Grandma, as you may or may not be aware, had her hip replaced last Monday. ("I did a very good job," said her surgeon. "I am very good, very fast. Thirty-nine minutes!") Her nurse Ellie May has ordered her on no account to bend over for a month, and you just don't disobey Ellie May. So, my parental units and cat and I hied ourselved thither on Friday after Thanksgiving to clean her house and put up her Christmas tree.
The house, being Grandma's house and therefore perfect, didn't actually need cleaning, but we cleaned it anyway. It was a little dusty was all. We got it all done Saturday morning.
So about eleven-thirty we piled in the car (leaving the cat in Grandad's shop) and went for a steak lunch a K-Bob's. If you've never been to a K-Bob's, I'm sorry. There are half a dozen in Texas and four or five more in New Mexico, so you'll just have to visit. While we waited for the Ranch Houses to cook, we played with my little purple Camaro. Our family has a long-standing restaurant game, where you get a point each time you roll the car just hard enough for the front wheels to fall off the edge but the rest of the car stays on the table. We played it with that same purple Camaro on our family vacation back in the late nineties at a K-Bob's in Elk City, Oklahoma, that we ate at on our way out and was closed when we came back. This particular game, Daddy won with three points to my two.
Then we went to Hobby Lobby and stood in their front vestibule for twenty minutes or so, checking out their forest and picking the Very Best Tree. We all scattered inside, checking out the ornaments for the ladies' tea and ornament exchange, the scrapbook paper, and the metal Celtic crosses (half off). I finally misplaced Mom entirely and had to call her on our cell phones. Grandma decided which was the Very Best Tree and Daddy and Grandad wrestled it into the trunk and bungeed it down, and dropped Mom and me off at the mall, and went home to wrestle the tree into the house. I found a pair of boots and two dressy tops, finished the entire mall, and had time for a coke and burrito-like egg roll in the food court by the time Dad and Grandad picked us up.
Allow me to digress a moment. Friday night, Dad and I watched _Casablanca_ for the first time. It's a good movie, but what astounded me was how well the woman dressed. She was genuinely beautiful--a rarity, I think, in movies with a supposedly drop-dead gorgeous protagonist, and I begin to understand some of the film criticism in Richter a little better--and she dressed like a lady. Wow she looked good. The garments at the mall did not look like something out of _Casablanca_. Winter dresses, for reasons I really don't understand, are all sleeveless and generally strapless and backless too. How come sleazy people in 1942 dressed so much better than nice people in 2006? I don't think this is fair.
End digression. Eventually we all collected ourselves back at the house and Mom put the Very Best Tree together in the middle of the living room. Dad and Grandad ran to Wal-Mart for ...I forget what, two or three things, and Mom and I drag the ornaments out of the unlocked closet in the long room upstairs. It's a very lengthy and short closet, so I have to hunch all the way to the back where the ornament bins are kept. I wend my way past exercise bikes, giant styrofoam gliders, kites, "Happy Harvest" scarecrows, and manage to get the ornaments out. We open them up...and discover there are no ornament hooks.
No fear! Dad and Grandad are still at Wal-Mart! I called them and discovered they hadn't left yet, and requested ornament hooks. Then Mom sent me upstairs to pick out the Very Best Tree-topper. I found a lovely gold-and-cream angel in the top of the bathroom linen closet, sitting on top of a vinegar bottle, so I brought her down. It struck me it was kind of what the Pythia did--sitting on top of a chasm breathing fumes all year--so I named the angel Pythia. She fit splendidly on top of the tree, though at one point, hanging ornaments, I looked up and there she was...tilted forward...looming over me. Rather scary, being loomed over by a Pythia. Anyhow.
Dad and Grandad made it home with "Christmas with the Kranks" but not ornament hooks. They couldn't find any and asked two employees, who both said they were out. On the basis of two witnesses, then, they quit looking. "Kranks" is a funny movie, genuinely funny. As they snuck and lurked and cowered before their neighbors, we hung ornaments as best we could without hooks. We finished about the time Mr. Krank got arrested for borrowing his neighbor's tree (with permission). And our tree, unlike his, looked really pretty. I think it made Grandma happy.
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2 comments:
Casablanca is a great movie--some consider it the best of all time, and it's certainly one of the most quotable. How had you not seen it before? An interesting thing about the movie, by the way, is that they filmed the majority of it before figuring out how it was going to end. Neither the actors nor the director knew, since it hadn't been decided, that Rick would put Laslo on the plane with Ilsa. That the ending was so perfect is amazing.
I'm not sure how I missed seeing it all this time; I'm glad I finally did. It was just full of quotes--like Shakespeare. When we started doing Shakespeare in high school, that was our first reaction to most of the plays. :-)
That is interesting. I wonder if it improves the lifelikeness of the acting, not to know how it turns out? To reference Shakespeare again, I heard about some woman who did a splendid job as Lady Macbeth for some insanely long time--like five years or something--and never did stick around to find out how the play ended. Weird...
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