It was the best most aggravating of times, it was the worst of times.
The feast was good if I do say so myself. Maybe that’s because I’ve had so much practice cooking it. Each and every year. Forever and ever, amen.
Our house guest, who arrived last Monday, left this morning.
House Guest, my nearly 70 year old bachelor uncle, comes every year for a week at Thanksgiving. House Guest was married for a short time during the 1960′s (I’m not sure how much of it he remembers, not because he’s old but because it was, well, the ’60′s and he was, after all, a hippie). He pretty much stayed in school until he was forty, at which time he got a real job. He retired six years ago. When he retired, he bought his first home out west. Prior to that, House Guest had rented a small apartment, so home ownership has been a real eye opener for him. He never had children. He is socially awkward. He is curmudgeonly. He is highly intelligent and WAY educated which he feels obligates him to impart wisdom, little of which is based on real life experience, ALL. THE. DAMN. TIME.
He tells me how to raise my kids.
He demands to see my electric bill so he can evaluate our kilowatt usage (we squander electricity).
He teases the kids. He gives them advice.
He teases the dogs. He gives them a bowl of wine.
He tries to give the dogs peppercorns. I stop him just in time.
He tells me that reading fiction is a waste of time because “it’s all made up”. I should be reading HISTORY and learning something, he says. He is also intellectually snobby about movies. Entertainment for the sake of entertainment is a waste of time.
He doesn’t own a TV, yet he spends quite a bit of time in front of ours, watching avidly while complaining about how insipid and uninspiring TV is to the point where he DOTH protest TOO MUCH, you know?
After Yes,Dear strips the turkey and refrigerates the leftovers, House Guest attacks the carcass muttering about “wasting perfectly good food”. He strips off another pound or so of what he calls “meat” and what I would refer to as OFFAL. I freeze it to discard after he leaves.
He complains about my driving. Constantly. In an annoying, passive-aggressive way.
He is a reformed smoker who keeps telling me that cigarettes are going to kill me. What he doesn’t know is that I’m smoking like crazy, praying they’ll kill me before he tells me that again.
Yet I love him. He’s family. So we grin and bear it as I’m sure he does, being that he lives alone all year with the exception of this one week, which I’m sure probably makes him very glad to go home and live alone for another year.
I try to plan ahead for his visits. We schedule some entertaining (but not time wasting) outings. Sometimes it’s a movie, always it’s a trip to a local museum, and usually an afternoon in a book store.
This year, we went to the Philadelphia Museum of Art where we saw a beautiful exhibit of quilts from Gee’s Bend, GA, an exhibit of soot and spit art that was really interesting, a landscape exhibit that was disappointing although if you’re partial to Elvis on Velvet you might enjoy it. We visited the Modern & Contemporary Art exhibit hall. Meh.
I did learn something interesting though, which made the trip totally worthwhile:
Apparently a few hundred years and several lives ago, my mother in law was a child model. The resemblance is uncanny, as is the disapproving expression:
