Birthday Girl: Bea Plus

Somewhere, in some celestial realm, three women are sitting down to some cheesecake in celebration of one of their birthdays.  A fourth, I hope, is raising a glass in her memory.

Teacher, Teacher

Now that I've been this new job for more than half a year, I've started to realize how curious it really is.

The Road Not Taken

I ran into myself this evening, and it was an experience both unnerving and thought-provoking.

Prix de Beauté

Apparently, all it takes is a few discreet swipes of Maybelline to turn the dullest plain jane into a creditable Loretta Young impersonator.  Who knew?

Now We Are Six (Plus 44)

Well, now that I've been so thoroughly outed by dear Mistress MJ, I suppose there's no point not admitting it:  I'm old.  This is not just a birthday, you see - it's one of those birthdays, the kind unreasonably freighted with significance just because they end in a zero.

Fifty.  The very sound of it is Eeyorish.  Fifty.  The age at which Gloria Swanson starred in Sunset Boulevard, a full two years older than Bette Davis in A Catered Affair.  It's the age - as all too many people are eager to remind you - that one becomes eligible for membership in the American Association of Retired Persons.  Fifty.  Oy.

Well, it's better than the alternative, I know that. And I'm also learning that all those people who go on about how you feel freer as you get older to do as you please, actually do have something of a point.  Also, it's nice, sometimes, to have a great store of experience to drawn on, even if it's just to stare down some youngster.  I found myself glaring sternly at such a one last week, a wee creature who had come to confirm whether some petty detail he found amiss could possibly be correct.  "Well," said I, "given that this is something that I have been doing for a living for the past 32 years, and it hasn't been wrong until now, I think we might assume it's so, don't you?"  Apparently I can look quite formidable with brows beetled, and he scooted off, cowed.  I felt quite disproportionately pleased.

So our naughty weekend in Dubai was actually a birthday celebration, and a festive one at that, with a grand lunch at, of all things, a little Irish pub we like (they do a first-rate roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, and those of us that indulge in that sort of thing can avail ourselves of their excellent sausages, gloriously made of what in these very halal parts we refer to as "flat-nosed beef").  Present were all sorts of people from hither and yon, from a sweet young thing who thinks of Mr. Muscato and me as his uncles (bless) to a an old pal from West Africa days who's recently washed up on these shores.  We ate and drank and laughed a lot, and I thought a little about the Long Strange Trip it's been.

Miss Rheba rang me up last night to commiserate, for she crosses the same Rubicon in just a few weeks.  As we've known each other since we were 14, we have few secrets and always lots to talk about.  "There are things we'll never do again," she said, "but I don't mind too much.  No, I really don't care.  Think of all the things we'll never have to do again.  I figure we have 30 more years, easy, of not caring what people think, and what a relief that is.  Imagine how much more fun we could have had at 25 if we could have just gotten over our cheap selves."  I think she's right.  Each decade's only gotten better so far, and with any luck, on that front, maybe things will hold, more or less like that, for one or two more.

In the meantime, we have much to do.  Tonight we enjoyed an excellent dinner, Mr. Muscato having not only roasted a chicken and whipped up his patented garlic mashed potatoes (the secret, learned from Julia Child, is incorporating the garlic into a cream sauce that's then folded into the potatoes, not fattening at all, of course), but also baked a raft of carrot cakes, one of which will go to the office to feed my colleagues (perhaps even that infuriatingly youthful whippersnapper) at our weekly staff meeting.  This weekend, we're apparently making a little jaunt one Sultanate down to our old stomping grounds, and on our return, God help us, we'll be just about a month out from totally uprooting ourselves and heading off on our next big adventure.

And, if nothing else, I get to keep an eye out for that AARP card...

Memory Lane: And as the Evening Falls

One of the things that keeps coming to mind as preparations for our move gather steam is all the music I've listened to all through the time I've been living overseas.  In these, the waning days of my expatriacy (is that a word?  It or some variant ought to be), I find myself searching out the various songs of all these fourteen years or so.  I hope you'll forgive me if over the next few weeks, we occasionally glance at one or two of them; they're an odd mix, I readily admit, and some I admire as much for the specific time and place they recall as for the music itself.

But not this one; I remain pretty crazed about the both song and its singers, "New York City Boy" by Pet Shop Boys.  It came out just a few months after I stopped being one myself (An NYCB, that its, not a PSB), and the memory it carries isn't Manhattan, but rather Accra, the West African capital in which I suddenly found myself, a place almost as mad and entrancing to me as my former home is to the twink who's transported there in the video.  He found Studio 54; I found great late-night jazz bars and local joints that played highlife music by the sea, long lazy days out at one of the beaches, afternoons of lobster kebabs and the terrific ice-cold local Star beer, and my own parties at my little white villa set in a garden full of bougainvillea and papaya trees.

To me this song is tied irretrievably to driving around the crazy streets of Accra, dusty and full of surprises, unpredictable flocks of tiny, hyperactive goats and peddlers selling everything from last month's Vanity Fair to giant forest snails (a local delicacy, albeit one I could never quite get into myself).  It was my first car (in Manhattan, who needs one?), a beat-up old green Jeep with a black hardtop.  For the first few weeks I wondered why sometimes people would duck aside as I pulled up at corners or outside one of the shops made from old shipping containers where I did my grocery shopping.  Only after the dozenth or so time did I finally think to ask someone, and they told me that there were to most people's knowledge only two cars in town that looked like that - and the other one, identical albeit a great deal spiffier, belonged to a particularly deranged cousin of the country's then Leader for Life (who actually, in a step rare for Africa then and now, stepped down a year later, much to everyone's surprise; the cousin, however, continued to be a local menace).  Until they got used to the white guy getting out of the Wrangler, people assumed it was Cousin o'Prez coming to cause trouble.  When we would occasionally pass each other, coming or going somewhere on the Ring Road or in Black Star Square, he would honk and throw me a thumbs-up for no good reason.

And the song that was playing, very likely, was "New York City Boy."  Oddly, it never made me feel nostalgic for the life I had left behind.  Instead, it seemed the perfect soundtrack to the new one I had embarked on, and it still feels that way, fourteen years later.  I won't be a New York City Boy - or any other kind, for that matter, given the years gone by - on our arrival back in the States, but I still relish the little thrill this song gives when it shifts into angel-chorus overdrive.  PSB have it right: the deal is real, and you'll never have a bored day.  One way or another, I don't think I ever have.

No Place Like Home

Oh, lord, where to start?  Well, to paraphrase dear Miss Bette Midler, it looks like I may be a harbinger of news here.  There have been, for a while, you see, rumblings of various sorts.  Early in the new year, they turned into whispers.  A couple of weeks ago, they turned into omens.  Now, it seems, they are in the process of turning into an offer.  To be frank, they have in fact done so.  And I've tentatively said yes.

In short, it would seem there is a possibility - a fairly good one, nearly a sure one - that the Powers What Am back in the home office of Golden Handcuffs Consulting Amalgamated International miss me.  They long for my dulcet tones and perhaps they want a closer look at this ponytail everyone's talking about.  They're funny that way.  Whatever the reason, the upshot of it all is that it may once again be time for me - for us - to take this show on the road, this time all the way back to the good old U.S. of A.

I'm terrified.  And kind of interested.  But mostly terrified.  I've been overseas since the second Clinton administration and have fully been expecting to remain so at least until the waning days of the second Clinton's second administration. Now we're looking, more or less, at being back sometime between Bear Week in Provincetown and Labor Day down the shore.  It's appalling.  Were this all to fall into place, the sheer amount of stuff that would have to be done to get us all settled would daunt anyone; for someone as fond of stillness and inertia as I, the prospect is horrifying.

The good people at GHCAI believe they have found, clever things, a perfectly legit way for Mr. Muscato (darn that DOMA, speaking of Clintons) to join me for the likely duration of the prospective engagement, which is promising, but he remains dubious about many aspects of the emerging plan, not least of the winter, which Egyptians don't much like at all, and rain, which they simply find mystifying (and during which, mostly, they generally stay home - not a practical solution on much of the East Coast for anyone not prone to agoraphobia).  He, of course, would be even more overseas than he is now, and while he's enjoyed his trips to the States, there's a big difference between swanning in and out for summer breaks and having to become a regular at Sam's Club.  And then there's the question of dragging the dogs halfway 'round the globe.

And packing the stuff.  And ridding out the wardrobes. And sorting the papers. And selling lots of things that overlap with the ridiculous amount of paraphernalia that's been sitting in storage waiting for me all these years.  And then, on that end, seeing all those things again and having to sort through them and wondering what to do with it all and asking myself why on earth I kept Aunt Edna's silver-lustre tea set that everyone who's ever clapped eyes on it since the Coolidge administration despises.  And - and I do realize this garners one little sympathy in many, many circles and quite rightly so - what on earth will we do without Mrs. Galapatti da Silva?  Una vita sans les domestiches - impossibile! Oh. Oh. Oy.

If this all seems rather disjointed, darlings, apologies, but I'm genuinely more than a tad flummoxed.  And intrigued.  And (have I mentioned this?) very, very terrified.  But parts of it may be good fun, I suppose.  In some ways, having been out for so long, going back will just be, in a sense, going to a new foreign place.  One, on the plus side, that speaks English, mostly, and mostly has potable water, even though it at the same time is full (if what I read is true) of gun-toting teabaggers, wild-eyed fundamentalists, and Honey Boo Boo-watchers.

Wish us luck.  If nothing else, I will likely not be short of things about which to kvetch write in the coming months...

My Little Pony[tail]

Another famed ponytailer, by illustrator Lisa Zador

Remember my hair?  No reason you should, really, but like it or not it has once more turned into a front-burner issue in what passes for my life.

As you may or may not remember, it's been getting longer.  And longer.  And mostly, I think, that's very good thing, as I it's still reasonably thick, has struck what seems a workable balance between salt and pepper, has a nice natural curl, and isn't receding as much as it really ought to be on a gentleman who is hurtling toward his sixth decade on this green earth (I'm sporting a great deal less forehead, for example, than Nicole Kidman - and I can still frown, for what that's worth).

But it's been nearly a year since I first thought seriously about such a weighty subject, and aside from a quick trim in Provincetown last summer, it's continued to grow. And grow.

And so, I've crossed a follicular Rubicon:  I've started wearing a ponytail.  Not all the time, but mostly on weekends and when I need it out of the way.  Tonight, though, the New Look made its debut at a formal event.  This time of year, you see, when for a very little while the Sandlands are blessedly cool, a great many parties are held outside, which is mostly a joy.   The combination of  perfect temperatures, lovely sunsets over the sea, and a little something pleasant to eat and (most of the time) drink can lend a certain charm to even the dreariest office party.  However, these sundowners are also often accompanied by a fierce breeze, and by the end of one such outing last week, I more or less resembled Bridget Jones the time she went for an incautious ride in a convertible. So, over the weekend, I took the fateful step of upgrading from found rubber bands to hairties bought at the grocery store, brushed the hair back and tied it neatly up, put on my suit, and went to the office party.

It was, I think, rather a success.  Certainly it was from a practical standpoint, for despite near gale force winds, I ended the evening as tidily as I began it.  Those who commented did so favorably, and not all who commented depend on my good opinion for their bread and butter.  it's pulled straight back, but not so tightly as to seem desperate, and the tail itself curls nicely under.  I really think the effect is rather nice - less either the icon seen above or (worse) Jean-Claude Van Damme, and more an eighteenth-century gentleman sort of thing.  I'd like to think it was a shade Banderas-esque, but I'm not that vain (although one person did raise the idea of Russell Crowe, which isn't wholly unpleasing as a comparator).  It's certainly simple, compared to blowing it all out every day, and who doesn't need an extra 20 minutes in the morning?

In any case, I think I'm going to give it a whirl.  What do you think of men with ponytails  (bronytails?)?  Is it aesthetically defensible, or am I fated to look like Karl Lagerfeld or worse? 

Well Done, Sister Suffragette!

What, you may ask, does this imposing lady (and in that hat, is there any question at all that she was, very definitely, a lady?) have to do with Election Day?

Well, O Best Beloveds, she is no less than my great-grandmother, resplendent (and, with the hat, well more than six feet tall) in the second mourning (all black, but no veil) that she wore for the fifty years that followed her precipitous and early widowhood.  The black kid gloves, by the way, lingered on well into my childhood, objects of a kind of family reverence rivaled in my experience only by Lady Ambermere's for Queen Charlotte's mittens.

Left more or less penniless when great grandfather proved no match for a galloping consumption, and with two daughters just barely more than toddlers, she lost little time in self pity.  She took on jobs as they presented themselves (at various points running a theatrical boarding house, shepherding my grandmother into a not altogether unsuccessful run at the Vaudeville stage, keeping books, and selling real estate).  She wound up back in her small Pennsylvania hometown, an enormously respected county tax collector, a position she passed on to grandmother when she, too, found herself widowed in her thirties.

Through it all, she had two passions:  women's rights and travel.  She would work until she'd saved enough to leave her girls at her endlessly tolerant parents' house and take off for parts unknown.  She headed to Alaska at a time when that was a far frontier, as she wanted to see first-hand her church's missionary activities in Sitka, and like the Misses Allen in A Room with a View (clearly on my mind these days) and me, for that matter, she went on to Constantinople.  She marched in suffragette parades on both coasts, and while that sort of thing wasn't really done in small-town Pennsylvania, she devoted her formidable powers of organization to seeing that her friends and neighbors fell into line in support of the Nineteenth Amendment.

In the '60s, when to my parents' horror my sister, off at college, declared herself a feminist, my grandmother gave my mother (who was always, I think a little surprised and perhaps even disappointed not to have found herself an early widow) a rather sharp little lecture, reminding her that it ran in the family, and a good thing, too.

So I think of her on Election Day, and the work that she did.  She died in the early '50s, before the next great wave of agitation for further civil rights, and long before the flowering of all the many ways since in which Americans have echoed her drive to secure the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, most recently in the push for marriage equality.  She was indomitable in her sense of fairness, and I like to think she'd approve.  I vote in her memory and her honor.   Looking at that photo, at her strong-minded expression of mingled resolve and good humor, I'd hardly dare not to.

Mutual Admiration Society

Okay, I admit it:  I'm vain.  Not overwhelmingly, and not all that much, any more, about my personal appearance.  There's only so much to be done, really, as one's sixth decade approaches, without making it the sole focus of your life - I'm tidy and I don't frighten people.  Who needs more?

No, what I'm vain about at the moment (aside from a couple of never-fail recipes, possibly), is this very blog.  I like it when people enjoy it, and I spend perhaps a shade too much time tracking its traffic.  If I had the energy and was more clued in, I would probably try to find ways to really pimp it out.  I'm perfectly aware that there's only so many people interested in a (to be kind, even to myself) untidily eclectic combination of terriers, mutterings about life in Arabia, olde-tyme stars 'n' royalties, and the like, but still.

So I sat up and took notice (at least metaphorically - we have been very lazy hereabouts of late) when I started noticing, recently, a string of visitors from somewhere new.  Quite a number of folks make their way to the Café from wonderful places like The Redundant Variety Hour, Peenee-world, the exotic fever dream that is Norma's Mitten Drinnen, and the Towers of Dolores DeLargo; there's still a surprisingly stream from TJB's sadly neglected Stirred Straight Up; despite pleading endlessly with MJ, I can't keep out the riffraff from Infomaniac; and I practically seem to be Google's go-to site for searchers after Adrian Maulana, Celia Hammond (despite her having graced us only once), and, inevitably (and unsettlingly almost always in all caps) MARISA BERENSON NUDE.  But this was something I'd not seen before.

So, I went with interest over to Male Pattern Boldness, and darlings, I was enchanted.  The site is a cornucopia of devotion to every conceivable aspect of the very kind of glamour I find most delightful, and its creator, Petter Lappin, is an acute, funny, and very charming host.  He is simultaneously deeply erudite and boundlessly enthusiastic about things like how best to accessorize '40s beachwear, or how to carry off tricky period accessories like snoods and stoles.  He recounts his adventures in creating from vintage patterns a staggering array of period costumes, and he brings into it all his own joy in what is clearly a deeply rewarding hobby as a seamster and style maven.  I'm deeply flattered that he's added l'il old me to his blogroll, and I'm pleased to see all new Gentle Readers coming this way.

So check it out.  Go.  Enjoy.

But do come back - and if you like what you find, tell your friends!

26 Across: Birthday Boy

Mr. Shortz, captured in a highly appropriate medium

Here's something I don't think I've ever mentioned here:  I have a thing for The New York Times crossword puzzle. 

One of my earliest memories is of Mother Muscato (of sainted, mostly, memory) at the kitchen table on a Sunday morning, flanked by ashtray and coffee cup, working away - alternately gleefully and with enormous angst - at the Sunday puzzle.  One of her proudest boasts was that she generally could do both the puzzle and the accompanying acrostic, diagramless, or other alternate puzzle before we left for church.  Granted, some Sundays that meant we didn't get there 'til halfway through the sermon, but those Sundays were fairly rare. 

Mondays were for children - she started me down the garden path at about six - and it generally wasn't until Thursday that she'd have to resort to Bartlett's, Webster's, or any one of the other authorities we all relied on in those neolithically information-deprived days.  When in a real bind - over a quip that wasn't falling into place, or a truly impossible set of rhebus answers - she'd either make for the phone* and ring up either her mother, who didn't generally get up as early as she but was bound to be more or less polite, or she'd pace the floor until she thought she could get away with calling her childhood friend across town, Aunt Susan (one of those aunts who isn't blood family, but all the more beloved for it).  "Your Aunt Susan is my dearest friend," she'd growl, "but I don't understand how a grown woman can sleep until 8:00 a.m. every day," she for whom that hour was practically mid-day (and later on all too often cocktail hour, but that's another story altogether).  In conference with one or the other she'd struggle toward triumph, although of course she was always far more gratified when our phone would ring, with one of the two calling to get her help instead.  "That?  I'm not even sure I still have this morning's paper..." she'd murmur as early as 11:30, as if it were weeks ago.

The crossworld puzzle's editors loomed larger in our household than any of the Times's reporters - first, in earliest memory, Margaret Farrar, a towering figure who more or less overshadowed (Victoria to his Edward VII) her successor, the comparatively short-running Will Weng, and then for a very long time Eugene T. Maleska, with whom Mother M. carried on an occasional and not entirely one-sided correspondence.  When, in 1993, he was replaced by the unknown quantity of Will Shortz, she was dubious.  I rather liked him, though, and in time a combination of the excellence of his puzzles ("That's practically a Maleska!") and his on-air banter with NPR's Liane Hanson on Weekend Edition Sunday brought her around.  The last time I saw her, she had a crossword puzzle on her lap, and I knew it was all over bar the shouting when Father M. reported on the telephone , truly concerned even in the face of months of decline for the very first time, that she had decided that morning to skip the puzzle (it was, in fact, a matter of only a day).

I stopped doing the puzzle for a long time, but technology does have its benefits, and there is an excellent iPad app to which I've become devoted.  I'm a piker next to Mother, but I'm getting better at it again.  I finished today's in almost church-making time (not, in fact, a destination, not least because today is a working day in the Sandlands), and with minimal reliance on the 21st century Bartletts et al that is Google.

In any case, all of this is a very roundabout way of wishing Will Shortz a very happy "SUIT, OF A SORT," or "NATAL ANNIVERSARY," or however it might pop up as 14 Down.  He seems a most engaging person, dapper in a puzzlemaster sort of way, with, according to his NPR bio, "a Tudor-style house filled with books and Arts and Crafts furniture" outside New York.  And he's a confirmed bachelor.  In the immortal words of Mr. Nathan Lane, you do the math.  Were I not so happily married, I might have to 42 Across:  Set one's cap (MAKE A PLAY FOR)...

* We had one, hanging on the wall in the short corridor that separated the kitchen from the grandeur of the living room. That's the kind of thing that young people today simply can't fathom.  I now have an assistant at the office, a charming and well-educated young person, who has never dialled a telephone.

The Whole Nine Yards

Nine.  Nine ladies dancing.  Cat o' nine tails.  Dressed to the nines.  Nine tailors, nine rings, and nine lives.  An anniversary celebrated with pottery (in the U.S.) and copper (in the UK), as well as with bird of paradise flowers (regardless of location).

And, in case you hadn't guessed, nine years to the day that Mr. Muscato and I met up.  We had both of us had rather varied lives to that point, and we mutually confessed a few years ago that our primary reaction at the time was something along the lines of, "Well, finally.  Taken you long enough.  Come along now, you, and don't dawdle."

Bernhardt, Nazimova, Garbo, and Me...

Yes, kids, I'm a Mucha kind of mood these days, and sadly it's not because of his sinuously fabulous Art Nouveau lines, nor even because of his brilliant evocation of the glamour of the Divine Sarah.

No, it's more of a pulmonary kind of affinity, if not with the poster-maker, than with his subject. I'm coughing, you see, on an epic, houseshaking, rib-aching, deeply unpleasant scale.  Fortunately - for the moment, at any rate - the bustlingly efficient folks down at the clinic have ruled out consumption, but as a runner-up, acute bronchitis is no prize.  They equally unflappably assure me that the dizzying range of meds they've given me will do the trick in a day or so, but I remain unconvinced.

If only the tailor made housecalls, I'd have him over to run up a little white number along the lines of the above.  So practical for the invalid, no?

All of this is especially annoying, on top of everything else, as our annual summer pilgrimage is rapidly approaching and there are any number of tiresome things that need to be done before we board that blessed airplane out of the summertime Sandlands.  For the moment, though, all that has to be postponed (although very definitely the flight will not be, not if I'm to save my sanity, not to mention Mr. Muscato's) in lieu of sitting about the house draped in terriers, who have rapidly learned not to be too alarmed by the hacking explosions that punctuate my rewatching of Margaret Rutherford movies on YouTube.

I suppose I should sit down and ask myself WWSD (What Would Sarah Do?), although I suspect that as the answer would likely have involved lynxes and absinthe, it may not be too practical a guide in these drab days...

Things Are Just Where They Should Be, Tonight...

Have I ever mentioned that I'm a total Cabaret Queen?  I'm going to guess that that's not a total surprise.  I just believe that honest songs, sung simply, can communicate more clearly, more tellingly, more directly than anything I know...

So anyway, this evening, I had one of those moments, one of those things that mark out, somehow, the glory and splendor and weirdness of our lives.  Nothing special, really - just driving home, after yet another office party (the season is winding down, and soon we'll be done with those, blessedly, at least until September or so).  So maybe, yes, I'd had a glass or two (something we're really not supposed to do, in these parts that take a very dim view of Demon Rum), and yes, maybe I'm just a little tired and ready for vacation (coming soon, and more of that anon).  Whatever; I think it was a gift.

Just one of those realizations, really, as I pulled around the corner, in my silly little car (have I ever talked about my Rolling Midlife Crisis?  Perhaps not.  It's red, and convertible, and very inexcusable, but kind of fun), and down our street.  One of those thoughts that strike one, now and then:  how inexpressibly odd and unpredictable and, more than anything, worth treasuring, this life is.  It all came to me, suddenly: how strange, to be living here in the middle of Arabia Felix, accompanied against all odds by someone who thinks, for reasons I simply cannot fathom, the world of me, not to mention two (two!) mad terriers, and living in a large white house with a garden full of bougainvillea and hibiscus (me from a cold small town in Pennsylvania, where we waited each year for a tulip or two and a few stunted roses in the garden), and...

In any case, suddenly, cabaret seemed the only thing that might explain this sudden rush of something, half sentimental, half bittersweet.  I first heard this song sung by the marvelous Miss Andrea Marcovicci, but since she's unavailable on YouTube, I do think this gentleman, Mr. Eric Michael Gillett, does a very creditable job.  If you've ever wondered, actually, what I myself might be like on stage, had I not abandoned such things early on in the face, ineluctable, of No Talent At All, he's not far off (except talented), although I think I'd eschew the sweater, and I'm not sure I'd in the best of circumstances have quite such a firm grasp on staying on key.

"there's a key on the table/such a beautiful sight/as I hoped that it would be..."

And the dogs come rushing down the stairs, and from upstairs I hear, "Where have you been?" And... things do really turn out differently than one ever imagined - but sometimes, so much better.  As the dear Pet Shop Boys once asked, in a very different vein, what have I done?  Myself, I can't imagine, but I do, now and then, count my blessings, every one.

Decoration Day

This is a holiday that always makes me just a little blue.  If you've read Ask the Cool Cookie's excellent meditation on the subject, you'll more or less know why. 

I wonder, from all these thousands of miles away, if anyone is looking after the little knot of graves I wrote about a few years ago, clustered there on their hillside looking out toward the Lake.  I imagine not, as none of us live anywhere near there, now, and like Cookie, I expect I'm about the only one left likely to think of such a thing, even on Memorial Day.

Once upon a time, of course, this was a real holiday, not (or at least not only) an excuse for picnics, long weekends, and blowout sales.  It meant not just the beginning of summer, but also the first of the year's three ritual calls on the, as it were, extended family, those gone before.  The other visits, of course, were Labor Day, for a pre-autumn tidy, and finally Veteran's Day, to make sure things were set for another long, cold winter.

First, we - my mother and I - would get up early, or rather earlier than than usual (Mother Muscato being very much a morning person) and go to the garden center, for geraniums.  Then she'd tool her ginormous Gran Torino around town, picking up first Grandmother Muscato, then Great Aunt Edna, and then, most years, our second cousin Louise whose only living relatives we were.  Then it was up the hill to the cemetery, and the process reversed itself, with Louise dropped near her family just by the main gate, and Aunt Edna near hers in the shadow of one of the vast Victorian mausoleums (mausolea?) in the middle, and then finally the first of our two stops, to take care of Grandmother Muscato's people over by the far side (a small blue cottage across the street being a handy landmark; when I was last there, in 2007 or so, it still was). 

With Grandfather, Aunt-Marie-Who-You-Never-Knew, She-Married-Poorly-and-Died-Young, and Great Grandmother taken care of, we'd go up the hill to Father Muscato's side's plot, in those days nearly unoccupied except for a maiden aunt and a child or two.  Earlier on, Edna and Louise would already have made their way there on foot (later on, when they found the hill more daunting, we'd pick them up again en route) and we'd tidy up this largest and most impressive of the plots, its single monolith with the family name safeguarding the empty spaces.  One got the sense that Edna and Louise, mother's side, always felt vaguely out of place, obliged to say something nice about the view, but not much more.  Mother was unsentimental about Father's family, and her tidying was faster here than down below, the geraniums less carefully placed and the shrubs clipped more hurriedly.  Afterward, we'd go for lunch at the Club, sitting in the less formal of its two dining rooms in recognition of our gardening clothes.

Now, these forty years or so later, I'm the only one of that Gran Torino-load left, and the only one not tidily tucked in there in that green and pleasant cemetery.  Grandmother (who was born, I just realized, the year of the last Diamond Jubilee for an English queen), Edna, and Louise were all girls together not too far off from the time of the Pickfordesque girl above.  Grandmother, in fact, had once upon a time attended an encampment of the Grand Army of the Republic with her own Grandfather, who was at Antietam.  Somewhere (unless its been discarded by the Evil Stepmother who has somehow ended up in custody of so many family things), there is a charming photograph of her, 'round about 1908, perched in her starched, frilled dress and big round hat on her Grandfather's knee, surrounded by a circle of grizzled veterans.  Mother was a Depression child and a Second War bride, but now she's up there as well, up on the hill with the side of the family whose graves she spent all those years short-shrifting.

I always assumed I would go and join them there, come the time, but now that seems unreal, unlikely.  The family is scattered, quarrelsome, preoccupied with our very different lives in very different places.  I can't even get Mr. Muscato into the U.S. for more than a visit alive, let alone (very) permanently otherwise, and he's significantly less enamored of the family even than Mother at her most acerbic.  Worrying about what one wears to lunch (especially when what one is wearing is a tweed suit or, if you're Louise and slightly daring, a pantsuit) seems as antediluvian as, well, encampments of the Grand Army. 

On Memorial Day, it's good to spend a moment considering all of this, even in such a muddled and inconclusive way.  Summer's coming, after all, and we might not think of them again 'til fall...

Surprise!

I hate surprises.  Perhaps it was a childhood that veered between the idyllic and the volatile, with not quite enough in between.  Perhaps it's just that I'm a dedicated, unregenerate, evil control freak.  Whatever.  It's the just the way it is.

Still, we had a surprise party last night, and by that I mean that two weeks ago, Mr. Muscato sat me down and told me he was having a party for my birthday, that he'd organized it to start while I was off at yet another office-sponsored cocktail extravaganze, that this was the caterer's menu and that that was the guestlist, and would I please find a way to not come home until I received a missed call at about 7:30 p.m., and for God sake's try and look surprised.

Which I did, in a far more convincing way than any of the stiffs that Philips hired as party-guest record-cover extras (and there's a narrow corner of the show-business, no?) for the LP above.   It all came off quite well, and while I still loathe being surprised, my cold heart was really rather touched by the glee that so many of the guests (a great many of whom had come on from the earlier, business fête) enjoyed at having "fooled" me for the past week.  Now, of course, I have to go back to work tomorrow and undoubtedly spend a great deal of time congratulating them ("boy, you really did get me, didn't you?") on their cleverness.

The rest of the time I'll have to spend planning my revenge on Mr. Muscato.  Oh, he told me about the party, yes - but he didn't run either the flowers or the music by me in advance.  Have I mentioned that I might, just might, have a few teeny-tiny hospitality-related control issues?

Hair Today

As things stand: artist's impression

Maybe it's just the influence of that last post, but I need to talk to you about my hair. I think it's getting out of control.

You see, for the past year or so, as part of the overall, ongoing effort to feel Less Appalling about every single aspect of life, I've been growing it out. I figured what the hell, I'm heading toward fifty, I'm for various reasons kind of unassailable professionally, and most importantly, I've still (a centimeter or so of forehead excepted) got the stuff. So off we went.

In this part of the world, with the exception of the tighter-up Brits and Yanks who frequently populate the ranks of middle-upper management, it's actually not that big a deal. Lots of Arab men, especially those from the Gulf, have Big Hair, even if it's usually covered up with traditional headgear. This is also kind of a facial-hair-mandatory setting as well, so I've lost all reserve in that direction as well. The gentleman above will give you an idea, if you're willing to age him up, flesh him out, and throw a heaping helping of salt into that pepper.

And it's really pretty easy - the maintenance isn't all that much worse than keeping a short cut tidy, although because it tends toward the riotously curly, I've gotten cosier with a blowdryer than I've been in several decades (we didn't have one actually; I gave it a try last summer because dear Boudi came to us with one - apparently his previous people liked him with a Farrah 'do).

On a bad day...

It's currently of a length somewhere between Slavic Baritone and mid-career Mary Astor (albeit with a fair bit more at the back). Last December, without warning, a demon stylist administered something I only later through diligent Googling discovered was a Brazilian Blowout (which is a whole lot less porny than it sounds, even when given to one by a lithe Lebanese hairdresser), and so for a couple of months it was straight (unlike the hairdresser) and limp (a greater resemblance). In fact, for one brief, shining night, I achieved - albeit 35 years after the fact - the state of grace I had once upon a time so longed for: Perfect David Cassidy Hair.

Now, though, I'm afraid the Blowout has blown and it's back to curls and a certain, shameful amount of frizz, even with diligent back-combing. As a result of the recent round of socializing (one evening of which, you may recall, ended in the Great Tooth Crisis of '12), I discovered this morning that I've turned up in one of the social columns that still grace local publications. There, staring out at me from the glossy page, was a distinctly rounder, older, and more generally PaulaDeenische sort of person than I think of myself, with that kind of dazed "must you?" look one gets when faced by a strange camera. Even so: cool hair, bro.

So I really, really like having it longer, both because it annoys so many people who can do nothing about it, and because, I suppose, it recalls days of vanished youth. Like that of dear Jo March, back at the time of life when appearances matter so very, very much, my hair was my one claim to real good looks, and it took me aback, as the tendrils started to wind collarward last June, how much I'd missed it. Of course, back then it was also (often all at once) teased, sprayed, feathered, gelled (but never, I can at least attest, Jheri-ed), waxed, and more often than not at least two unnatural colors. It's kind of restful, comparatively, to have it just be longer.

A compromise?

I'm wondering if perhaps Stock Photo Daddy here isn't a possible way forward. The resemblance is actually rather strong, although his brows are a little more roguish than mine, and I'm not sure (especially given the evidence in this week's going-out mag) my Gaze of Quiet Self Confidence is quite as assured.

So what do you think? Do I continue down the road of further growth, heading toward Anglo-Fro territory, the possibility of Olde Boho Pony Tail, or worse? Do I just get over my cheap self, cut it all off, and return to Corporate Clean Cut? Or do I find some soft-focus rocks and an Indigo Land's End Button Tee, go back to Blowout Boy for a trim, and see how it all works out?

So...

Geez. You go away for what, a year, year and and a half? Things really fall apart.

As did I, for a little while. I got sick, and then I got better, and through it all I stayed insanely busy trying to preserve the illusion that I'm fine, perfectly fine. Which I wasn't, of course, but what with having a new job in a new country, not to mention a heaping helping of debts and obligations, one tries to keep up. None of which is terribly amusing.

In any case, on the off chance that anyone's still paying attention, here we are. For the record: Mr. Muscato is still a saint, Koko is still a scamp, and we've even added a new terrier to all our lives, more of whom, perhaps, anon. We've learned to like, well enough, the life we're leading, and we're already planning Plan B.

And through it all, I've missed being here. All sorts of things good and bad have happened out in the Great Wide World, and I've missed dishing it all. Living, as I did for too long, in a kind of life-wide Writer's Block, I've missed out on so much. And now it's time to try and see if one can't, like Mrs. Levi, come out of one's personal haze - to the lights, if not of 14th Street, at least of this place I so enjoyed creating, once upon a time that feels longer ago than it really is.

In due time, I suppose, explanations and apologies as necessary. Today, I'm going to hit "publish" and see what happens. It's a little scary, truth to tell. But I'm learning, relearning really, as one must, that scary can be good. Here goes.

(Re)Born on the Fourth of July

Well. So where were we? What? What do you mean, "where have you been?" Oh, very well, if you insist on explanations, here's the deal, or at least as much of it as I can cope with at the moment.

First things first: we're all well - Mr. Muscato, Koko, and me. It's been something of a wild ride over the last few months, a whirlwind of surprises, difficult decisions, unexpected opportunities, enormous annoyances, horrid misbehavior from startling corners, the occasional complete nervous collapse, a shade too many doctors and lawyers, endings, and, now, beginnings. It all required a good long rest, which I have to say we've been enjoying tremendously.

Now that I'm catching up, at last, I can't tell you how much all the interest, concern, and nagging from friends and Gentle Readers over recent months has meant; I only wish I'd had the energy not simply to disappear for a while, and I hope, very much, that forgiveness will reign for the long and enigmatic silence.

So, here's what's up, more or less, in no particular order.

Alas, the Villa Muscato is no more. One of the first signs, in fact, that the universe - ours, at least - was falling out of alignment was the unwelcome news that our longsuffering landlord had at last awakened to the fact that he was being woefully underpaid and was exercising his option to retake his little slice of heaven, ostensibly for a family member.

In discussing domestic options, it became clear that my betters at VeryDull International Consulting (a wholly owned subsidiary of Gilded Cage Career Choices, LLC) were not encouraging about the prospect of a new long lease. "I wouldn't," said my Fearless Leader in the Home Office, "count on more than six months, really..."

At that point, much becomes mercifully unclear even in such recent memory.

Lights up, then, on a sunny morning some six weeks later, in which after much backing-and-forthing, suggestions, proposals, and just the slightest hint of threats in several directions, our way forward became clear(er). In short order, we were dealing, badly, with the appalling prospect of packing, closing accounts, zeroing out obligations business, fiduciary, and social, and generally steeling ourselves to entirely unendurable levels of activity, change, and general stress and strain.

The first wrench was saying adieu to Ermilia, our stalwart domestiche, who is now brightening the lives of a charming expat family who have taken on the formidable bureaucracy currently required to secure the presence in one's life of what Grandmother Muscato referred to as Good Help. Even the temporary attentions of her silent and eccentric chum, the ever-reliable Flordeliza, were only a pale substitute for our lamented factotum.

But then, at last and with a curious mix of relief and melancholy, Mr. Muscato and I bade farewell to the peculiar little Sultanate in which we'd made our lives for the past six years. I suppose I will have more thoughts as time passes on the place we've called home, but for the moment, suffice it to say that we don't miss the driving, and it's wonderful not to feel guilty wearing shorts.

And ever since we've been recuperating, most recently for an extended stay in one of America's loveliest, most relaxing, and most invigorating (a seeming contradiction, I know; but it's not) seaside villages, one that will I suspect be familiar to at least a few of you from the snap above. We've slept, we've luxuriated in the sun and sea, we've gorged on lobster in all forms, we've regaled friends and family with tales of our injustices and triumphs, we've shopped furiously for perfectly useless bibelots, we've made our way through a fair amount of Champagne, and now...

We're preparing, with a certain amount of mixed trepidation and excitement (and a great deal of procrastination and inertia), for the next Great Changes.

Soon, therefore, we will once again be expatriates. We've found ourselves, long distance, yet another commodious-looking villa not too far from the sea. We will shortly be reunited with our beloved Koko, who has spent his long summer leave in the devoted care of friends and who has been sorely missed. We will be facing all sorts of new hurdles and opportunities, from securing basic services in a place almost as noted for bureaucracy as the dear Sultanate to securing a (pale, but with luck adequate) Ermilia-replacement to finding a decently amusing place to spend a Thursday evening.

It all raises the question, I have to say, of what to do with the Café. The name, of course, will no longer be entirely accurate, nor, for that matter, will my own nom de blog. We shall have to see, as things go along, and I hope you will be as patient with me as I figure these things out as you all have been while I went, for a while, underground.

In the meantime, a lovely Independence Day to all of you who care for such things; we'll be celebrating in our own quiet way, before shortly setting off for our own New World. I hope you're all as well, or at least as content, as, in the end, it's turned we have managed to be.

Freeze Tag

I have to admit that the prospect of having been tagged (see horrid logo, left) has very nearly stopped me in my tracks, given that it presented the appalling prospect of having to display this image and then talk about myself.

Well, we've been over this ground before, but Peenee (predictably, what with being evil incarnate and all) showed no mercy, and he was even joined in his devil's work by the 'til now comparatively benign Felix.

So, it seems I've been double-tagged, which - as with so much in life - turns out to be not nearly the naughty romp it sounds like it ought to be. herewith, even so, my turn at the Kreativ Blogger Meme Award, or whatever it's called.

1. Thank the person who nominated you for this award.

Thank you, Peenee and Felix. And damn your eyes, while we're at it.

2. Copy the logo and place it on your blog.

Done, over my better judgment.

3. Link to the person who nominated you for this award.

See 2, above.

4. Name 7 things about yourself that people might find interesting.

...And this is where it gets appalling. I've not been nearly as sharing (to put it kindly) as some people (looking at Peenee), but having been writing about myself in drips and drabs for the past year and a half, it's hard to come up with too much that's terribly fresh. I think I'll just free associate for a bit and hope for the best:

(1) My Arabic has been improving of late, to the point that at times I will pretend to understand less than I do, mostly so I can listen to Mr. Muscato chat with friends while they think I won't get it all. Not that he's ever really come out with anything amazingly indiscreet (although the friends occasionally do, mostly on the Appalling Conspiracy Theory front), but I've kind of got to like being the silent one when we're out with the boys.

(2) I worry that we've gotten too comfortable living in a comparatively quiet and provincial place, and that when and if the opportunity arises, we'll end up being boring country mice anywhere slightly more happening.


(3) The most amusing Big Lady I ever got to work with, hands down: Tyne Daly. Smart, funny, foul-mouthed, and amazingly talented. She can sing an adagio version of "There's No Business Like Show Business" that will, as she herself has said, make strong men weep (never thought about it as a slow song? Believe me, it works - that's a lyric that can be sung sad). She's the real deal. That said, she's not the one I loved the most. But that's another story.

(4) I have been mugged or assaulted five times - twice with a gun - and been burgled twice (once with arson for that extra frisson). Yet the most that any of the idiot failed criminals ever got off me was $5, a ring with a cracked amethyst, and a small bowlful of change and subway tokens (leaving contemptuously behind the small bowl itself, a rather good piece of Georgian sterling courtesy of Grandmother Muscato). The fire, admittedly, got a good deal more, but that hardly benefited the perp.

(5) On a brighter note, I have never in more than twenty years of at times essentially continuous travel had a moment's (knock wood) difficulty, not anywhere from Tokyo to Ouagadougou, despite having now and then been, to be kind, a fairly Easy Mark. Strangers have benevolently put me in taxis and sent me back to the occasional hotel; I've found myself by happenstance in neighborhoods neither accustomed nor welcoming to new faces; small coups, even, have broken out nearby - but to date I've sailed serenely through. Here's to twenty years more...


(6) I may not be freakishly double-jointed like some people, but my first ballet teacher (a small and ill-tempered Russian woman) declared with satisfaction on first looking me up and down that I possessed the best natural turnout she had ever seen in a boy. Sadly, that forever after remained my principal terpsichoric distinction, and it only gets one so far, but it did serve as her principal, if steadily less encouraging, talking point about me for the next five years.

(7) 2010 promises to be a year of changes that may or may not provide the chance to revisit some - I profoundly hope not all - of these issues. Watch this space.

5. Nominate 7 Kreativ Bloggers and post links to the 7 blogs you nominate.

But this is where I reap the benefit of being so terribly late in accepting my tag - I truly think this is one meme that has run its course and needn't be inflicted on anyone further. At least until somebody comes up with a better logo.