The Long Weekend

Thanksgiving was lovely. We went to a bar in a hotel that had Christmas trees set up and no  music and just enough light to make it cozy but not dark. I'm finding that I don't like going places that play music. Places that play music play it about a decibel too loud, placing it just within my notice, in sort of a peripheral hearing, to be distracting. I don't like that. I also hate loud music. Yes, I am too old.

I think I am actually turning into your great-granny. There's the music thing, and then there is the knitting, and then there is the preferring to read or watch t.v. and knit rather than go out in the evenings, and then there is the vague aches and pains everywhere. We aren't even getting into the desire to grab people on the street and tell them how to behave properly. For godsakes, people, when you are with a group of people on the sidewalk, with a wall on one side and busy traffic on the other, and someone is walking toward you, could at least ONE of you step aside to let that person pass?!? Also, pick up after your dog, especially if that dog is the size of a horse! And, pull up those pants! And get the hell outta my yard!

The aches and pains are all ridiculous. My hands are cramped from knitting, would you believe? As are my forearms. Then, somewhere along the line, I think I pinched a nerve in my neck because I have a feeling, somewhere between numbness and pain, running from my cheek, down through my shoulder and into my bicep. I would blame my purse, but I stopped using a purse and switched to a backpack when the pain began. Then, I switched the backpack to one strap on the other shoulder. Now, I think I just sleep on it funny. It only gets worse from here, doesn't it? Like next it will be my sciatica --actually, that happens pretty frequently -- and then I'll break my hip, and then I'll be all stooped over and then I'll get arthritis, and then I'll need a cane, and then I'll start using the can to whack those kids with their baggy pants and their loud music when they start hanging out in my yard.

Anyway, on Thanksgiving, after we went to the bar, we went to a lovely restaurant for a tasty dinner. The company that the Gentleman Caller is working for had a big "traditional" Thanksgiving dinner for its employees on Friday, but we did not go. We figured that they would serve rubber turkey, but mostly we didn't want to pay the $50 for me to attend. The dinner was free for all employees, but any family member who attended had to pay $50 each. We decided to go to the opera instead.

Actually, the opera was on Saturday night. We saw The Magic Flute  in a very tiny theater down by the river. The orchestra consisted of the conductor playing a piano, a bassoonist, a flutist, a clarinetist, and oboist and -- oh, I forget -- another instrument, I want to say violinist. The point here being that the orchestra was more of a sextet and it was set off to the side of the stage. They a cctv on the conductor so that they could put a monitor in front of the stage so that the singers could see her direction. The stage might have fit into your living room, and the audience all sat shoulder to shoulder and hip to hip on risers. The singers were maybe twenty feet away and they did not need any sort of microphone.

The opera itself is very sexist, what with the defeat of the Queen of the Night by the "manly" Masons; but the entire creative team from the conductor to the artistic director to the costume designers were all women. The lighting person might have been a man, but everyone else was female. Being aware of the sexism of the libretto, they included a feminist reading of the story in the program. In the opera itself, the costumes showed a historical progression of fashion from the late 1800s to the 1920s. That is, unless you take in the Queen of the Night and her three attendants. They included the Viking (the Gentleman Caller leaned over to me and said, "that's how you can tell it is an opera: women in hats with horns"), ancient Greek, ancient Egypt, and Elizabethan eras. In the final scene, the women all wore "Votes for Women" sashes, Pamina stripped Tamino's masonic apron off, the Queen of the Night ripped off her muzzle, and, as the company sang something about glory coming down from above, a banner rolled down saying "Votes for Women," while a battle of the sexes broke out on stage. You don't see that every day at the opera.

Yesterday, we visited a castle. The term "castle" actually refers to the building's earliest incarnation. It's last was a Jesuit monastery, but the architecture reflects the centuries in which it was a manor house. Like any respectable manor house, it comes with a story of the macabre. Allegedly, two nobles fell in love with the same woman. At a ball, their rivalry escalated into a duel. Before they went out to draw pistols, they boarded her up in a wall. In the duel, one died from his wounds and the other drowned in the river. No one knew that the woman had been boarded up, so she died there in the wall. According to the guide books and the plagiarized piece on every website about the castle, workers discovered the skeleton during renovations in the 1880s, and estimated that the bones had been there 130 years. According to the woman working the ticket counter, the Jesuits discovered the bones there during renovations in the 1920s.

I've been struggling with the Big Guy for a few weeks, trying to find the balance between the brush strokes and the whole museum. Yesterday, I finally found the heart of the story that I'm trying to tell. The whole time I thought I was trying to tell the story of a particular conflict having to do with women, and I was having the worst time trying to fit all of the chapters and characters together to tell that story, but the story lacked something that made it sound authentic, that made all of those chapters and characters fit together into something coherent. I kept reading, and re-reading, and thinking, and hating on myself for being so inadequate, and then reading and, re-reading, and thinking some more.

Then, a quote shook loose. The quote tied together the end with the beginning, and the sentiment of the quote -- the big picture that it described -- ran all through his life. The conflict of the story was about something slightly different than I had originally thought. I had thought it was simply a conflict about gender, with race and class incorporated. I see now that I was trying too hard to separate out gender and make it the center of the story, since most other biographies talk only about race with either very dated or very cursory inclusions of gender; but, you really cannot separate them as much as I was attempting to do -- or the way that those other biographies tended to do.

So, I placed race at the center of the story along with gender -- and then class naturally followed. Now the story has greater tension, greater conflict, greater drama, and more coherence. I'm not just charging ahead. I actually have something like an introduction. Sure, it will be revised, but I think I'm a person who does need to start with something like an introduction, otherwise, I will wander all over and never get to the point. Then, I will get distracted by something -- anything -- else.

The introduction sets up the conflict. I had a method, now I know what that method will draw me toward. I know the conflict that I am describing. The conclusion will bring it all home. I actually did a happy Snoopy dance when I figured it all out!