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If ever I prove false to you, bright day will turn to night
The problem with an epic weekend (especially one that lasts four days) is that by the time it's over, you are no longer in any condition to write up the experience. Once more into the sleep deprivation.
Some number of years ago, I promised the person who loved me then that I would dance at their wedding. That was this weekend. It is not that I wanted any longer to marry them, but they were very important to me for a long time, very tightly bound into a period of my life that in the end hurt me very badly, and our entire emotional history was complicated to begin with. They tended to make me come unstuck in time. I was not sure if I was simply going to fall apart around the ceremony. Our last few interactions had not been encouraging. Because he is one of the best things that has happened to me so far this year,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel agreed to go with me—if nothing else, to be an anchor, someone who was not part of that time when my life was entirely different and looked to continue that way. The wedding was on Sunday, so we decided we might as well make a weekend in D.C. out of it. We made arrangements for a hotel in Dupont Circle and packed lots of books. On Friday morning, having received an unexpected and welcome lift to Sullivan Square from nurrynur, we took the regional out of South Station and spent the rest of the day on a train.
Honestly, not very much happened on Friday except that I finished reading George Dyson's Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship (2002) and David Mercer's Cousin Vladimir & Shooting the Chandelier (1978), I finally posted about The Avengers (2012) and we got in a little ahead of schedule, so we negotiated the Metro over to our hotel and started our weekend by discovering that my credit card—with which I had made the reservation—was being declined. There was a brief shining moment of pure adrenaline which eased only slightly when I got hold of a human being in the chilly, sensory-depriving labyrinth of interactive voice response and determined that my last month's payment had not yet arrived, despite being sent off in the mail at the mandatory time. I handed over my debit card. We went out for dinner at Kramerbooks & Afterwords. Blood sugar was a categorical imperative by that point. We got even better: Rob ordered a fine dish by the name of Road Kill Chicken, which as far as blackened Cornish hen with farro risotto and slices of blood orange goes was very tasty, but I had the Jamaican curried goat. Rob started trying to poach some as soon as it arrived at the table and I couldn't blame him; it was the superior dish. There was a Scotch bonnet on top. I ate some of it. Capsaicin is my friend. (My dinner companion later informed me that I first licked the 350,000-Scoville pepper, exclaimed on the amazing stupidity of this action, then bit into it and asked him to ride roller coasters with me. He seems to like me.) For dessert, there was salt caramel cake and a peanut butter pie martini which was much less of a terrible idea than it sounds; the brilliant one was the hot chocolate with butterscotch schnapps the restaurant also turned out to serve. We then failed to leave the bookstore without purchase of debt-levels of literature, including (in my case) Harvey Pekar and Paul Buhle's Yiddishkeit: Jewish Vernacular & The New Land (2011), a graphic novel anthology of the history of Yiddish in America. In among sketches and the libretto for an entire satirical revue, it features short comics about figures like Moishe Oysher, Molly Picon, Zero Mostel, Aaron Lansky—and others, like Kadya Molodowsky, I'd never heard of, which is how I knew the book was good. I believe we read a lot that first night.
(There may be a review-ish post to follow. The in-house internet at the hotel turned out to be stupid expensive—that's the annoying converse of mad cheap—so we simply didn't have any until the last night of the trip, when Rob broke down and bought a day's worth for entirely legitimate reasons. I checked my e-mail for the first time since Friday on the train back on Monday evening. It may be the longest I've stayed offline since I spent five days with G andschreibergasse in Ossipee. On the bright side: we burned through books like you would, actually, if you read this journal, believe.)
Saturday, we had planned on the National Air and Space Museum before heading out to Rockville to meetstrange_selkie and darthrami, because I love my god-daughter and Rami has a favorite barbershop that is accessible only by car, but instead we hiked up 18th Street to Adams Morgan in the kind of heat that smashes off every sun-whitened surface back at you and had lunch at a diner whose name Rob cannot be faulted for not remembering, because it's The Diner. We passed rows of lavender-painted brownstones. (Probably because we had already left Dupont Circle, we saw almost nothing of Pride in D.C. except perhaps a slight increase in rainbow flags hung out from porches. Also going on was some kind of Girl Scout centenary, helpfully explained to us by a woman we sat next to on the Metro, even though we hadn't asked. It did explain the frequency of Brownies in the car. I think the uniform has changed since I tried my hardest to avoid wearing mine.) Rob had something appropriately breakfast-y with eggs and toast, I had a buffalo chicken sandwich that was only playing at the form, because it arrived spilling off its potato bun and into the chips, with the top half of the bun cavalierly perched on the ketchup. We each got milkshakes. I couldn't actually remember the last time I'd had one. There was further hiking across the Duke Ellington Bridge, which is a beautiful fall-away into crowding green trees and a tunnel somewhere far below that looks like a transplant from Central Park, and Rami met us at the Metro, took us to the Rock Creek Barber Shop; I am trying to encourage Rob to post a photograph of himself with much shorter hair than I've ever seen on him, because while I'd gotten used to the sort of fine flyaway look that made him look like a really mad scientist before he combed it in the mornings, the alternative looks good on him. We arrived at the house just as Selkie was preparing to make a yogurt cake with Noel, of course instantly distracting her. She's two and a half now; she's reached the stage where she recognizes me at once, but it still takes her a few minutes to decide whether she really wants to hug me or not (yes, eventually). She took to Rob immediately. We would later end up singing her to sleep with the child-friendliest things we could remember on no notice at all, which turned out to be "Cottleston Pie" and "Lydia the Tattooed Lady" and Bill Staines' "River." Before then, Rami played us the pilot episode of a terrific BBC radio comedy called Cabin Pressure and we had dinner variously ordered from Urban BBQ, which I realizes sounds hopelessly trendy, but is instead a very solid barbecue place that feels it is only reasonable to provide its customers with egg rolls made of sweet brisket and spicy cheese and a sort of chili fondue to dip them into. We stayed way past our hosts' bedtime—Rami turns out to own the original sheet music for songs like "Over There" and "Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life" and Selkie let me tear the recipes out of all her back issues of Food Arts—and weren't exactly early to sleep ourselves. I read out lines of Roy Blount, Jr.'s Hail, Hail, Euphoria! Presenting the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup (2011) to Rob and he read me back choice excerpts from Backward Ran Sentences: The Best of Wolcott Gibbs from the New Yorker (2011).
And as I said to Rob as we were coming off the Metro at Dupont Circle, "And on Sunday was the Anabasis."
What you need to understand in order for this story to have its full impact is that the wedding was to take place at a venue which claimed on the invite to be in Baltimore, but turned out to be more like Owings Mills with gerrymandering. We had worked it out that if Rob and I caught the train from D.C. at half past noon,fleurdelis28 could pick us up from Baltimore Penn Station and we could all make the ceremony in time. We arrived at Union Station a little behind our time, but well within train-catching limits, and bought our tickets for there and back.
And approximately thirty seconds later saw on the departure board and heard over the echoing PA system that our train was delayed. As were all trains coming or going north of the city due to a broken cable on the Bush River Bridge. Indefinitely. With a sinking sense of irony, we waited for the next announcement.
"All trains are not operating at this time."
I will not describe the precise circles of what fresh hell that ensued except to say that I appreciate Rob taking none of it personally, but I texted Fleur-de-Lis immediately to find out if she had any suggestions and was not expecting to receive, passed on directly from the groom, the instruction that we should take a taxi to not really Baltimore; we would not have to pay for it. I wrote back to double-check that both she and the groom had meant what I'd read: I was not prepared to have come all this way for a wedding with Tesla levels of emotional charge and then miss it due to transportation idiocy, but that's a hell of a taxi ride. There was no answer for what felt like fifteen minutes and was probably at most five or ten. Eventually, I heard back by text and phone call both. She was confirming.
We took the taxi. We arrived five minutes before two o'clock. Due to a lack of cash on everyone's part, we practically had to pass the hat to pay the fare. (I metterriqat's five-month-old daughter for the first time by having her thrust into my arms so that her mother could scrounge around in her backpack for bills. I joked that I was holding her for ransom: she was like afikomen, only wrigglier. Predictably, she fisted her hands in my hair and tried to eat the strands. She has beautiful dark-ringed blue eyes and, we discovered at the reception, liked it when I harmonized on Arcade Fire's "Rebellion (Lies)" while holding her.) It did not matter; we were there. We went inside, to meet strangers and people I hadn't seen in years. And it was, I think, on the whole a good wedding. Outdoors, on flagstones; the shade fell first on the groom's side and moved slowly over to the bride's. shirei_shibolim officiated as cantor; he did a very good job explaining every step of the ceremony with just enough humor at the right moments, and he took his responsibilities seriously even while playing a processional version of "Blackbird" on a guitar full of birdseed. The couple looked like they wanted to be there, at that moment, making those promises to one another in language both ancient and just-drafted. I did not dance, but I watched them dancing. I talked with the friends I don't see enough of and a woman I couldn't remember if I'd met at Brandeis. I perused the crazy, curio-store shelves of the parlor and the back hall. I walked the terraced, hill-tumbling grounds of the mansion with Rob and picked off spanakopita and stuffed mushrooms from the hors d'oeuvres trays whenever they came by.
And it served the purpose for which I attended: I kept my promise. I didn't fall apart. I wrote yesterday togaudior, "I don't mean it still wasn't strange, especially when the groom's family kept coming over to me and asking how I was doing, or that Rob won't tell you I tightened my grip at certain points in the ceremony or the speeches. But . . . [i]t wasn't the worst-case scenario."
That may be all I am going to write about it publicly, now. But alone that would have made it worth my going.
I finished my summary to Gaudior: "And if Amtrak had not been made of molasses and bust switches, the traveling itself would have been fine." Returning from the wedding proper was not so much the problem; we got a ride into Baltimore from a friend of the bride's, an actress who turned out to be into radio theater and commedia dell' arte (so it should be evident that we had absolutely nothing to talk about on the way to the station), and if the trains were still only sort of running by the time we were supposed to catch ours back to D.C., it afforded us an extra hour at the station with Shirei and Terri and their still beautiful-eyed daughter, all similarly stranded by Amtrak's failure to resume normal service. We read some more. We got back to Dupont Circle around eleven o'clock and were both so hungry we went straight back to Afterwords and demolished another goat curry and some amusingly named dessert drinks. We considered the day to have been well and truly survived. The problem was Monday. We woke up exactly an hour before we had to check out of the hotel, stashed our bags at the desk, and regretfully abandoned designs on the Air and Space Museum in favor of making our train; we had lunch at a nearby bakery called Firehook (perfectly fine ham and cheese croissant, perfectly fine lemonade, slightly terrifying death-by-chocolate that was masquerading as a brownie until you cut into it and realized it was liquid theobromine only barely holding a rectilinear shape), walked the diplomacy-lined streets in no particular direction and found a little park up by the Chinese embassy with tiger lilies and bumblebees and some kind of weird ornamental cherry or miniature horse chestnut; and arrived at Union Station a little ahead of our time. And discovered that the trains were—still—despite online advertisement to the contrary—indefinitely delayed. Which is why, after the kind of interminable standing on line that shortly reduced us to absurdist laughter and frequent quotation from the outtakes from Emmet Otter's Jug-Band Christmas (1977), we arrived home in Boston at a sufficiently late hour that all public transit had ceased to run. We were wise in the ways of the last-minute taxi. This time, we could even pay the driver without my getting out of the car and accosting fellow-guests in the parking lot. There was welcome collapse when we got in.
Mostly today was aftercare. Some hours on my job which I had not been able to work since Thursday, early dinner at The Painted Burro (too loud for my comfort, but queso fundido! really good flan with orange-flower water and plums!) in Davis Square. I came home and watched a film noir with Robert Young on TCM. I read some more of the last of my trip books. I feel like a truckful of hammers hit me. I had an epic weekend.
And I am very glad I did.
Some number of years ago, I promised the person who loved me then that I would dance at their wedding. That was this weekend. It is not that I wanted any longer to marry them, but they were very important to me for a long time, very tightly bound into a period of my life that in the end hurt me very badly, and our entire emotional history was complicated to begin with. They tended to make me come unstuck in time. I was not sure if I was simply going to fall apart around the ceremony. Our last few interactions had not been encouraging. Because he is one of the best things that has happened to me so far this year,
derspatchel agreed to go with me—if nothing else, to be an anchor, someone who was not part of that time when my life was entirely different and looked to continue that way. The wedding was on Sunday, so we decided we might as well make a weekend in D.C. out of it. We made arrangements for a hotel in Dupont Circle and packed lots of books. On Friday morning, having received an unexpected and welcome lift to Sullivan Square from nurrynur, we took the regional out of South Station and spent the rest of the day on a train.Honestly, not very much happened on Friday except that I finished reading George Dyson's Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship (2002) and David Mercer's Cousin Vladimir & Shooting the Chandelier (1978), I finally posted about The Avengers (2012) and we got in a little ahead of schedule, so we negotiated the Metro over to our hotel and started our weekend by discovering that my credit card—with which I had made the reservation—was being declined. There was a brief shining moment of pure adrenaline which eased only slightly when I got hold of a human being in the chilly, sensory-depriving labyrinth of interactive voice response and determined that my last month's payment had not yet arrived, despite being sent off in the mail at the mandatory time. I handed over my debit card. We went out for dinner at Kramerbooks & Afterwords. Blood sugar was a categorical imperative by that point. We got even better: Rob ordered a fine dish by the name of Road Kill Chicken, which as far as blackened Cornish hen with farro risotto and slices of blood orange goes was very tasty, but I had the Jamaican curried goat. Rob started trying to poach some as soon as it arrived at the table and I couldn't blame him; it was the superior dish. There was a Scotch bonnet on top. I ate some of it. Capsaicin is my friend. (My dinner companion later informed me that I first licked the 350,000-Scoville pepper, exclaimed on the amazing stupidity of this action, then bit into it and asked him to ride roller coasters with me. He seems to like me.) For dessert, there was salt caramel cake and a peanut butter pie martini which was much less of a terrible idea than it sounds; the brilliant one was the hot chocolate with butterscotch schnapps the restaurant also turned out to serve. We then failed to leave the bookstore without purchase of debt-levels of literature, including (in my case) Harvey Pekar and Paul Buhle's Yiddishkeit: Jewish Vernacular & The New Land (2011), a graphic novel anthology of the history of Yiddish in America. In among sketches and the libretto for an entire satirical revue, it features short comics about figures like Moishe Oysher, Molly Picon, Zero Mostel, Aaron Lansky—and others, like Kadya Molodowsky, I'd never heard of, which is how I knew the book was good. I believe we read a lot that first night.
(There may be a review-ish post to follow. The in-house internet at the hotel turned out to be stupid expensive—that's the annoying converse of mad cheap—so we simply didn't have any until the last night of the trip, when Rob broke down and bought a day's worth for entirely legitimate reasons. I checked my e-mail for the first time since Friday on the train back on Monday evening. It may be the longest I've stayed offline since I spent five days with G and
schreibergasse in Ossipee. On the bright side: we burned through books like you would, actually, if you read this journal, believe.)Saturday, we had planned on the National Air and Space Museum before heading out to Rockville to meet
strange_selkie and darthrami, because I love my god-daughter and Rami has a favorite barbershop that is accessible only by car, but instead we hiked up 18th Street to Adams Morgan in the kind of heat that smashes off every sun-whitened surface back at you and had lunch at a diner whose name Rob cannot be faulted for not remembering, because it's The Diner. We passed rows of lavender-painted brownstones. (Probably because we had already left Dupont Circle, we saw almost nothing of Pride in D.C. except perhaps a slight increase in rainbow flags hung out from porches. Also going on was some kind of Girl Scout centenary, helpfully explained to us by a woman we sat next to on the Metro, even though we hadn't asked. It did explain the frequency of Brownies in the car. I think the uniform has changed since I tried my hardest to avoid wearing mine.) Rob had something appropriately breakfast-y with eggs and toast, I had a buffalo chicken sandwich that was only playing at the form, because it arrived spilling off its potato bun and into the chips, with the top half of the bun cavalierly perched on the ketchup. We each got milkshakes. I couldn't actually remember the last time I'd had one. There was further hiking across the Duke Ellington Bridge, which is a beautiful fall-away into crowding green trees and a tunnel somewhere far below that looks like a transplant from Central Park, and Rami met us at the Metro, took us to the Rock Creek Barber Shop; I am trying to encourage Rob to post a photograph of himself with much shorter hair than I've ever seen on him, because while I'd gotten used to the sort of fine flyaway look that made him look like a really mad scientist before he combed it in the mornings, the alternative looks good on him. We arrived at the house just as Selkie was preparing to make a yogurt cake with Noel, of course instantly distracting her. She's two and a half now; she's reached the stage where she recognizes me at once, but it still takes her a few minutes to decide whether she really wants to hug me or not (yes, eventually). She took to Rob immediately. We would later end up singing her to sleep with the child-friendliest things we could remember on no notice at all, which turned out to be "Cottleston Pie" and "Lydia the Tattooed Lady" and Bill Staines' "River." Before then, Rami played us the pilot episode of a terrific BBC radio comedy called Cabin Pressure and we had dinner variously ordered from Urban BBQ, which I realizes sounds hopelessly trendy, but is instead a very solid barbecue place that feels it is only reasonable to provide its customers with egg rolls made of sweet brisket and spicy cheese and a sort of chili fondue to dip them into. We stayed way past our hosts' bedtime—Rami turns out to own the original sheet music for songs like "Over There" and "Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life" and Selkie let me tear the recipes out of all her back issues of Food Arts—and weren't exactly early to sleep ourselves. I read out lines of Roy Blount, Jr.'s Hail, Hail, Euphoria! Presenting the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup (2011) to Rob and he read me back choice excerpts from Backward Ran Sentences: The Best of Wolcott Gibbs from the New Yorker (2011).And as I said to Rob as we were coming off the Metro at Dupont Circle, "And on Sunday was the Anabasis."
What you need to understand in order for this story to have its full impact is that the wedding was to take place at a venue which claimed on the invite to be in Baltimore, but turned out to be more like Owings Mills with gerrymandering. We had worked it out that if Rob and I caught the train from D.C. at half past noon,
fleurdelis28 could pick us up from Baltimore Penn Station and we could all make the ceremony in time. We arrived at Union Station a little behind our time, but well within train-catching limits, and bought our tickets for there and back.And approximately thirty seconds later saw on the departure board and heard over the echoing PA system that our train was delayed. As were all trains coming or going north of the city due to a broken cable on the Bush River Bridge. Indefinitely. With a sinking sense of irony, we waited for the next announcement.
"All trains are not operating at this time."
I will not describe the precise circles of what fresh hell that ensued except to say that I appreciate Rob taking none of it personally, but I texted Fleur-de-Lis immediately to find out if she had any suggestions and was not expecting to receive, passed on directly from the groom, the instruction that we should take a taxi to not really Baltimore; we would not have to pay for it. I wrote back to double-check that both she and the groom had meant what I'd read: I was not prepared to have come all this way for a wedding with Tesla levels of emotional charge and then miss it due to transportation idiocy, but that's a hell of a taxi ride. There was no answer for what felt like fifteen minutes and was probably at most five or ten. Eventually, I heard back by text and phone call both. She was confirming.
We took the taxi. We arrived five minutes before two o'clock. Due to a lack of cash on everyone's part, we practically had to pass the hat to pay the fare. (I met
terriqat's five-month-old daughter for the first time by having her thrust into my arms so that her mother could scrounge around in her backpack for bills. I joked that I was holding her for ransom: she was like afikomen, only wrigglier. Predictably, she fisted her hands in my hair and tried to eat the strands. She has beautiful dark-ringed blue eyes and, we discovered at the reception, liked it when I harmonized on Arcade Fire's "Rebellion (Lies)" while holding her.) It did not matter; we were there. We went inside, to meet strangers and people I hadn't seen in years. And it was, I think, on the whole a good wedding. Outdoors, on flagstones; the shade fell first on the groom's side and moved slowly over to the bride's. shirei_shibolim officiated as cantor; he did a very good job explaining every step of the ceremony with just enough humor at the right moments, and he took his responsibilities seriously even while playing a processional version of "Blackbird" on a guitar full of birdseed. The couple looked like they wanted to be there, at that moment, making those promises to one another in language both ancient and just-drafted. I did not dance, but I watched them dancing. I talked with the friends I don't see enough of and a woman I couldn't remember if I'd met at Brandeis. I perused the crazy, curio-store shelves of the parlor and the back hall. I walked the terraced, hill-tumbling grounds of the mansion with Rob and picked off spanakopita and stuffed mushrooms from the hors d'oeuvres trays whenever they came by.And it served the purpose for which I attended: I kept my promise. I didn't fall apart. I wrote yesterday to
gaudior, "I don't mean it still wasn't strange, especially when the groom's family kept coming over to me and asking how I was doing, or that Rob won't tell you I tightened my grip at certain points in the ceremony or the speeches. But . . . [i]t wasn't the worst-case scenario."That may be all I am going to write about it publicly, now. But alone that would have made it worth my going.
I finished my summary to Gaudior: "And if Amtrak had not been made of molasses and bust switches, the traveling itself would have been fine." Returning from the wedding proper was not so much the problem; we got a ride into Baltimore from a friend of the bride's, an actress who turned out to be into radio theater and commedia dell' arte (so it should be evident that we had absolutely nothing to talk about on the way to the station), and if the trains were still only sort of running by the time we were supposed to catch ours back to D.C., it afforded us an extra hour at the station with Shirei and Terri and their still beautiful-eyed daughter, all similarly stranded by Amtrak's failure to resume normal service. We read some more. We got back to Dupont Circle around eleven o'clock and were both so hungry we went straight back to Afterwords and demolished another goat curry and some amusingly named dessert drinks. We considered the day to have been well and truly survived. The problem was Monday. We woke up exactly an hour before we had to check out of the hotel, stashed our bags at the desk, and regretfully abandoned designs on the Air and Space Museum in favor of making our train; we had lunch at a nearby bakery called Firehook (perfectly fine ham and cheese croissant, perfectly fine lemonade, slightly terrifying death-by-chocolate that was masquerading as a brownie until you cut into it and realized it was liquid theobromine only barely holding a rectilinear shape), walked the diplomacy-lined streets in no particular direction and found a little park up by the Chinese embassy with tiger lilies and bumblebees and some kind of weird ornamental cherry or miniature horse chestnut; and arrived at Union Station a little ahead of our time. And discovered that the trains were—still—despite online advertisement to the contrary—indefinitely delayed. Which is why, after the kind of interminable standing on line that shortly reduced us to absurdist laughter and frequent quotation from the outtakes from Emmet Otter's Jug-Band Christmas (1977), we arrived home in Boston at a sufficiently late hour that all public transit had ceased to run. We were wise in the ways of the last-minute taxi. This time, we could even pay the driver without my getting out of the car and accosting fellow-guests in the parking lot. There was welcome collapse when we got in.
Mostly today was aftercare. Some hours on my job which I had not been able to work since Thursday, early dinner at The Painted Burro (too loud for my comfort, but queso fundido! really good flan with orange-flower water and plums!) in Davis Square. I came home and watched a film noir with Robert Young on TCM. I read some more of the last of my trip books. I feel like a truckful of hammers hit me. I had an epic weekend.
And I am very glad I did.
no subject
Boo and Hiss on Amtrak. A couple of years ago, my university's veterans had a trip to DC (anybody could go). It *moved*, but they lied about the wireless service. When the group did the trip again this year, they took the plane instead -- faster, less expensive (oddly), and better internets.
Yiddishkeit sounds fascinating.
Big cheers for Spatch, and I have got to see the haircut.
no subject
The goat was splendid both times and their desserts are also impressive. The hard part, going back, will be (one of us, because I suspect there will always be goat) making ourselves order something different in order to determine what the rest of the menu is like. Judging by the number and quality of our purchases, the bookstore even without the restaurant would have been a success.
When the group did the trip again this year, they took the plane instead -- faster, less expensive (oddly), and better internets.
I fly on JetBlue deals and it is cheaper. On the other hand, I enjoy not having somebody's hands in my crotch when I haven't invited them there.
Yiddishkeit sounds fascinating.
Highly recommended. Hit up your nearest comics store.