Who was Cassandra?
In the Iliad, she is described as the loveliest of the daughters
of Priam (King of Troy), and gifted with prophecy. The god Apollo
loved her, but she spurned him. As a punishment, he decreed
that no one would ever believe her. So when she told her fellow
Trojans that the Greeks were hiding inside the wooden horse...well,
you know what happened.
the cassandra pages
words, pictures, and a life
Saturday, October 09, 2004 My next few posts will be a story about my father-in-law, in installments. This is part one.
1. Matters of the Heart
On Friday night, we took dinner to my father-in-law, so that we could sit and talk together as a family: his son, his granddaughter, and me. M., as I’ll call my niece (she is the daughter of J.’s considerably-older brother) and I had shopped in Montreal and brought back Arabic tidbits for the occasion: little meat-filled pastries; homemade hummus; wara einab (stuffed grape leaves); the wrinkled black Moroccan olives we all love; a special kind of pita spread with za’atar ( a lemony spice blend that is mostly ground sumac) and tomatoes. And we made rice pilaf with vermicelli and almonds, and green bean, beef and tomato stew - a particular family favorite.
My father-in-law was lying on his bed when we arrived. He got up laboriously, and slowly made his way out to the front room, groaning. I took the bags and pots and pans to the little condominium-size kitchen and began unpacking and heating things up. M. said, offering her arm, “Grandpa, let’s go out on your balcony and look at your plants. Show me what you’re growing.” J. helped me in the kitchen, as we peered through the pass-through at the scene out on the porch: the very aged grandfather, now seated on a chair, explaining each plant and its summer history to his nearly forty-year-old, youngest granddaughter. I saw a rare happiness and animation erase the pain in his back and legs; I watched M., being her dear self, trying to connect with this patriarch for what will surely be one of the last times. J. quietly reached for his camera. I turned to the stove, like generations of women before me, and for what was the first of many times that evening, my eyes filled with tears.
My father-in-law and niece came in from the balcony, and he settled into his favorite chair with a huge sigh: “Ahhh!” “Tell me,” he asked her, “can you print a copy of a manuscript for me on my computer?” This is the sort of thing he often asks any visitor who might be computer-savvy; we have learned from experience not to get too involved in his computer woes or risk being caught in a cycle of blaming and frustration fueled by near-total ignorance: something he reserves for his family. M., naive about this and eager to please, said “sure” and J. went to the study to try to help her with the aged computer.
My father-in-law got up after a bit and came to inspect the dinner and talk to me through the pass-through. “Do you have everything you need?” he asked. “There are plates in the --" he waved his arm toward the dish drainer -- "and more in the cupboard. I’m sorry, I can’t do anything these days.” I assured him that everything was under control, I was delighted to do it, to please let me wait on him. “I have no choice,” he said, laughing. “That’s the way it is!”
I asked if he had laban (yogurt), and he told me where it was in the refrigerator. “The stew smells delicious,” he said, running the “d-e-l” together as the first syllable, and saying “ISH” as the emphasized second syllable, almost like taking a bite of the savory word itself.
We could hear J. and M. talking as they worked in the far room. Then my father-in-law balanced on his cane with both hands, looked straight at me and said, “You know, I almost died last night.” I stopped working, picked up the towel and wiped my hands.
“What happened?” I asked, looking closely at him.
“I woke up in the middle of the night, and my chest was terribly constricted, painful, my arms were numb. It was as close to a heart attack as you can get, I think. And it’s the second time this week this has happened.” He laughed, self-consciously; I was thinking, “maybe closer than that.” He went on: “So I reached for one of those little white pills and put it under my tongue, said, 'all right, what will be will be,' and went back to sleep." I smiled, amazed by him as I often am. Then he laughed again, more genuinely this time. “But I woke up!” I laughed then, too. He told me that he had told the story to a friend of his there at the retirement home, a woman who is 91, and asked her if it happened again, could he call and ask her to come and witness it? “She said she’d be glad to,” he said. I peered at his face and thought his eyes looked misty.
“You can call us at any hour,” I said, emphatically, pleadingly. “We can be here in ten minutes!”
“I don’t want to call you in the middle of the night,” he said. “And besides, what can you do? When it happens, it’s going to happen.” Then his attention shifted. “I have fruit,” he said. “And cakes – there are some of those little cakes.” On the corner by the sink was a plate with three doughnuts, pilfered from the breakfast buffet downstairs, no doubt. One had already been broken and nibbled by my husband. “Great,” I said, “that can be dessert.”
We left the city at 6:30 and drove through the Green Mountains, where frost covered the north-facing slopes and the fall color - not spectacular this year, except for the occasional brilliant red tree - is marching inexorably southward. A cheerful young woman with long, wavy blond hair checked our passports at the U.S. border. After the requisite questions about where we lived and whether we had exotic fruit, beef, or firearms in the car, she asked, "And what is your profession, sir?" "Photographer and designer." "And what do you do?" she asked, looking at me. "I'm a writer." "And you?" She leaned out of the booth to address our niece in the back seat. "I'm a writer too." 'Well, guys," the customs officer said, reshuffling our passports and handing them back with a smile and a little nod, "a photographer, writer, and writer. OK! Have a nice day!" I guess that means she figures no taxes are due from our high-paying secret jobs in Canada!
By 11:30 we were unpacked, somewhat cleaned up, and at the retirement home for lunch with my father-in-law. Our niece (his granddaughter) told him about an essay she had written about studying Arabic in a community class. He was intrigued - it is his language and his love, after all, and none of us speak it - and asked her some questions, and then said, "So - it's not really about studying Arabic, it's about the people in the class who were studying Arabic." "Yes," she said. "That's it."
After lunch we went up to his room. "I can't do anything," he said, handing me the latest New Yorker which he had just picked up in the noontime mail.
"No, you'll read it," I said, looking with despair at the cover - an excellent encapsulation of the nation's electoral identity crisis: Bush in fatigues, leaning familiarly on his lectern with a wise-guy, conspiratorial grin on his face, and a golf club over his shoulder, and Kerry in officer's dress whites, hands behind his back, looking down his patrician, educated nose, aghast, at the lowly private.
"No, there's nothing in it I want to read anymore. Too much gossip. But take the New York Review, I've read all of it. Some very good things - an article on Iraq by that fellow at Harvard..." He settled back into his chair and sighed. "I get up every day full of ideas and things I want to accomplish, and at the end of the day I haven't done a single one of them. This is what old age is!" He threw up his arms in a gesture of futility, and smiled, throwing off ten or twenty years. "Oh well! I sleep beautifully, and when I'm lying in bed, there isn't an ache or pain! It's heaven!"
On the way back to the car our niece said, "He's a lot smaller." We walked in silence for a while, and then she spoke again. "But he sure is sharp. He picked up right away what I was doing in that essay! It took me weeks to figure that out!"
Here, we can only go to Little Italy (a great pleasure in itself) but it has been such a delight to read Ernesto's recent posts from the Rome. And he's now in Paris...I am so happy for him!
--
Tomorrow morning, early, we're heading back south. How the time speeds by! The biweekly schedule may make it seem faster; the seasons leap-frog forward, change seems to happen twice as fast, from progress on construction projects to the buttoning-up of the city in preparation for winter. Today I cycled downtown to meet our niece in Chinatown for a dim-sum lunch, and nearly froze: I'll be bringing my gloves back next time, but I found that my black wool beret, if pulled down over my ears, fits neatly underneath my bicycle helmet. How welcome was the hot pot of jasmine tea, the slippery shrimp-filled noodles, the delicate fish-stuffed steamed dumplings! How delightful the crunch of whole, deep-fried, lightly battered prawns!
Au revoir, wonderful city. I leave with a few new pounds of books in my duffle and, if words could be weighed, my laptop would contain a gain commensurate with that caused by the fromage et beurre in other, more obvious parts!
After a long day of work, I walked into the park at dusk. The day had turned stormy, and as I crossed the sidewalk the trees tossed their red and yellow leaves in the wind, scattering more onto the wet pavement. In the west, the sky was still bright, and a single golden cloud swept across the blue window between the two lines of dark trees, as if it had sails.
Under the dark, tall trees, the wading pools and swings were abandoned and silent. A patch of acid-yellow marigolds under the shrubbery glowed in the raking light. I stood for a long time beneath the line of huge old poplars, listening to the wind roaring in their leaves: the sound of a waterfall.
The stadium lights were on over the empty emerald ballfields, but except for a few joggers and an old, thin man in a running suit, walking far faster than his age, the park was nearly empty. Three friends played boules on the graveled court; a cyclist in black sped past, going home. A man in a raincoat stood alone, staring out through the trees. I stopped by some wet, green park benches where red maple leaves had stuck in the earlier downpour, and took some pictures under a grove of younger trees, resting my camera on the top of one bench in the failing light.
Behind me, the setting sun suddenly turned the sky red, and every reflective surface took on a strange sheen of dark rose. In the upper lake, the fountain was off, and the water being drained, forming discreet pools in the raked gravel of the bottom. A duck quacked somewhere in the weeds along the far edge, and a man with a long stick walked slowly in what used to be the lake edge, fishing for – what? pennies? just beneath the surface. I was getting cold; the wind picked up; I wished for my black wool beret for the first time this season, and walked hurriedly out of the park, toward home.
