Tuesday, August 31st
Both daughters decided that a long lunch with us each day and then evenings spent together in Caz’s Barn while John and I are doing our usual news watching in the house, perhaps an episode of West Wing thrown in, was the perfect way for Alison to have a few days off work. Long afternoons in the warm pool are assumed.
Today I decided on a Middle Eastern mezze lunch with plates of cold food, feta and tiny sliced cucumbers, delicate and soft small pink onions with local tomatoes, piles of steaming meat seasoned with cumin and cinnamon surrounded with hummus and another green pea hummus softened with mint and coriander. Soon we were deep in a conversation about film making, Alison’s cogent comments about modern television and network films, about which she knows all, started the conversation. I sat quietly and watched as the conversation became hilarious and ferocious. Fassbinder, Wenders, ‘The chicken killed itself’, yelled one daughter, as she violently disagreed with a comment. We moved to Tarkovsky, ‘that movie is unwatchable’ interrupted another. ‘Didn’t she f*** a car?’. Slowly we moved on to Aaron Sorkin, the genius of American television – and film, and had a long, much quieter and thoughtful conversation about his work.
John is as passionate as my daughters about art, writing, film, the Greeks and Romans, and any other idea that has affected the world. Once we got through the Taliban, and America leaving Afghanistan to men steeped in another century, American foreign policy in general, about which I know more than the three of them, the intensity dropped, and laughter reigned. I have raised two intellectual daughters, clear minded with their own ideas and no problem in expounding their point of view. I wondered how they were so knowledgeable about film and art, let alone politics, and thought that old adage of fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree. True. They grew up in a house full of people who worked in the film and television business and who were passionate about it. It was what we talked about at every meal. A devotion to politics followed.
These days I am more concerned that my succulent beds get enough water and my secret garden, full of pots, gets fed. I wonder about getting a manicure so my hands will look like they might eat in a restaurant, and then give up as I measure the amount of work to be done moving paths on the hillside. My daughters are a reminder of the woman I used to be, passionate, demanding of the world, thoughtful and, I hope, funny. They are building their own paths forward while I am imaging the end, whenever it might come.
One day when it is time for death, I want mine to be quiet and graceful, a sliding away to a new world not yet imagined. I would love to be wrapped in a clean white sheet and dropped in a hole under one of our oak trees. Perhaps that will be possible in years to come. I hope my daughters will accept our deaths with sadness, celebrate what we meant to them, remember the fun we had together, tell all the terrible family stories that make us laugh with tears running down faces, and then continue to walk with grace into their future.
