Winter's Warm Welcomes

I glanced over at the Table of Friends - for 2 years it was the literal and pristine tabula rasa, with not a name chalked up - and discovered two interesting additions: I welcome you both, remembering the old song make new friends and keep the old; one is silver, the other's gold, recalling how many times I have dodged new friends and dumped the old, hoping that my Ebenezer Scrooge years are behind me, and the next quarter-century and more will see me as a less astringent tonic to people who cross my path. -----


I had spent some time with the old folks, it being the coldest day in December, and - by my mother's calculation - it was the exact day for doing exterior Christmas decorating.
We have managed to land spot on the most frigid of the 12th month for about eight years in a row now, and she is feeling considerably braced about her uncanny weather prognostications. She feels they more than make up for her tendency to burn or explode things in the kitchen, and it is pretty impressive.

Essentially, the first Thursday following the new moon just before the winter solstice...all reckoned by the Julian calendar, mind you, with a few corrections according as the Ephemeris tables indicate "good luck" or a "swift kick to the tuhukus" as she quaintly says.
She is the only person I know who uses the word "tuhukus" ( pronounced "tu - hu' - kus ), most others saying things like "toosh, posterior, derriere, hindquarters, stern, etc." There is a "tuckus" which means the same thing, and I don't know where she got the extra syllable, and whether it is the original or intrusive.
It could be some sort of inter-syllabic modification of a word to denote something, sort of like the Ancient Greek duplication of the first syllable of a verb to denote the perfect tense: pe-paideu-ka : I have taught, where "pe" duplicates the initial "p" in "paideu-".  
Dunno. Don't care... something or other underwear, as we used to say in Middle School.

They were to have gone out to dinner with some friends who were a century younger than they, but my father was visibly not well. These signs escaped my mother, who was a blur of activity in other areas, such as laying out exterior lighting nets, which had both male and female plugs on the same end and right next to each other, thus defying any plan of stringing them together and spanning the circumference of the prickly bush where she wanted them placed.
Since these are called "candy cane" nets, and the idea was apparently to string them around the estate's Doric columns, and create a spiral of red and white, it sort of defied understanding why all the plugs were at the same end, absolutely forbidding any kind of consecutive stringing of lights. I mean, I could ray out everything from a center, and sort of create a candy mushroom, I suppose, but not a straight up-down cane.

We sensed a plot, but it was too late: we were committed to Chinese lights interventions. These Chinese numbers also sported plug-ins which accepted only prongs of equal size, not the more recent safety feature of the inscrutable West, where one prong is a bit larger, preventing all sorts of mis-prongulations one assumes. Anyhow, east lights are east lights and west lights are west, and never the twain shall be linked together...easily...for mom's Xmas display.
The prickly bush - oddly enough - grows every year, getting a bit bigger, and its prickers become more acute, drawing blood through corduroy, and I wonder if it isn't some shrub that the Middle Ages called the Passion Bush, or Jesus Wept, in memory of the goodly amounts of blood it seems to draw.
Better yet, it is encircled for three-quarters of its periphery by barberry bushes, which are no slouches when it comes to fine points and sharp needles. I do believe this was the Crown of Thorns shrub so beloved of the ancient Romans in Palestine.
One could almost hear it laugh at corduroy and leather gloves.
The access between these two nursery-stock Iron Maidens becomes yearly more difficult, as the space between them grows smaller and smaller. Add to this the biting cold wind, and its seems a perfect Via Dolorosa Frigida.

I seem to remember praying a bit for patience, and possibly a cloak of invisibility; surely Harry Potter and his mates must have had similar scrapes at the Christmas Season at Hogwarts: something like hanging the holly in the Chamber of Secrets would be a a close second to this effort of ours.

The job was finished in time for dinner. I had brought some fresh pierogi from West Bloor Village, Toronto, to prepare as a treat for everyone. They were boiled quickly, then fried just to a vague brown in butter. My mother said I could sit down, and she would watch them, but I said no way...she smiled: memories of Thanksgiving's almost-burning butter.
Then I brought them to the table; my father ate exactly 2/3 - or 66.777% - of one pierog, and my mother wolfed down three. I had to eat about fourteen or so; they were exceptionally good, but I could have spread them over two or three meals.
The entire notion of sitting at a groaning board and gorging oneself a la Henry VIII or Gargantua...and the meal consisting of Diet Coke and pierogi...visions of King Henry tossing back plates of pierogi...little packets sliding from the plate down his eager throat...it just did not work. These were small packets of potato and cottage cheese made lovingly by a battery of Ukrainian women, and I did not feel the slightest urge to wipe my mouth with an ermined sleeve, belch loudly, and look about for monasteries to plunder.

It was late, so I stayed the night. Their friends cancelled at the last minute, and my father went to bed for 14 hours. I spent some time saying "flu symptoms" to my mother, but it didn't sink in. There is no illness until that time when one just can't pick 'em up and put 'em down anymore; the notion of preventative medicine being vague and insubstantial to her; she leans more to poultices and elixirs.

The cat, who looks eeriely like Sidney Greenstreet, woke me with his reveille complaint at around 5:00 AM. I have no idea what he wants; he launches a big grievance, then disappears. I get up and look around. My father was up, so we decided to sit in the front room by the Christmas tree. Comcast was extorting them for more money for HD TV they wanted no part of, and the cable was operating poorly...thank God! So we sat watching the Weather Channel, admiring the tree, and watching the river.
"Damn Obama..." he muttered.
I ignored it, looking at river, admiring the tree.
"You know, he has all these czars..." he said.
Admire the tree, watch that ol' man river flow......
"...and he's got one, is a card-carrying communist."

At this point, the tree lost it fascination, and I said I did not wish to enter into a discussion that Rupert Murdoch and FOX want to bring back from the McCarthy era fifty-plus years ago.
Mumble. mumble...
"Well, maybe you should..." mumble.
This was the point at which I mentioned that we both despised the political parties which oppressed us; why did we need the extra FOX stuff? And, by the way, did anyone ever notice how incredibly stupid they are to talk about "czars" and "communists" as one and the same...in the same breath?
"Czars...and Commies...?" he said, thoughtfully.
"Yeah. The czars are bolsheviks; bloody idiots..." he said.  He laughed finally, and we sat back to watch the weather on the eights for about the fifth time since we sat down, and it hadn't changed much.

He observed that if we were to be wary of communists, we should not have taken on the Bank of Red China as a business partner. The cat wandered in.
"Did you ever notice," he said "how much he resembles Orson Welles...since he's gained weight?"
I told him I was thinking along the lines of an Alfred Hitchcock look-alike.
The cat huffed over to the window and sat looking at his climbing perch. Sighing, he turned away from it and sat down, spreading like a pool of mercury. It was time to go.

I was going to my brother's and see how his love life was, ever since he'd taken up with the waitress who looked like Wallace Beery... That's a story for another time.

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