts. I only wish my brother Scott and his family from Florida could have been there. The goal every year, as I’ve mentioned, is to make my mom cry. The lifetime membership we got her at the local co-op did the trick. But this xmas, I beat her by a mile; it took me a half-hour longer than everyone else to open all my presents, because I had the ones from Scotty there as well. My mom took what felt like an entire roll of photographs of me doubled-over, face in my hands, bawling. Even my dad, the easily-distractable and not-easily-impressed, stuck around to watch the whole event, floored. At the end, he said quietly, ‘That’s no small gift. That’s the best of the best.’ We headed off Friday morning, all of us together in the purple minivan, to Michigan. I was very unplanned about my post-xmas knitting and didn’t have time to go to the yarn store for the items I most want to do next, so I grabbed some stash-yarn and patterns on my list and tossed four potential projects in the bag, hoping I’d have enough to last me the trip. I was worried about knitting with my finger-gash, but it worked out OK. I finished the last of my fat marmelade yarn on the bathmat, and need another hank to complete it. I swatched and measured and got halfway up the back of a loose hoodie I’m making with this goofy orange boucle, before that yarn ran out as well. I then had to choose between denim-colored socks on tiny tiny needles (sockmaking has been likened to knitting with a porcupine; this is absolutely accurate), or starting on this hoodie, which is a crazy project to be working on in a moving vehicle, due to the very involved cable pattern. See, with a lot of knitting, you can get the measurements and pattern in your head and just go. With something like this, you’re reading a pattern almost every row. But since it’s beautiful and I have this amazing light-olive Italian yarn, I decided to go for it. As of the time it got dark on the way back today, I have finished an entire arm. That’s approximately 15-20 hours of work. There was nothing else to do at gramma’s this weekend. * Please note I will soon have a knitting-blog, and you will be able to avoid this in the future, should you wish. For now, allow your eyes to glaze, and skim. Actually, there were a few other things to do yesterday. First of all, we visited my great-uncle Connie in the nursing home. My mom walked in and said, ‘I’m going to see Con, who wants to go?’ in that way we knew that we would have 100 guilt-points added to our tally if we didn’t. And it’s not that I don’t want to go visit him, it’s just immensely upsetting to me, both seeing him in that condition, and seeing the nursing home itself. I just don’t take those things well at all. We found him sitting with my great-aunt in one of the many TV-lounges. He was curled in a recliner with tubes running out his sleeves and pants leg, twitching nervously. He’s lost probably 50 lbs since the last time I saw him. My mom said he was way more alert than before; he seemed happy to see my dad, but he didn’t remember me or Stephanie. We sat and talked for a bit, thankful for my mom, who can make conversation with anyone, even someone completely incoherent and mostly unresponsive. Stephanie and I decided to stand, after finding all the chairs had telling stains on the seats. There was the tiniest old lady I’d ever seen in a gaudy plaid housedress and dark glasses twisted into a neighboring recliner. She was muttering to herself quietly until a pair of attendants came and lifted her out of her chair to sit with them in the nurses’ station. I think they were trying to feed her; all we heard was her screaming, “Oh god no! God help me! God no!” over and over. I considered the emergency exit. My aunt led us down the hall to see Connie’s room, as the nurse quieted her by urging her to pray the Our Father. We had to pass ten open doors in the hall, and I wanted to not look, but had to. Each one was occupied by a pair of elderly people; some were buried in their blankets, as tiny as children in their beds, and some were staring blankly with the TV-stare, only not at the TV. None of them really noticed as we passed. By the time I got to his room, I was feeling sick. We walked in and saw his bed and nightstand, and it took a second to notice his roommate, Joe, because he was sitting so still he blended into the furniture. I tried to catch his eye to say hi, but he was glazed and muttering. As we left, I realized he was repeating the beatitudes. Blessed are the meek… I was freaking out. I was about to go stand with my head against the wall when a nurse turned the corner, so I decided to act like someone who could deal. We got my uncle in a wheelchair and took him for a walk around the building. It went on forever, rooms and rooms full of what I was afraid of. We wished Merry Christmas to people in wheelchairs in the the hall. I spent too much time lingering by the birdcages, because the birds were alert and active. My dad pilfered the restroom key from the front desk for me while the lady was away, and hung around outside waiting, because he’s even queasier about hospital-environments than I am. When we got back to the lounge, the little screaming woman was back in her chair, clutching her rosary in her tiny, bony hands, praying it in a loud, scratchy, monotone at such a pace I could barely make out the individual words, had I not been flashing back to my first-communion days. I was doing my best to not look at her; there’s something about the combination of decripitude and religion that makes my skin crawl. Occasionally, she would stop and leave out whole lines of the prayer, then shout a word or two and return to the chant a moment or two later. I’d hear ‘sinners!’ and ‘mary mother of!’ punctuating a kind of choking silence. It wasn’t until my mom stopped her one-sided conversation with my uncle that I looked up; the woman was leaning over the side of the chair and vomiting streams onto the floor, then going back to the rosary, never losing the pace in her head. We left very shortly afterwards. The other, less traumatic tradition, was to go to the Krygoski farm to see the Christmas light display. It’s more impressive every year, and worth climbing out of the warmth of the purple minivan in 10-degree weather to see the fountain, waterfall, and river of moving lights, as well as the squat donkey wearing a persian rug. Everyone there was friendly and festive, even though we were mutually freezing our asses off. My favorite sight, a new addition this year, was the small army of parking attendants dressed in robes. Lot-shepherds! I loved it. The whole family was alarmingly crabby today on the ride home, except for me and Stephanie, who entertained ourselves pretending to be southerners (really, it never gets old) whenever we weren’t plugged into our iPods. The crankier my dad is, the slower he drives, so we got back about 2 hours later than we should have. I quit my knitting when it got dark, and finished listening to The Lovely Bones, doing a pretty decent job of not letting on to my crying. Not that it would have alarmed them in any way; lately I’ve been a sniffling sentimental foo’. In a good way, of course. And now, I have to further my pantslessness and go take a shower in a bathroom where I don’t immediately become painfully dry and cracked upon exiting. And then I have to examine my macerated finger. Eww!Jenni