Everything that you’ve heard is true.
My father took his own life this summer. A couple of months later I went home to lay him to rest among family (or close enough) I hadn’t seen in fifteen years. A few days later I came home and turned thirty. My fall–my winter, really–has pretty much been about those things, even when it wasn’t.
It’s snowing in Saint Germain; it has been on and off for over a week. Somehow bad weather means it’s the season for visitors–maybe just because the weather is so rarely nice–so we’ve revisited most of our favorite restaurants, and on the other nights Nick has been confit-ing as if his life depended on it. Our apartment is full of steam and smells and fat, happy dogs.
I don’t cook lately, myself. At least, I don’t cook well. I spend half my time revising my book, and the rest leaning hard on the excellent support system I’ve always loved having, but didn’t expect to ever use this way.
Nick convinced me to run in the woods this morning, although the snow triggers a deep-seated hibernation instinct that I can’t really believe he doesn’t share. During the first half of his lobbying he didn’t even encourage me to get out of bed, which I later realized was so that I wouldn’t put on my glasses and see the blizzard. Not that it wasn’t enough of an uphill battle: I was so stubborn that he offered to drive us to the woods. Sadly, he reneged on that offer as soon as I accepted it. So we crunched to the forest, ran around a bit, threw snowballs for the dogs, crunched home.
On the way back we ran into a man I’ve become friendly with, although you wouldn’t know it at first. When he saw us coming he immediately crossed to the other side of the street, the way he did for the first few months whenever we encountered each other. I’d assumed that one of his two Lab-esque dogs was mean, but it turned out that the whole time, he’d been afraid of the beagle.
Seriously. The beagle who, while just standing around, will sometimes fall down for no reason at all.
Anyway, I waved, and he went straight from grouchy and hostile to friendly and warm; I think Nick got social whiplash. But who could blame the guy? He was just back from two weeks in India, and trudging through the driving snow. “I’m not thinking straight yet,” he admitted sheepishly, trying to hold his cigarette and two dogs without accidentally mixing the two. It gets harder once the dogs spot Juliette; she’s the living, canine version of catnip.
“Took his own life” is the expression of a friend of my father’s. Doesn’t it sound…bloodless? Almost like the reasonable, well-considered act that anyone might be on anyone’s table at one point or another. The sort of thing you can talk about in polite circles. I kind of hate it.
On the subject of expressions, though, my new favorite is one that Nick has apparently absorbed. I heard him say it once, and although I try not to get too involved in his French language development, I had to tell him what had happened so that he would never do it again.
Naturally, he did. I think it’s stuck.
When describing what his company makes, he tries to translate where stents go in the body. He mispronounces one word, then guesses at another, and winds up saying, “It’s for the monkey’s dishwasher.” Once is a fluke, but twice? Now that it’s twice, I’m not sure he’ll be able to shake it. I think I need to learn “stent” so that I can just jump in and cut him off.
But as soon as my current book draft is done, I’ll be switching right over to the Japanese Rosetta Stone disks that one of our visitors brought me, so the language part of my brain will have more than enough to do.
“You’ve just got your whole Christmas break planned out, don’t you?” Nick asked, probably relieved that I’m not playing any more morbid word games.
I do. You should, too. ‘Tis the season; spread the love.