211207 Obsolete - vices and art
Dec. 7
Last night the wind howled around the house, and roared down the ridge like an aeroplane coming down to land. The Adirondack chairs were blown right off the porch.
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When I lived in Edmonton, I had my own office in a small business, a few of us did, my boss and two or three other staffers. Three of us smoked, upstairs, and of course in the coffee room. Sometimes, recently, after forty years of smoking on the porch if I was smoking that year, I long for my own office, where I can smoke. Just sometimes, when I am working. Ashtrays are a lost art - they came in all shapes and materials, sometimes with animals or souvenir paintings. I always had my favorites, the same way I have favorite mugs for coffee, they have to be just the right size and shape and feel... It is not a thing everyone has, I have found. (I wonder if they have just abdicated the "right" they could grant themselves, to have such a pleasurable thing.) A fancy ashtray was part of the decor in the fifties and sixties, usually on the coffee table, and there would be ashtrays on each side-table around the room.
This pair of little stackable ashtrays would be available on a side table by a chair or couch. This goat may have been designed for pins, it is only two inches across, or as an ashtray.
My childhood family of seven ate all our dinners in the front room dining space. As young adults we siblings usually made up five or more at the dinner table, and after dinner, with the tea, the ashtrays were brought to the table - several, within reach from different caches, and the cigarettes. My mother was the only non-smoker in the family - how she stood it I don't know. She must have been almost as addicted as we were. Never kid yourself that smokers' children are not more likely to smoke!
Lighters and cigarette cases, too, were gifts given during memorable rituals: engagements, marriages. My mother gave my father a silver cigarette case, inscribed with the date of their wedding. Cameron, K's mother, had a lighter with her initials on it, likewise a wedding present. Obsolete art - the museums are full of such things. Is there a smoker's museum? There should be. (Include the bones of some who died young.) It could be right next to the drinkers' museum, with its own obsolete art of lead crystal decanters and silver goblets. These treasures, the smokers' and the drinkers', form some part of the habits' hold on the drinkers and smokers. They are the items of the rituals, which make the charm, help create that small break in the day, when all the errands can be put on hold, or alternately and just as refreshing, troubles dragged out for a good rumination and grump. Nonetheless these breaks in the day were moments of presence and "me- or us- time", a collective ritual, small and insignificantly daily, like a cup of tea. Here I have stumbled into another obsolete ritual, again with its own beautiful and almost obsolete teacups and saucers. [A reason my mosaic art holds such interest for me.] And one must make mention of tea POTS, which have slid off the map, the way of such communal items. Now one makes tea in the mug, with a string attached.
We love the paraphernalia and the ritual. It is immediate. It is here, now. It is zen, haha. It is sharing, communal, social, sometimes ancestral, as ritual implies generations. My cousin and I, when I was in England, were visiting her mother at the seniors' residence and my aunt was not well at all. We were shaken and sad. The caregiver offered us a cup of tea which we gladly accepted - it would calm us, bring us around, it would not have happened in Canada. As Anna says, in Notting Hill, "Drink tea. There's lots of tea." ***
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A couple of days ago:
The electrician is come. He is supposed to make the upstairs lights and plug-ins (outlets?) work. Right now all that works is the bathroom. Its heater works but not the main room's. It has been a year now (on the 8th) we have been here, without power to the upstairs. * Seems fitting: this is our life, K and I. At this point, it is part of the romance of our relationship. We're not much for fixing things. Here, we teeter on the edge of heaven, allowed to look out at this valley. That the lights don't work is not relevant. Short of a safety issue (no pun intended!) we do not need everything to be perfect. Would that change if our financial circumstances changed? Maybe a little. Don't know that I'd ever need a fancy car. Four wheels and an engine gets you there. A pick-up truck, now that's something I'd like! How useful for garage-saling! We haven't done garage sales or church bazaars since covid. Seems like ten years, not two.
The electrician has gone. We still don't have power upstairs. But it is safe. He said something about spring, when he can get at the outside wiring. I don't know that I followed all that he said. I am afraid I am still on some pain meds and my brain is functioning below optimum levels.
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* What?! A year?! It seems to have gone by in a blur of (Oh, I just got Stephen King's The Langoliers : time curls up behind us, done and gone, and we rush from crisis to errand to crisis at the edge of mortality. **) in a blur of settling in, the joy and the reality, then the summer cut short by my health, by my unhealth, and fall obliterated. The last few months have been pain- and drug- befuddled confusion.
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Today the sun is shining bright, pouring into the house all warm, while outside it is cold, but the sky is blue. I purchased this enormous thermometer in 2020, to bring to the vineyard but then I thought it too enormous and ridiculous... But this fall I brought it and it works very well: far enough out to read (the temperature) accurately, and big enough to read from indoors. On the right, the sun pours in.
Thank you for visiting. Keep well.
Mumma Yaga
** Stephen King, The Langoliers, one of the stories in Four Past Midnight , 1990.
*** Notting Hill, movie, 1999
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