People only remember the aged Katharine Hepburn for her shakes (she SWORE it wasn't Parkinsons, and it turns out it wasn't), or for her old tree metaphor, but nobody mentions her weepy eye. One (I think the left) was always red and drippy, and that's how my spring allergies have decided to manifest themselves the last couple of years: red, itchy, constantly weeping (right) eye. My glasses are always crusted, and stay askew on my nose from my constant reaching up under the lens to blot the drip. Handle the cat, swipe a little dust off of a table top, even read the Sunday paper, and I have to treat my hands as if they were radioactive -- wash them IMMEDIATELY and in the meantime NOT touch the offending eye. (Was it Solomon who said if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out? Well, I'm almost there.)
Anyway, Kate's eye got some kind of a permanent infection from when she threw herself, several times, into a Venetian canal at the insistence of the famously hard-nosed David Lean, the director of "Summertime". Terribly romantic movie (Rossano Brazzi was breath-taking), and a terribly romantic way to get a chronic eye infection. It's not all we have in common, Kate and I: she was only a few months younger than my mother, and they bore a startling physical resemblance to each other. Mother could do a devastating Hepburn imitation (better even than Anthony Hopkins', "Yowah killing yowaself with yowah drinking, yew know..."), something about calla lillies being in bloom my deah, reahhlly they ahh. And Mother was invited to play the role of Eleanor of Aquitaine in a staged "Lion in Winter" off Broadway, and damned near did it, but her health declined very quickly about then and it didn't happen.
Mother had played Eleanor very convincingly all of my life, up against my father's Henry II -- the dinner table battles were epic, those two bitter and noble and frightened monarchs battling it out with everything they had. (That table is where I got the nervous stomach that used to make it easy for me to lose weight in a crisis.) They had a passionate relationship, my parents, and God help those of us who had a stake in the outcome of any particular skirmish. We kids almost fit the pattern of the princes, too (except for being female): the eldest not very imaginative but fierce, the middle one always scheming but with no physical courage whatsoever, and the baby (moi) everybody's favorite but not at all inclined to rule. (The fact that that baby was not too bright I don't want to dwell on.)
So here I am with allergies, peering at the world through salt water, asitwere. This condition will fall off rapidly as soon as stuff out on the mesa stops its vigorous blooming; in the meantime I pop Benedryl like Pezzes, and continue to mop the eye.
For a brief time in the last week we thought Beaux Eaux would be coming back to us. After a massive and demonic communications foul-up, after I had paid for a motel room in Colorado Springs (non-refundable), and rented a car big enough to haul an 85-pound dog and his enormous crate, after getting so damned mad I could spit, it turned out that nothing, NOTHING, about Beaux's situation was as reported, and the place where he lives now is just fine. The people who have him apparently got a slanderous report on us and our feelings toward them and their dog-handling, so they're pissed too. They told us to butt out, not to contact them (good God, you'd think we were talking about a grey-market child adoption here), and further off-putting instructions. When I'm not getting mad all over again, I can take comfort in the fact that they renamed him Bodhi (which is perfect for that great soul), and in that we don't have to turn our lives upside down all over again. I'm glad and sad, but that chapter is closed now. Repairing relations will take a little longer.
Update on the great breast (leave that one) uproar: I got in to see a GYN, and got a (very) brief breast exam. He was not particularly excited about the lump, which had all but disappeared in the time between making the appointment and actually seeing somebody. We did make another date for an overall screening (hereinafter to be referred to as "screaming"): mammo, pap, etc etc etc, for six weeks later, so this clearly was not an emergency. Everybody can stand down now; I am grateful for your concern, truly I am.
We are busying ourselves with finishing the home improvements begun pre-Beaux Eaux, with firming up arrangements for our vacation at the end of August, with planning a choral tour to San Francisco in October and another one to Australia in May/June 2008.
Y'all tell me your favorite summer reads, okay? I think I'll actually be finding some time to do that!
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