Let the Holidays Begin: Part I

The holiday season approaches in all of its enchanting glory and disenchanting realities. The pre-holiday grocery trip can be either or both but is required for any holiday preparation. Even early in the week before Thanksgiving, Ingles bustles with activity and crowds. Christmas candies, stacks of boxed fruitcakes and jars of marshmallow cream greet shoppers along with painful renditions of Christmas carols. The buggy, with Rem driving the attached car and repeatedly suggesting that I buy bananas, fills quickly before I even leave the produce section.

We wind our way up and down aisles and I stop in the middle of aisle five to help an older gentleman in a black, buttoned wool coat who reminds me of my father locate the spice section. We follow the alphabetically ordered spices to the ground cloves when a phone rings in his coat pocket. He hesitates because his hands are currently filled with the cloves, a handwritten list on lined notebook paper, and the small hand-held basket with a lemon, bag of celery, and a box of brown sugar. I take the basket from him so that he can answer the phone. “She always forgets to put something on the list,” he smiles in appreciation and takes the phone from his pocket. “You are lucky I’m not in the check-out line,” he gently chides into the phone. “What have you forgot?”

Rem and I leave the gentleman and make our way down the aisle. I study the basket to see what items Rem tossed among our Thanksgiving necessities. I only notice two boxes of unwanted baking soda. Last week I purchased frozen baked potato halves with bacon and cheese. I didn’t find them until I unloaded the groceries at home. No takers for the potatoes, although I have offered and even tried to pack them in Craig’s lunch, so they sit in my freezer. Rem’s purchased large bags of shredded cheese and cartons of yogurt. He swipes these items from the bottom shelves of the dairy section - items that sit at eye level to the car that he insists on riding in for all grocery trips. I never see how they actually get into the basket but Rem often takes short breaks and cackles as he runs around the cart and then jumps into the car again.

Some shoppers angrily make their way down the aisles, older women wearing deep set frowns, filling buggies with items needed for a Thanksgiving feast, disgruntled by the crowds and the traffic jam at the canned cranberry sauce. Others seem oblivious to the upcoming holiday and purchase the usual assortment of meats and vegetables or beer and Eggos.

I especially enjoy the shoppers who arrive in clusters of multi-generational groups or committed couples infused with holiday spirit eager to help each other. Visiting mothers seem befuddled by the grocery store’s layout, shopping with daughters and grandchildren who happily meander back and forth through the store with the promise of delectable homemade pies. Kids keep moms from forgetting key ingredients like mini marshmallows while young moms ponder quantities necessary to feed twelve or more people. Couples divvy up dishes on the spot and go in separate directions to gather needed ingredients. Men push baskets purposefully and lift heavy, bagged turkeys for wives anxious to return home to welcome college kids or far flung family members.

I eaves drop on one group that keeps appearing in the same aisle as I do as we make our way through the store. One of the women, already sporting a Christmas sweater (amply filling the tree that grows from her waist to just below her chin, the real bells that adorn the tree tinkling when she walks) pushes her elderly mother in a wheel chair. The other daughter walks just ahead of them pushing the grocery basket. “Now, Mom, what do we need for your stuffing?” she asks. The older woman’s hands shake as she counts off sausage, walnuts and cornmeal. All three seem to be enjoying this stage of their holiday together. The daughters retrieve the items and they move to the next dish. The mother laughs about Aunt Joyce’s gravy and the tinkling daughter remembers another of Aunt Joyce’s mishaps. I finish before they do and find long lines at the three open registers, providing ice-breakers to those of us waiting next to each other as we all wonder aloud why the front of the store is lined with thirteen registers. (if not to use for the holidays, then when?)

I enjoy cooking for Thanksgiving and have every year that we have been in Asheville. Most years bring family members our way and for many years our elderly neighbors joined us. This year our English friends will share our table. Generally, I prepare the same meal whether we have friends and family or just us sitting around the table. Fresh, tasty oysters for stuffing, are difficult to come by unless some form of my family from Louisiana joins us but we can get by with a Carolina shrimp stuffing in a pinch. My dinners resonate with traditional dishes from my family. Sometimes I stuff mirlitons. I always bake pecan pie. This also means that my recipes serve no less than fifteen (and sometimes more). Craig marvels at the huge quantities needed for so few people. No worries. I expect my extravagant efforts at Thanksgiving to last at least a week. When we have a particularly large gathering I am stunned that by Saturday we have run out of leftovers. I want to hoard the delicious dishes and just keep reheating turkey and opening cans of cranberry sauce. No luck. My brother asks for a second piece of pie (the one I marked for Sunday night after the kids went to bed). The mirlitons really do taste like Grandmama’s and vanish quickly. Even Lise’s sweet potato balls (now tradition, I am told) disappear like candy. Perhaps because with hidden mini marshmallows in the centers of them, they taste like candy.

Now that the shopping’s done, I can roll up my sleeves, open a bottle of wine, gather my little sous chefs and get to work.

A Dog Day Morning

Rem tends to take the spotlight away from all of the other players in his life and today proved no exception. Tam fell into Rem’s imagination abyss and found herself playing second fiddle not only to Rem but to Rem’s stuffed dog, Rocky, too. Rocky acquired his name and Rem’s interest only this morning and reinforced Rem’s reign over the Chenevert household when Rocky sported a brown leather leash that, only moments before, were holding up Craig’s pants as he readied himself for work.

Tam, on the other hand, wore a worn purple leash that had spent the night on the porch soaking up the dampness from the rain. Although dangerously close to arriving late for her veterinarian appointment, Tam waited patiently at the back door while Rem decided that one of Lise’s old belts would suit Rocky better than Craig’s and carefully made the switch.

The four of us, Rocky and Rem, Tam and I, made our way to the vet’s office. The receptionist greeted us and it seemed that she knelt down to put Tam at ease but it soon became clear that Rocky needed more attention as he suddenly fell into her lap. Tam quivered through her examination and could not get off the table soon enough. She jumped the four feet to the floor as soon as the doctor stepped away. Not so with Rocky. He nearly flung himself onto the table and with Rem’s encouraging “good boy” and “good dog, Rocky”, sat through a thorough examination and rabies shot without a flinch. While Rem and Rocky accepted the praises of the doctor and all who came pouring in to watch the spectacle, Tam nervously shed about half of her fur onto me.

Imagine Tam’s humiliation as she whimpered through the usual trauma of having her nails clipped only to be interrupted at Rem’s insistence that Rocky (who at all outward appearances has no nails at all) take a turn. Not only did the two women fawn over the stuffed mutt as they pretended to clip his nails but they also rewarded him with real dog treats. Rem seemed thrilled.

Completely spent from her annual physical, Tam hovered at the door while Rocky swung this way and that in the lobby where Rem, at the other end of the leash introduced him to everyone. Apparently, Rocky is two and he likes to play in the park. The brown fuzzy dog, unrecognizable as any breed much less one as dignified as a Brittany, and his equally impudent owner sucked every ounce of attention, compassion and admiration from that office, leaving Tam with nothing. But, as always, Tam maintained her composure and, head held high, we returned home. She immediately rushed toward her crate. Perhaps she wished to sulk unnoticed. But who should come soaring over her head to land in the crate first? Rocky, of course. And Rem left the two of them to work it out together as he ran away, laughing.

Half a Lifetime Ago

The campus resonates with activity, oddly alive for a Saturday, especially now that the football season is over. Students’ thoughts focus on upcoming exams and final papers. Study groups meet on the benches in the quad and in the grass of the parade grounds to enjoy the last warm, dry days of November. Sweaters and sweatshirts wait in heaps on the ground or on laps, the only hints of the cooler mornings and evenings of late fall.

A young sophomore spends an afternoon under bright fluorescent lights on the floor of the university bookstore, confidently skimming the pages of fine print and diagrams from a psychology textbook she was unable to afford at the beginning of the semester and quickly jots notes into a worn, spiral bound notebook. She’d rather be at the typewriter working on her Heart is a Lonely Hunter paper or her paper on religious images in 19th century poetry. And she really should finish her last short story of her creative writing class but these she saves until the end, fine morsels of pleasure to punctuate the semester and savor until the next semester begins.

Architecture students, in their final year of studio, work and play on the first floor of Atkinson Hall at the opposite end of the quad from the library. An odd assortment of music wafts from the open casement windows that includes the Cranberries and Billy Joel and the students take turns singing along and tossing a ball over drafting tables as the others bend over drawings of buildings that will never be built. Colored renderings are stacked with elevations and section drawings ready to be presented to a skeptical panel of professors during the week of final exams. All energy and ease, one of the students takes leave of his friends and finds his way down the hall to the door. He walks quickly through the sculpture garden, beyond the dairy store and the classroom building to the stadium parking lot and his car.

The young woman smelled the strong sweet smell of her Milton professor’s pipe before seeing him standing in the shadows of the arched entrance of Allen Hall. He greets her through clenched teeth and then takes the pipe from his mouth to encourage her to finish reading the Milton prose because they will end discussions of Paradise Lost on Monday. She leans toward him to filter his quiet voice from the ambient noise around them and notices that she towers over him, this iconic image of professors of old, and wonders if the rumors that this is his last semester are true. They part ways and her thoughts return to the upcoming date that evening.

He arrives to her quiet apartment (her roommates both in New Orleans for the weekend) in a festive green and red plaid button down shirt and a pair of khakis. All chivalry and charm he puts her at ease before they are seated at a small table in DiGiulio Brothers, a cozy Italian restaurant down Perkins Road under an interstate overpass. He leads her to the table with his hand pressed against the small of her back and she feels his electricity through the black sweater and lace camisole long after his hand is released.

All smiles, they feed tidbits of themselves to each other over manicotti and wine. Guarded fantasies of a future beyond university life follow brief histories of their own young lives. One describes childhood haunts, places where this or that happened while the other embellishes childhood escapades. Overwhelming tales about growing up with five siblings intermingle with stories about life with one brother. A celebrated architect and acclaimed writer seem more like possibilities than whimsy. The escalated pleas of the woman behind them begging the man she is with to leave his wife result in the only lull in the young couple’s conversation. They linger at the table even when the food and the entertaining couple are gone. And linger on into a lifetime.

This November celebrates my life in halves. Half of a lifetime ago the two of us sat together for the first time in that crowded cafe. And now Craig has been a part of my life for as many years that I so quickly summed up on that first date.