I slept till 9 a.m. Christmas morning. We drank coffee, read the paper, and got a phone call from Derek, who said he and Erin had been awake since 6 something, so Nick could open his presents. Oh, yes, I know that drill. We didn't even think to open presents till about 11. Since we're not highly driven to buy, buy, buy! at Christmas, Liberto received the clothes I'd gotten him, I re-opened my Flip Video (which I had wrapped), and Paul said he was thrilled with the globe and didn't want anything else. According to him, "I have everything I want." Liberto's sisters sent a huge box of gifts for us. Gina was in the states visiting Grelia last month, and they went shopping on our behalf. They have always been generous to a fault. I know Grelia's husband was laid off this year, and her hours were also cut back. He's since landed another job, but surely they must be tight because of the ripple effect of a few weeks or months without the usual income. Yet Grelia has always sent presents, no matter how hard times have been. It's that Latina Thing.
After a nice meal, we went to see Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which was awesome. The theme, of course, is about time, love, and loss. Whether one goes forward in aging or backwards in aging, life inevitably brings love and loss. Benjamin Button is born an old man. His mother dies in childbirth and he is abandoned by his father, who drops him off on the doorstep of a nursing home, where one of the attendants takes him in and raises him. He fits in perfectly with the elderly residents because he looks like an old man and has all the ailments of advanced age even though he is still a child. At the home, the older people begin to die off, but of course there are always new elderly residents to take their places, reinforcing the point that everyone is taking the same journey towards God's waiting room. But Benjamin de-ages, and somewhere in the middle, his life intersects with a woman who is aging normally. His first attempt to be with her does not work out because the timing is off; she is too young, giddy and full of herself. Later, she is too self-absorbed with pity about an accident which has damaged her ballet legs. But suddenly, when the timing is right, there is a window of a few years when they mesh well; they are the same "age." Then the timing goes off-kilter again, when his increasing youthfulness and her increased maturity throw the relationship off. He leaves to sow his very first wild oats---after all, he's never been young before. And she, as a mature woman, has a child to raise and responsibilities to keep. Eventually, Benjamin becomes a child, a cantankerous, disobedient, troublesome one. His behavior is similar to that of an elderly person with Alzheimers whose true personality has been eclipsed by the disease. Then he's a baby, with no consciousness. To steal a quote from the original short story, "Then it was all dark, and his white crib and the dim faces that moved above him, and the warm sweet aroma of the milk, faded out altogether from his mind." Of course, the movie was not entirely faithful to the short story; for example, the timeline was pushed up to the 20th century from the 19th, but the concept was the same, and the movie conveyed the messages well.
Bradd Pitt said on Oprah the other day that he considered New Orleans to be one of the important characters of the movie. That was true. The sense of New Orleans was strong.
On to another subject, I started and am halfway through a hilarious novel called Getting Rid of Matthew. A thirty-something single woman has been having an affair with her boss, a married man, for four years and has nagged him continously to leave his wife. Imagine her surprise when he arrives at her flat one night with his suitcases and announces that he has left his wife and is moving in with her! Suddenly, he seems far less attractive at close range, in a small, crowded flat. She discovers that he snores, he dyes his hair, he has irritating mannerisms. And he's so old! But now she's stuck with him! Now her mission is to find a way to get make him move out because she realizes she doesn't love him. It's a laugh-out-loud page-turner, loaded with Britishly wry wit.
Today, the 26th, is my parents' wedding anniversary. If they had lived, they would have been married 61 years. Not too many people live long enough to have a 61st anniversary. I often wonder, if my mother had lived longer, would they have remained married for another 17 years? I suspect yes. Although times had changed for women during the decade my mother died (1972), I have trouble picturing her leaving my father and striking out on her own. Of course, in those days before no-fault divorce swept the country, if a couple divorced, the man had to pay alimony, so the financial part wouldn't have been a problem. But because she was a troubled soul, I somehow can't imagine her living alone and creating a new life. Diana and I have talked about this, and she has the opposite perspective. She imagines our mother breaking away from our father and really thriving on her own. Part of this is because Diana sees our mother's problems as stemming from my father. If he were removed from the picture, then she would have blossomed. At least that's Diana's vision. We'll never know.
Well, tomorrow is our 23rd anniversary. Today, Liberto said sentimentally, "Remember 24 years ago today?" I said, "Do you, by chance, mean 23 years ago?" He gulped and hemmed and hawed. "Ah yes, 23 years." I guess it only seems longer to him. What I do remember is how frightening our situation was in December of 1985. I was still in my doctoral program at LSU, earning a Teaching Assistant's salary of next to nothing, and was preparing to go onto the job market as an ABD, All But Dissertation. I couldn't wait around LSU finishing my dissertation because we were so destitute. We needed an income! Liberto was still working on his undergraduate degree at LSU and was delivering pizzas on the side to help make ends meet. It was not a pretty picture, quite frankly. He agrees. All these concerns were weighing heavily on our minds the night before we got hitched in Pasadena, California, in 1985.
One year later, I was employed full-time at Francis Marion in SC, (having delivered Paul two weeks before the fall semester started) while Liberto continued his courses at a nearby college, which he'd transferred his credits to. He also worked nights at Piece Goods, a fabric store. We were still in tough shape financially, but hope was on the horizon. At least I had a real job, and at least he was close to graduation. Five years later, I was a tenure track assistant professor at Georgia Southern, and my dissertation was completed although I still needed to do the defense in the spring of '91. Liberto had finished his degree, had gained some real-job engineering experience in SC (for slave wages but he learned a lot), and had just been hired by the City of Savannah as an engineering aide. He also became a full-fledged US citizen in 1990. We'd purchased our first house on Nicholson Circle. Ten years later, twenty years later, 23 years later...the outcome is better than I would have imagined in 1985.
Tomorrow, cousins Jean and John will be here to join us in a toast.
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