I had an odd relation to this novel. In the beginning I liked it more than I did when I’ve tried to read it before. Then I thought it stupid. Then the character Sam Weller appeared and I kept reading just to see what he would say next. Then the narrative got tiresome. I took a break and read a spy novel. The most I can say about the last 200 pages is that I touched every one of them once. And I read all the footnotes. In some cases they were more interesting than the text.

The Pickwick Papers is the book that made Dickens’ name. Serialized over the course of 18 months, it was wildly popular. But the 19th century was a different time. Today the characters come across like a bunch of arrested twelve year old boys in gaiters and waistcoats. If they had actually been twelve year old boys in gaiters and waistcoats, they might have been endearing, and certainly would have been funnier. Mr. Pickwick is a man in his 60s who forms a little club of his friends—all of independent means—to travel around southeast England, have adventures, and record them. Guileless, they get into various scrapes usually on account of their naïveté about women and the ways of the world.

The scrape that carries the plot along is the one which also gives the world Sam Weller. Here is an early conversation with a hotel guest while cleaning boots in the yard of the hostelry where he is employed:

Pretty busy, eh?” said the little man

“Oh werry well, Sir,” replied Sam. “We shan’t be bankrupts and we shan’t make our fort’ns. We eat our biled muttons without capers and don’t care for horse-radish ven ve can get beef.”

“Ah,” said the little man. “You’re a wag, a’nt you?”

“My eldest brother was troubled with that complaint,” Sam said. “It may be catching—I used to sleep with him.”

“This is a curious house of yours,” said the little man, looking round him.

“If you’d a sent word you was a-coming, we’d a ha’ it repaired.”

When Mr. Pickwick meets the young cockney man, he is impressed and amused, and wants Sam as his valet. Mr. Pickwick and his friends can’t say anything without making a formal discursive of at least three paragraphs accompanied by hand gestures. But here is the hiring of Sam Weller:

“I have half made up my mind to engage you myself.”

“Have you, though?” said Sam.

Mr. Pickwick nodded in the affirmative.

“Wages?” inquired Sam.

“Twelve pounds a year,” replied Mr. Pickwick

“Clothes?”

“Two suits.”

“Work?”

“To attend upon me, and travel about with me and these gentlemen here.”

In discussing Sam’s lodging with his landlady, Mr. Pickwick begins by telling her he has something important to discuss with her, sends her little boy out of the room and begins thus: “Do you think it’s a much greater expense to keep two people as to keep one?” After a series of ambiguous exchanges Mrs. Bardell decides Mr. Pickwick has proposed marriage and she accepts. Mr. Pickwick is oblivious to what has happened until 300 pages later when Mrs. Bardell sues him for breach of promise.

Another couple hundred pages later is the trial in which the court finds for the plaintiff. Rather than pay the damages, which though hefty, Mr. Pickwick can easily afford, he goes to debtors’ prison. He refuses to let Sam stay with him in prison. So Sam borrows money from his own father (who is himself an entertaining character) on condition that he sue to get it back the next day. By such a contrivance Sam lands himself in prison in order to keep an eye on Mr. Pickwick.

In the debtors’ prison Mr. Pickwick does something that gives English majors something to write about: he matures. He sees the real suffering about him—people who are truly destitute, not dandies like himself whose noses are out of joint because they never bothered to grow up and understand anything about women. It’s not quite enough to make him pay up, but it’s a start.

The slimy attorneys –Dickens had a lifelong antipathy for lawyers– who handled the Bardell/Pickwick case turn around and sue Mrs. Bardell for court costs and she, too, ends up in the debtors’ prison. Mrs. Bardell agrees to drop her breach of promise suit if Mr. Pickwick will pay her court costs—a much smaller sum than the breach of promise—and they all walk out the door of the prison.

A man who appreciates Sam Weller deserves a second consideration and in the end I liked Mr. Pickwick, but I kept reading the book so as to not miss a single scene that Sam appeared in. “Wellerism” is actually a word. Rather than give a tedious explanation, here are some of my favorite examples and you can deduce your own definition:

*“Then the next question is, what the devil do you want with me, as the man said, wen he see the ghost?”

*“Wery glad to see you, indeed, and hope our acquaintance may be a long ‘un, as the gen’l’m’n said to the fi’ pun’ note.”

*“Avay vith melincholly, as the little boy said ven his schoolmissus died.”

*“Wotever is, is right, as the young nobleman sweetly remarked wen they put him down in the pension list ‘cos his mother’s uncle’s vife’s grandfather vunce lit the king’s pipe vith a portable tinder-box.”

*“Anything for a quiet life, as the man said wen he took the sitivation at the lighthouse.”

Here are a few other bon mots I enjoyed in The Pickwick Papers:

*“Hocus the brandy and water”—put laudanum in it

*“British Hollands”—Dutch Gin.

*“There are very few moments in a man’s existence, when he experiences so much ludicrous distress, or meets with so little charitable commiseration, as when he is in pursuit of his own hat.”

*“It wasn’t the wine,” murmured Mr. Snodgrass in a broken voice. “It was the salmon.”

*“Dumb as a drum with a hole in it, sir.”

When I tried to picture the logistics of the recent Summer Musicale featuring both The OK Chorale and All Present my mind tended to shut down. Working with either group can feel like trying to juggle Jell-O cubes. For this event we sang at the Community Hall at the Phinney Neighborhood Center.  It has great acoustics but a small stage made smaller by the presence of the upright piano, which I wanted to use. Both groups couldn’t be up there at the same time and I needed a certain amount of room to maneuver without falling off the stage.

My non-negotiables for this event were that 1) Once All Present was up on the stage, they had to stay for the duration and 2) The Chorale needed to sing on-stage since the whole point of using a hall with a stage is to be on it, not to be on the floor with the lumpen proletariat.

I decided to have the Chorale sing first. It’s always a smaller group in the summer but they had worked hard and they sounded like 40 voices instead of 20. The altos were smallest in number but they held their own with the basses, the strongest section. The sopranos positively wafted and –if you’re a choir director you’ll appreciate this—I always get reliable tenors. They deserved the stage. They sang “Java Jive” (flourishing coffee pots and mugs), “Isn’t it Romantic,” and “Under the Boardwalk” (with sun-glasses on).

Then there was a deployment of Chorale members to sit on the edge of the stage (the “danglers”), or to stand behind All Present, once we got them up there. Another group was to sing on the floor amongst the audience. All Present slowly, inexorably moved onstage with walkers before them and caregivers in tow. Susan and Mike, my lovely assistants, and several of the Chorale tenors and basses helped maneuver twelve dressed-up and excited elderly people with short term memory loss into place on the stage. Several of them grabbed my arm to tell me they didn’t have their music.

“I’ve got the song sheets,” I said over and over, sometimes to the same person. “We’ll pass them out in a sec.”

The two groups sang “It Had to be You” with harmonies both planned and spontaneous. Several of the All Present men had been professional singers and Barber Shop singers in their earlier days, and they either remember the harmonies or have never forgotten how to make harmony. After our first number it was brought to my attention that Violet and Vivian and Bill couldn’t be seen by their families and friends because Jim and Dennis, both quite large men, were sitting in the front row.

There was very little room to maneuver on stage. A discussion ensued in which advice was poured on me. One idea was to have a few people of All Present sit on the edge of the stage with some of the Chorale “danglers.” Jim, who is over six feet tall with a large frame, volunteered enthusiastically. He shuffled to the edge of the stage, clearly preparing to lower himself to the floor and swing his legs over the edge. There was a gasp from the audience followed by the silence of suspense. I looked across the hall and caught the expression on his wife’s face and knew this was an accident about to happen. The silence was filled by a rush of “No” coming from the social worker and director of the Greenwood Senior Center. I put my hand on Jim’s back and turned him around to the stage door. He and Dennis were helped around to the front where they could hitch themselves up on stage and let their legs dangle.

Then we had to get the back row up to the front row. Bill and Vivian are mobile but Violet needs her walker, which was god knows where. I helped her to her feet and then got behind her. With my arms under her arms, sweating and thinking about my own back, I inched her into a chair in the front. Why hadn’t I asked someone else to do this?

She beamed into my face. “This is so much fun!” she said.

I went to the microphone. “When we were trying to plan the logistics of this event, someone memorably asked me if it couldn’t just arrange itself organically,” I said to the audience.

“Kind of like a slow growth,” piped up Susan from the front row. Susan was, by special request, our guest soloist.

Finally we were ready to continue. The two groups sang “Pick-a-little, Talk-a-little/Goodnight Ladies” and “Lida Rose/Dream of Now” from The Music Man. Then we commissioned the audience to join us for “Goodnight, Irene.” Susan came on stage to sing the verse she had taught us last quarter when we sang “Goodnight, Irene” in our tribute to Pete Seeger:

Sometimes Irene wears pajamas.
Some Irene wears a gown,
But when they’re both in the laundry,
Irene is the talk of the town.

The audience of fifty had been given song sheets. The entire hall sang “Oh, Susanna,” “Home on the Range,” “Sloop John B,” and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.”

By chance I had discovered that “How Much Is that Doggy in the Window?” and “Where, oh Where has my Little Dog Gone” can be sung at the same time. Here I am, trying to organize this duet with the audience and the group on stage while the tenors and basses in back had lost their stage presence and were acting like they were lounging around their own living rooms:

“The folks on stage are Group One,” I announced to the audience.

I faced the stage. “Forget what we did in rehearsal –you are group one–and hey! will you stop talking back there?”

Back to the audience. “The first two rows are part of Group One and the rest of the hall is Group Two,” I said waving my arms unnecessarily and thinking, “god, I hope this works.”

Gail, alto, moved in between rows and faced the audience. She led Group Two as we started to sing.  Gail teaches kindergarten. She could see what needed to happen.

It worked beautifully. We got through the “Two Doggy Songs,” and finished the show with “White Cliffs of Dover” and “As Time Goes By.”

I don’t get nervous over OK Chorale events but I had never been been in charge of putting the two groups together. When it was all over I was so wound up I could not relax.  I had one finger too much Scotch that evening.  During the night I woke up six or seven times trying to catch Jim as he pitched over the edge of the stage.

The next day I joined everyone to do it all over again on the Edmonds ferry.  Dennis and Jim, both former Barbershop singers,  stood with the Chorale during “Java Jive” without quite knowing why except that it felt familiar. They had brought their harmonicas and spontaneously led some of the singing.  One of the Chorale had recently had a death in her family.  Another had family hurt by the recent California earthquake.  There we were, a jumble of people with joys and sorrows, singing the old songs that everyone knows.

All Present with the OK Chorale–before the big shift. Photo by Kay Groves

For my annual pilgrimage to Walla Walla, I decided to fly instead of drive. I hadn’t flown since 2009 so I was rusty on the procedure. I scored an expedited pass so I didn’t have to take off my shoes, but the water bottle I meant to leave in the car was still in my bag and that held up the line. I had too many carry-ons with me so I crammed one bag into the other. The flight is only long enough to get in the air, get the drinks cart up and down the aisle, collect one’s things and get off the plane. The drinks cart passed my row several times with no joy when we began the descent.

“Did they just ignore us?” I asked my seat mate, a winemaker whose arms were covered with interesting tattoos and on whose earlobes were a couple of earrings that looked like heavy bolts. His carry-on was a little cooler and I was dying to know what was in it.

“I think they did,” he said.

“Just us?”

“Yep.”

We both shrugged, collected our belongings and de-planed.

Putzer the Attorney was home recovering from knee surgery and though I had the option of waiting for James to leave work to come collect me, I had the unaccountable desire to take a taxi. A taxi in Walla Walla. It must stem from having been a student here, back in the days when I had never been in a taxi and it felt like a dangerously adult thing to do. Also the airport being about 5 miles away, it seemed silly to not take a taxi for the $3 it was going to cost.

It cost $16. Plus the driver had BO and talked too much. Now I’ve had the experience I won’t need to do it again.

The plane had been two hours late leaving Seattle. Door to door from my house to Putzer’s: if I had driven, it would have taken me an extra fifteen minutes and I would have felt no less drained.  I felt keenly the snub my row received from the airlines, which shall go nameless because a friend works for them.

My first morning I went for a walk while it was still only 70 degrees and the sun was hidden by clouds. I walked the few blocks to Mountain View Cemetery where reside quite a number of my family on my father’s side. I found my grandparents’ graves at the corner of Cypress and Pine. I’d like to have a go at their headstones with a wire brush and some Mr Clean; the dates are almost unreadable. Louise Knott Richmond died in December of 1918 from the Spanish flu. That burial must have been bleak. The lovely old trees in the cemetery wouldn’t have been there then. Mountain View was most likely out of town in 1918 and Louise and Charles are on its very edge. Closer to the center of things is the Knott family plot. There lie the greats and the grands. There’s a story in there somewhere as to why Charles and Louise are buried so far from the rest of the family. I think my great grand-father wasn’t all that enamored of his son-in-law (One of those damn wheat farmers from Prescott.)

After paying my respects and trodding on the graves, I started back. I was at a bus-stop when the trolley came by and since the fare was free and I was still feeling indignant about the expense of the taxi, I, on impulse, hopped aboard. I got off at 2nd and Poplar and walked to Main Street where I bought an iced-coffee at Olive’s, which I still think of as Merchant’s (that’s inside information) and went in search of Putzer’s office. I had two reasons for dropping in. One was to see a painting of mine, which had been hanging in my living room for a year with a sold sign on it and which now hangs in Putzer’s office. The other reason was to ask the office assistant to call Putzer at home and tell her I was at large in downtown Walla Walla and would be back as soon as I caught the trolley again.

At the bus-stop was a sign saying the trolley followed the same route it took from 1906-1919. I tried to imagine 2nd Ave in 1906, the year my great-grandfather and his two youngest daughters, made the trip back to Cornwall. Maybe the trolley down 2nd Ave was the beginning of that long trip across the U.S. and the Atlantic Ocean to England. Or in 1918, the year Louise died. My father was eight years old. Did he take the trolley down to Main Street to a candy shop? I could smell cooking at Bright’s Candies when I came out of Olive’s with my coffee, but unfortunately they weren’t yet open.

Late morning, Anitra from Putzer’s book group came by for coffee bringing with her clusters of white grapes from her garden. Sharp and sweet, I think I ate most of them over the course of the weekend. I like grapes with pits because they take longer to eat.

In any case Anitra was named after the Peer Gynt character by parents who named another daughter– who grew up to become a buffalo rancher– Thaïs. I say this by way of suggesting that this was an interesting woman. She had been married to a history professor at Whitman and she finished her English degree during her tenure as a faculty wife. Over tea and grapes, the three of us thoroughly dissected the Whitman English department of the 1970s.

When I try to remember what else happened on Friday it all dissipates into the heat of a Walla Walla August.

On Saturday Putzer, Jim and I went for coffee at the Walla Walla Roastery out by the airport. It’s important to say “out by the airport,” partly because the Walla Walla Regional Airport needs all the attention it can get and partly because there are so many good things “out by the airport.” There’s Klicker’s, the produce farm that’s been family owned and operated for nearly one hundred years. There’s the community college, which has a now-famous school of viticulture.

And there are the tasting rooms. I don’t know if it’s true any longer but the word among the wine cognoscenti used to be that the tasting rooms “out by the airport” were run by the least pretentious and most generous vintners. Their rooms weren’t as classy looking on the outside as the ones along the highway or on Main St in Walla Walla, but they had heart. That’s just a little freebie for you. I don’t drink wine.

We split up: I to the Saturday Farmer’s Market, Jim to run errands and Putzer to go home and ice her knee. At the market, the sun was too hot and the music too loud. To get there we had passed the edges of the college and I felt nostalgic for it. I walked back to campus and sat among the trees at Lakem Duckem. I thought about Putzer and Jim living in Walla Walla for over 35 years. Their associations with the town are of people and relationships and daily life. Mine is of memories and a nostalgia for what never was.

In talking about it later, Jim said that all of us have memories and nostalgia for what never was. I realized that my Walla Walla associations are with people and relationships, too. I have friends of forty years who unlike my family in the cemetery are not a memory and a nostalgia.

The rest of the visit dissipates into the heat of a Walla Walla August. The plane home was on time and I scored three servings of cranberry juice.

Lakem Duckem

I almost wet myself the first time I read the denouement of Madame Defarge in A Tale of Two Cities and I still love the pacing and tension between the comic and the terrifying in that scene. This book is an old favorite, and one nurtured by a beloved high school English teacher. I can still hear Mrs. LaBelle talking about Jerry Cruncher, the honest tradesman and Jarvis Lorry, the man of business; about the mender of roads in the blue cap who becomes the sawyer in the red cap; 105 North Tower, and the evocative and cryptic “Recalled to life.”

A Tale of Two Cities is a book about death, redemption and retribution with images of such flowing like the blood and the wine from the beatific to the crass. When it opens, it is 1775; Jarvis Lorry, solicitor of Tellson’s Bank and Lucie Manette are on their way from London to Paris to collect Lucie’s father who had been released (recalled to life) from the Bastille where he had been imprisoned for 15 years, long after everyone thought he was dead. He is in safekeeping in the home (and wine shop) of his former servant Ernest Defarge and his wife Therese who, for the moment, merely knits and “sees nothing.” As events unfold, Madame Defarge knits and “sees nothing” often enough as to be unnerving.

Back in London we make the acquaintance of Sydney Carton, lazy, alcoholic reprobate and Charles Darnay, man of such honor and goodness that his teeth gleam. They bear a physical resemblance to each other and both are in love with Lucie, the Dickensian angel du jour. Lucie marries Darnay and becomes the unattainable Beatrice, Laura, and Stella to Sydney Carton.

Fifteen years later, the Revolution is about to explode in France. Charles Darnay receives word that an old family retainer has been thrown in prison by the revolutionaries because of his association with Charles’ family, the aristocratic Evrémondes. Without checking the web cam for Paris, Charles leaves for France and is arrested as an enemy of the Revolution. Jarvis Lorry, Dr. Manette, Lucy and her little girl set out after him. With them are Jerry Cruncher, Lorry’s gopher; and Miss Pross who has been Lucie’s nurse, governess and companion all her motherless life.

Miss Pross and Jerry Cruncher are minor characters but they have more life to them than Lucie and Charles, and I get a kick out of them.  Jerry Cruncher, the honest tradesman, sits outside Tellson’s Bank with rust on his fingers, awaiting orders from Jarvis Lorry. The message with which he is entrusted–“Recalled to life”– worries him because it suggests– to him, if not the reader– a curtailment of some mysterious activity of his. At home he keeps a steady surveillance on his wife to see she isn’t “flopping” against him.

As slowly as these hints are doled out, they are elucidated: Jerry is a “resurrection man,” a grave robber. That’s why his fingers are stained with rust and why he doesn’t much care for the idea of anyone being recalled to life. On one of his Boys’ Nights Out Jerry and his associates dig up a coffin that’s full of rocks; he blames his wife. (“What do you mean by flopping yourself down and praying agin me?”) Only late in the story do we learn that the body supposed to be in the coffin was that of a double agent who is still very much alive.

Miss Pross and Jerry both come to France with the retinue that is determined to free Charles Darnay. There’s a menacing scene when Madame Defarge and her BFF, The Vengeance, pay them a visit, ostensibly to ascertain where the Manettes live in order to spare them in the coming Revolution. But by this time we know what it means that Madame Defarge knits and “sees nothing.” She is creating The Register, a list of names coded into her knitting.

Miss Pross, however, is not impressed. She, with her “rooted conviction that she was more than a match for any foreigner, was not to be shaken by distress and danger, appeared with folded arms, and observed in English to The Vengeance, who her eyes first encountered, “Well, I am sure, Boldface! I hope you are pretty well!” She also bestowed a British cough on Madame Defarge. . .”

Not only does Dr. Manette, with his clout as a former prisoner of the Bastille, fail to get Charles freed from prison, his whole family is knitted into The Register as enemies of the Republic who are to be arrested and eventually guillotined.

This is Sydney Carton’s hour. The nonredeemable lout’s eyes have been raised to visions of goodness merely by brushing up against Lucie Manette in her London drawing room. He hatches a plan to impersonate Charles Darnay and go to the guillotine in his place. While he is exchanging clothes with Darnay in the prison cell, Jarvis Lorry bustles Dr. Manette, Lucie and her daughter out of their Paris lodgings and into a coach that only needs a drugged Charles Darnay to be slopped inside before they can rattle up to the coast and board a ship for England.

It’s at this point that Madame Defarge decides it’s time to dispose of the entire Manette family herself. Her husband has a regrettable tendency towards kindness and he is too fond of Dr. Manette. Madame takes a pistol and a knife and sets off. “There were many women upon whom the time laid a dreadfully disfiguring hand, but there was not one among them more to be dreaded than this ruthless woman now taking her way along the streets. Of a strong and fearless character, of shrewd sense and readiness. . .  She was absolutely without pity. . .”

Jerry Cruncher and Miss Pross are to follow the Manettes in a separate coach. They have seen the Manettes and Charles Darnay off and were “concluding their arrangements to follow the coach even as Madame Defarge, taking her way through the streets, now drew nearer and nearer.” Jerry and Miss Pross get into a discussion about whether it might not be better to take their departure from a different street seeings as how one coach has already left the area. Two might look suspicious.

“And still Madame Defarge, pursuing her way along the streets, came nearer and nearer.”

Jerry has an explosion of conscience and guilt and starts to unburden himself about moonlighting in graveyards. He goes on incoherently about his wife’s predilection for “flopping.”

“Whatever housekeeping arrangement that may be,” said Miss Pross. . . “I have no doubt it is best that Mrs. Cruncher should have it entirely under her own supervision.”

Jerry fervently hopes she is flopping for him right now.

“And still Madame Defarge, pursuing her way along the streets, came nearer and nearer.”

Miss Pross tacks back to her idea of leaving in a coach from a different street.

“Madame Defarge was drawing very near indeed.”

Miss Pross takes a final tour through the empty rooms, and then leans over a basin to splash cold water on her face. As she comes up from one such splash, she sees Madame Defarge standing in the doorway.

“The wife of Evrémonde; where is she?”

Miss Pross with great presence of mind runs to shut the doors of all the empty rooms in order to obscure the fact that the birds had flown. She plants herself firmly in front of Lucie’s door.

“Years had not tamed the wildness nor softened the grimness of her appearance; but she too was a determined woman in her different way, and she measured Madame Defarge with her eyes, every inch. . .

Madame Defarge looked at her scornfully, but still with something of Miss Pross’ own perception that they two were at bay. . .

‘On my way yonder,’ said Madame Defarge. . . ‘where they reserve my chair and my knitting for me. I am come to make my compliments to her in passing.’

‘I know your intentions are evil,’ said Miss Pross.  .  .

Each spoke in her own language; neither understood the others’ words; both were very watchful, and intent to deduce from look and manner, what the intelligible words meant.”

Every critics in history may agree that Dickens needs an editor, but I already feel I have travestied his writing by cutting out numerous paragraphs to suggest the suspense this scene carries. I love the build-up.

Anyway, the two women struggle. Miss Pross gets Madame Defarge in a lock. The pistol goes off. Madame Defarge takes the bullet. Miss Pross and Jerry Cruncher get away.

Sydney Carton achieves his redemption if redemption is something one can be said to achieve. He goes to the guillotine in place of Charles Darnay. Charles Darnay gets through all the roadblocks on Sydney Carton’s travelling papers.

A Tale of Two Cities begins and ends with two of the most famous passages in English literature.

The Beginning:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. We had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way— in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

The End, spoken by Sydney Carton at the end of an operatic speech at the mouth of the guillotine:

“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”

This book is only corny because it’s so well known. It’s well known because it’s been so loved. I can’t get through it without sobbing.

All Present, a song circle for people living with ESML (Early Stage Memory Loss) is in its second quarter. Almost everyone from the spring returned. It’s a peculiar feature of this group that if I hadn’t been told every one of these singers had some form of dementia, I wouldn’t have known. Some of them drive themselves to class at the Greenwood Senior Center. It’s true that some of them need their care-giver to sit next to them to keep them oriented but there are days when I could use someone like that. Once the class starts, however, I don’t imagine we look different from any group of adults doing something as quaint as sitting around with song sheets instead of cell phones in our hands, and singing. Even people in The OK Chorale drop their music from time to time.

All Present has a formidable amount of music to drop. We have built up a repertoire that requires 50 –and growing–pages of song sheets. This bunch can’t learn anything new but there seems to be no end to the songs they remember. I have tried to create song sheets that are easy to read and can be added to; this has proven to be more complicated than I would have thought. I had re-written them twice when Susan, the wittiest woman I know got involved.

Susan copy-edited my memoir. She is the reason I even know what a copy-editor is. After I wrote my book, several English major friends proofed it. Then I published it. Then Susan read it.

“You didn’t have it copy-edited,” she said

After some hesitation on her part she gave me her copy of my book with corrections. Every page looked like a crime scene. There were mistakes on every single page. I was horrified. I felt like I had been walking around without underwear and with my skirt tucked into its waistband. I couldn’t fathom the number of inconsistencies, spacing and punctuation errors, and misspellings I had not only just missed but hadn’t even dreamed existed.

“Don’t worry too much about it,” she soothed. “Probably no one but another copy editor would notice most of these.”

I corrected everything, paid a fee and had the book re-published.

I have an idea that copy-editors are unable to read anything without a red pen in their hands. When Susan got a look at my song sheets, she asked me if she could streamline them a little bit—or something that sounded innocuous. They came back to me with Track Changes streaked across them. I shuddered in remembrance.  Susan and her husband Mike come every week to help with the song circle and we are still finding lines that aren’t scanning.  The song sheets are, like all of us, a work in progress.

I was flustered during the first class. There’s always confusion at first. Added to this, the sponsoring organization (Visiting Angels) who provides the money that pays me was hovering around filming us. I had forgotten to tune my guitar and had a hard time doing it front of 15 pairs of very interested eyes and 15 pairs of ears, many of which are more acutely aware of intonation than I am. I looked at Jim who gave me thumbs up and down. When I finally got it in tune, Roger said, “You could have taken in in the next room where it was quiet.”

I met the half dozen new people.

“Elena,” said Midge. ‘That’s a beautiful name.”

“So’s yours,” I said.

“No, it’s not.”

Busted while trying to be nice. I sometimes forget that while these people may have dementia, there’s nothing wrong with their minds.

“OK,” I conceded. “Midge is a cute name.”

She smirked. I’ve gotten used to that smirk with Midge.

We sang “Chattanooga Choo Choo” one day. On a whim I asked the group if there was a song they hated.

“Chattanooga Choo Choo,” Midge declared.

“You mean the one we just sang?”

“Did we?”

The next week I told Midge we wouldn’t sing “Chattanooga Choo Choo” since she hated it.

“Did I say I hated it?” she laughed

Vivian, with the beautiful, cheerful face and the sweet smile, has no idea who I am week after week though she greets me like I’m her daughter. Dennis seems uncertain of who I am until we start singing, then something in him remembers.

They all are so familiar to me and their faces are so dear and so expressive. I have to remind myself that their minds or parts of their minds are in a dimension I can’t access. They can’t remember what they did an hour earlier. They can’t learn anything new. But their ability to be present to the moment is richer than mine. That’s their great gift to me.

All Present and The OK Chorale are presenting

A Summer Musicale
3:00 PM, Saturday, August 23
Community Hall, Phinney Neighborhood Center
6532 Phinney Ave N, Seattle.
By donation for ESML programs at the Greenwood Senior Center.

Everyone is welcome. Prepare to be surprised at how rich the present can be.

My Little Dorrit story begins months before I ever launched myself on my current Summer of Dickens project. I was browsing in the library to see if there was a book on tape not by an author whose paperbacks could insulate a McMansion. I saw Little Dorrit.

“Oh. Little Dorrit. I’ll try that.”

There were five discs. I put in disc one.

“The watch,” an accented voice gasped.

Huh? I checked to make sure I was at the beginning of the disc. Again with the watch. Odd. I put in disc two. It appeared to be en medias res someplace else in the story. On disc three I heard about the watch again. Same with discs four and five.

I made a little note that disc one was not the beginning of the novel and that discs one, three, four and five were identical. I took it back to the library. They routed a different copy of the book-on-tape to me. But the different copy had the same errors.

“Look,” I said. “Can you send me all the copies in the system to me? I’ll check them all and report back.”

I love my library.

There were five copies in the system, all exactly alike. The librarian at my branch looked up their history.

“Here’s the really odd part,” she told me. “This book-on-tape has been checked out 40 times. Did anyone listen to it?”

Hmm. Hard to say.

As a result of this experience I knew that a *watch* figured in the story. The watch was part of a mystery that along with a few odd characters and minor story lines kept me reading. On the whole, though, the novel didn’t appeal to me. I am tired of Dickens’ angelic females who sacrifice their lives to care for men who haven’t bothered to grow up. I went through this with Nell and her grandfather in The Old Curiosity Shop. Hell, I went through it in my own life, which is partly the source of the irritation with reading about it. But rather than going into a diatribe about the patriarchy, I’ll note a few of the things that intrigued me in Little Dorrit as I meander through a synopsis.

The Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison. Up until about 1860 when a man became insolvent and couldn’t pay his creditors, he could be arrested and imprisoned. It left his family hostage to pay the outstanding bills and secure his release. The family could live in the prison and they could come and go as they liked. Only the debtor himself could not leave. Dickens had a lifelong preoccupation with debtors’ prisons. His own father had been sent to the Marshalsea Prison during Dickens’ boyhood and Dickens would breakfast with his family there before he went off to work (at age 12) in a blackening factory.

“Little Dorrit” (her given name is Amy and I found the appellation of “Little Dorrit” irritating to the nth degree although clearly it was meant to be endearing) is called the Child of the Marshalsea because she was born in the prison, her father, William, having been there for some 20 plus years. A grown woman when the story opens, Amy thinks of the prison as home. She lives with her father and goes out every day to work.

It’s supposed to be the great irony of the novel that Amy is the only character who is not imprisoned in some way. In the 19th century it hadn’t occurred to enough people that women were imprisoned by Western culture from the moment of their birth. Don’t get me started. I will concede that Amy is the only character who appears to be content with her life. On the other hand, the novel was written by a 19th century male. Don’t get me started.

William Dorrit’s freedom is secured and he is let out into Society as typified by the Merdles. Now Mrs. Merdle is an old friend—so to speak– of mine because Lord Peter Wimsey called all his many Daimlers “Mrs. Merdle” and I have read all of Dorothy Sayers’ novels. Mrs. Merdle is a formidable, haughty woman. I don’t remember that Lord Peter’s Daimlers shared those qualities but I’ve about exhausted all there is to say about his Daimlers so I’ll leave them and Mrs. Merdle aside.

When William Dorrit quits the Marshalsea Prison he opts to take his family abroad and leave his shame behind in London. To get to Italy where the Dorrits eventually take up residence, they traverse St Bernard Pass from Switzerland and stay in the alpine hostel originally founded by Augustine monks in the middle ages. The St Bernard breed of dog used to be bred right there by the monks. The dogs really did save people lost in the snow but I think the little canteen of brandy around their neck was a Walt Disney invention. All this time I had the St Bernard vaguely mixed up with Heidi so it figures that I thought the barrels on the dogs’ necks contained chicken soup.

William’s freedom is secured by the efforts of Arthur Clenham and Pancks, one of the novel’s most colorful supernumeraries who, by badgering the Circumlocution Office, finds the error that caused Dorrit’s original insolvency. William cuts himself and his family off from Arthur as too painful a reminder of his old Marshalsea life and of course Amy as the dutiful, 19th century, angelic Dickens’ heroine tries to comply. Arthur and Amy become star-crossed and tongue-tied; neither is able to express feelings of love for the other.

English society, headed by Mrs. Merdle, decamps to Venice where William finds it a different sort of prison. Amy spends much of her time alone, looking at Venice from a window or alone in a gondola. Although not happy in Venice she was at least doing what she wanted to do even though people noticed and people talked.

While Mrs. Merdle holds court and sway in Venice, Mr. Merdle stays quietly behind in London making himself rich by investing other people’s money– including Arthur Clenham’s– rather in the style of Bernie Madoff. When his bubble bursts and financial ruin overtakes everyone he has ever breathed upon, Mr. Merdle commits suicide in what was the most shocking surprise–to me–in the story.

In a final, rather delicious irony, Arthur Clenham ends up in Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison. Amy, with money she received because Arthur traces a clue from a *watch* belonging to his father, pays his creditors and gets him out. The two of them are married in St George’s Church right next to the prison.

Readers are advised that this post makes the detail of the plot explicit. But you probably weren’t planning on reading the book anyway.

My only recollection from reading Nicholas Nickleby in high school is that I liked it. Forty-five years later I understand why I liked it but I don’t see how I got through it. It’s picaresque—the full title is The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby— with the usual unmanageable cast of characters and is exceptionally rambling. Dickens’ third novel, it was written in monthly installments that carried on for nearly two years, which meant that on any given month he could go off onto some kind of tangent. He does this a lot. One bought the paper installments much like one now buy serialized e-books and for the same reason: to find out what happens. It would have annoyed me no end to have the main tale interrupted for two months while I had to read about the “gentleman in small clothes” who threw root vegetables over the wall to Mrs Nickleby as an apparent overture of affection.

I’ll be as succinct as I can with the main tale: when Nicholas, his mother, and his sister Kate are left without money at his father’s death, they apply to their father’s rich brother, Ralph to help them out. Ralph, a villain I loved to hate, gives the two women a small allowance and a nasty little house and sends Nicholas to teach at a boarding school in Yorkshire. Now I have been to Yorkshire and have familial connections with the North Riding. It’s beautiful and the people are lovely and they say “aye” instead of “yes.” But I gather that in Dickens’ time sending someone to Yorkshire was like sending him to Siberia. (It should now be understood that I’m not being succinct any longer). In the 1800s there were a bunch of boarding schools in Yorkshire where unwanted children were starved and beaten in exchange for generous guilt tuition. Dickens visited some of these schools before writing his scathing descriptions in Nicholas Nickleby and it seems that within ten years of the book’s publication and because of its influence, all of them had closed down.

Back to the novel: One of the residents of Dotheboys School is Smike, a young man of 19 who was first dropped off at the school at the age of about five and who has been so mistreated and malnourished that he has grown up unable to talk clearly, stand up straight or walk without strange limps and contortions. Nicholas who has observed the abuse handed out to his charges by Wackford Squeers, the one-eyed owner of the school feels helpless to interfere until a day that Mr. Squeers prepares to beat Smike particularly severely. Nicholas intercepts the whip and goes after Mr. Squeers himself, after which he packs himself off, intending to walk to London.

Once on the road, he discovers that Smike has followed him and the two become fellow travelers.  They become involved with a provincial acting company of generous artists, over-sized egos, sullen performers and The Infant Phenomenon, a female billed as age 10 but who looks twice that age. There are some touching scenes with Nicholas helping Smike learn the lines for the apothecary in Romeo and Juliet. With warmhearted support from the entire acting troupe, Smike delivers in the performance.

Back in London, Ralph is infuriated by the news from Yorkshire even as he goes about his many exploitative schemes to make money. He develops an intense hatred of Nicholas, seemingly for his idealism and youth, even as he tries to insinuate himself into the lives of Mrs. Nickleby and Kate and tries to marry Kate off to a predatory but rich man.

There’s a mole in Ralph’s office: his secretary, Newman Noggs, a man with ticks and quirks, “shrugging his shoulders and cracking his finger-joints, smiling horribly all the time, and looking steadfastly at nothing, out of the tops of his eyes, in a most ghastly manner.” Throughout the novel Newman goes about quietly undermining Ralph while looking after the interests of Kate and Mrs. Nickleby. He was the connecting thread that held the novel together for me; he was liable to show up anywhere weaving a web around Ralph while serving him without the “smallest speculation” in his face. “If it be possible to imagine a man, with two eyes in his head, and both wide open, looking in no direction whatever, and seeing nothing, Newman appeared to be that man while Ralph Nickleby regarded him.”

When Nicholas gets word of how Kate is being exploited, he and Smike leave the acting troupe and go to London. Nicholas removes his family from Ralph’s machinations. He finds a job and falls in love, but the woman is at the crux of one of Ralph’s schemes. Nicholas marries her and as a result Ralph loses a great deal of money. The wheel of fortune has turned.  But there’s more.

Smike dies of tuberculosis. Through a tale of past and present as twisted as London’s streets and involving numerous characters old and newly introduced, Ralph and the reader learn simultaneously that Smike was his son. Chapter 62 is titled “Ralph makes one last Appointment—and keeps it.” The next day he is found by his neighbors hanging from a beam in the attic room of his home where Smike spent the first five years of his life. So—if you’re following this—Nicholas and Smike were cousins. It made me think back over all the scenes of the two of them and burst into tears.

Finally here is a marvelous description of the London that Nicholas and Smike entered when they came home to save the day for the Nickleby family:

“Emporiums of splendid dresses, the materials brought from every quarter of the world; tempting stores of everything to stimulate and pamper the sated appetite . . . screws and irons for the crooked, clothes for the newly-born, drugs for the sick, coffins for the dead, and churchyards for the buried–all these jumbled each with the other and flocking side by side, seemed to flit by in motley dance like the fantastic groups of the old Dutch painter, and with the same stern moral for the unheeding restless crowd.

. . . There was a christening party at the largest coffin-maker’s and a funeral hatchment had stopped some great improvements in the bravest mansion. Life and death went hand in hand; wealth and poverty stood side by side; repletion and starvation laid them down together.

But it was London; and the old country lady inside, who had put her head out of the coach-window a mile or two this side Kingston, and cried out to the driver that she was sure he must have passed it and forgotten to set her down, was satisfied at last.”

About 15 years ago there was a massive controversy in The OK Chorale involving a camp song called “The Titanic.” Something similar has come up and again it involves camp songs. Who would have thought that camp songs– camp songs!—would exercise so many people? I have finally realized that what most people call camp songs are “Home on the Range” and “Red River Valley” and all their friends. I call those folk songs. Camp songs are those satires and re-writes that kids do in order to upset the adults. They’re supposed to be puerile. That’s their charm—to me, evidently not to everybody.

For the Chorale’s summer quarter we are singing a set of standards (“It Had to Be You,” “Under the Boardwalk,” “Isn’t It Romantic?”) We were to sing a bunch of camp songs, but I am amending them to folk songs as a result of the uproar, which I admit is probably going on more inside me than anyone else. In any case, the offending songs were “My Gal’s a Corker,” “Oh dear what can the matter be, seven old ladies got locked in the lavat’ry,” “Clementine,” and “As Time Goes By.” Yes, you read that last one correctly.

We had several new people sign up for the quarter and they all brought their Presences with them. That’s fine. I like people who are direct and comfortable with themselves. But I noticed some smirks, and raised eyebrows on their faces and heard some snarky comments during the course of the rehearsal and I didn’t like that. As we were packing up I asked them how they were doing after an hour and half of The Chorale Experience.

“Well, it’s a fun, welcoming group,” one woman said, “but I had some trouble with the content.”

I immediately thought of a particularly crude verse depicting the experience of one old lady who was locked in the lavat’ry from Monday to Saturday, and for a second saw it through the eyes of someone who was young, earnest and idealistic. But no, the first “content” she sited was a line in “As Time Goes By:

“Woman needs man and man must have his mate/that no one can deny.”

“Oh!” I was completely nonplussed. “But that’s just one line. Have you seen Casablanca?”

“What’s that?”

I was speechless.

She went on to the “exploitation of children” in the song “Clementine.”

I had always assumed that Clementine was a grown woman. I don’t know what else to say.

I passed out temporarily and didn’t take in her comments on the seven old ladies locked in the lavat’ry from Monday to Saturday. The song does make the females in question look ridiculous, but why do I need to re-iterate that that is the whole point? I’ll also add that I can be considered an “old lady” by over half the population and I think the song is hilarious, especially since I grew up singing the sweet little song “Oh dear, what can the matter be, Johnny’s so long at the fair.” Besides that, it scans and I enjoy pretty much any song that scans. Just so you understand the indecency that’s being referred to, here is not the nastiest verse:

The next to come in was dear Mrs. Mason,
The stalls were all full so she peed in the basin;
And that is the water that I washed my face in,
And nobody knew she was there.

By the time I got home that night I was stewing with ingredients that all belonged in different dishes. When I deconstruct the text of some of the songs, of course I can see the images of “male domination over women.” If I were to strip my library of songs to reflect that single thought state, there would be nothing left to sing except a mind-numbing song someone sent me with a single rhythm pattern, five notes, and the same four words “Do the right thing,” repeated over and over and over and over and over. I’d rather be locked in the lavat’ry from Monday to Saturday.

Beyond that, though, was this question: who walks into a choir rehearsal for the first time with little or no experience of music or singing or songs (or Casablanca) and appoints herself supervisor of the teacher, someone who has been making music for 56 years. I felt patronized—anyone torturing me for information who knew about that vulnerability would find me spilling my guts in three minutes. Maybe if I were a parent I would be used to having my inconsistencies and failings pointed out to me by someone half my age, but I’m not so I ain’t.

My question remains: who does that? Well, on second thought, I have done it. I suppose a lot of us have, hopefully when we were much younger although that isn’t the case with me. It’s tacky behavior no matter the perpetrator or at what time of their life. However the incident in the Chorale rehearsal does bring up some thoughts about the disparate generations that inhabit the earth at the same time and their differing associations with music.

The older we get the more layers of memory are embedded in songs that connect our pasts and presents. I was raised in a fundamentalist church and grew up singing about grotesque religious images of death and lamb’s blood. Today I am not connected to any church or religion but there are things about those old songs—a stray phase and certainly the tunes—that I love. I would even sing one again in a group such as mine because the song is a connecting thread, not because I subscribe to any of the content. As for male-domination, if it wasn’t my generation’s facing down condescension and fighting back discrimination the young women in that rehearsal wouldn’t have, at their birth, been handed a world that contains the consciousness to deconstruct the songs let alone the nerve to comment on them.

The three new women are not coming back, and in fairness to one of them, she wrote me a thoughtful note. I’m sorry they couldn’t have given us more of a chance. However, in my (temporary) questioning of my own competence, I polled some of my regulars and found out that I am pretty much the only woman who likes the camp(y) songs. Maybe it’s because I was a Sunday School child and never got to be bad. I’ve decided to drop the Ladies who were stuck in the lavat’ry from the Chorale’s program but I am going to sing it to myself from Monday to Saturday. So there.

Charles Dickens is often criticized for creating characters that don’t grow and mature. There are days I might add that in that case, art is merely reflecting life. In any case, in Martin Chuzzlewit the maturation of the eponymous Martin as a plot line is nearly obliterated by the presence of a grandiose fellow who took over the book much as he took over the air space in every room he entered and sucked up the energy of every scene in which he figured: Seth Pecksniff:

“He was a most exemplary man: fuller of virtuous precept than a copy book. Some people likened him to a direction-post, which is always telling the way to a place, and never goes there: but these were his enemies; the shadows cast by his brightness; that was all. His very throat was moral. . .”
(Chapter 2)

“It was a special quality, among the many admirable qualities possessed by Mr. Pecksniff that the more he was found out, the more hypocrisy he practiced. Let him be discomfited in one quarter, and he refreshed and recompensed himself by carrying the war into another.” (Chapter 44)

We first meet Pecksniff when he is blown onto his butt by a windstorm as he attempts to open his own front door so my first impression of him was of a harmless galoot. But it was on account of Mr. Pecksniff that it took me nearly 400 pages to decide I liked this novel. After his first buffoonish appearance I found him nearly intolerable; he reminded me of someone I was recently entangled with, someone whose arrogance, sense of entitlement and lack of self-awareness was breathtaking. Since I have totally recovered from My Personality Disordered Entanglement, it seems odd that Pecksniff felt so concrete. He didn’t become funny until I was halfway through the book and he was getting his come-uppance.

In contrast to Pecksniff being a vacuous direction post, a recurring reference to a fingerpost helped orient not just the characters in the book, but me as a reader. On the road from Pecksniff’s small village to the cathedral town of Salisbury is the turn off to London and there stands the fingerpost that points in three directions. I could locate the comings and goings of the many characters whenever Dickens referenced the fingerpost, and I got quite fond of it, watching for references as though I were looking for Waldo.

My trajectory with this narrative followed the character of Tom Pinch, an open-hearted young man with a great dollop of naïveté, who had a huge fund of good will for Pecksniff, which the Great Man squandered as carelessly and thoughtlessly as My Personality Disordered Entanglement did mine—but I am completely and utterly over all that. It no longer bothers me. I don’t speak of it. Forget I said anything just now or a few paragraphs backs or that I might refer to it again.

I felt endeared to Tom right away because he played the church organ for his own enjoyment on his own time; in the 19th century that can only mean one thing: he played Bach. He and I realized together that Pecksniff, because he had risen to power in spite of his incompetence, could do a great deal of harm to people who strayed into his many blind spots.

Pecksniff, in spite of having no ability of his own, runs a small school for architects. He accepts large tuitions and provides room, board and the opportunity to bask in his grandiosity. Martin Chuzzlewit, a distant cousin, is a talented young man who comes as a student and whose family connections Pecksmith hopes will redound to him. When Pecksniff realizes there is more fortune to be made by toadying up to Martin’s grandfather with whom Martin is on the outs, he finds a way to diddle Martin out of both his inheritance and his fiancée. Tom Pinch is a casualty in the diddling of Martin, but Tom grows wiser and more content after he leaves Pecksniff’s orbit.

I identify with Tom Pinch, I have not a vestige of feeling left in regards to the arrested adolescent Pecksniffian who ate away at my sense of worth for too long (the jerk), and I tend to run as fast as I can from my third featured character when I meet her in Life, but who nevertheless is very funny on paper:

Her role serves a structural purpose and her personality explodes over the entire narrative, shoving even Mr. Pecksniff into a corner.  Mrs. Gamp, a nurse and mid-wife both to birth and death, her professional services are needed because an extraordinary number of people get sick or die during the course of the story. We first meet her when she is called to a death. “Mrs. Gamp, who had a face for all occasions, looked out of her window with her mourning countenance. . .”(Chapter 19)

Today we might characterize Mrs. Gamp as a networker –“Gamp is my name, Gamp my nater,”—“a lady of that happy temperament which can be ecstatic without any other stimulating cause than a general desire to establish a large and profitable connection. She added daily so many strings to her bow, that she made a perfect harp of it. . .” (Chapter 46)

Always promoting herself, her verbal resume is announced through the intermediary of a mysterious friend by the name of Mrs. Harris to whom Mrs. Gamp is “as gold as has passed through the furnace:”

“‘only t’other day; the last Monday evening fortnight as ever dawned upon this Piljian’s Projiss of a mortal wale; I says to Mrs. Harris when she says to me, ‘Years and our trials, Mrs. Gamp, sets marks upon us all.’—‘Say not the words Mrs.Harris, if you and me is to be continual friends, for sech is not the case.

At this point she was fain to stop for breath; and advantage may be taken of the circumstance, to state that a fearful mystery surrounded this lady of the name of Harris, whom no one in the circle of Mrs. Gamp’s acquaintance had ever seen; neither did any human being know her place of residence, though Mrs. Gamp appeared on her own showing to be in constant communication with her. There were conflicting rumors on the subject; but the prevalent opinion was that she was a phantom of Mrs. Gamp’s brain. . . created for the express purpose of holding visionary dialogues with her on all manner of subjects, and invariably winding up with a compliment to the excellence of her nature.” (Chapter 25)

Living in such “a wale” as she does, Mrs. Gamp fortifies and contents herself at all times with brandy, which she keeps in a teapot. She takes night duty when she has a patient so she’s free to have her “tea” and her “cowcumbers.” Here’s Mrs. Gamp when a mourner has the audacity to hang around the death bed to grieve during her watch:

“I have seen a great deal of trouble my own self,” said Mrs. Gamp, laying greater and greater stress upon her words, “and I can feel for them as has their feelings tried, but I am not a Rooshan or a Prooshan, and consequently cannot suffer spies to be set over me.” (Chapter 19)

Here’s a few more Gamp morsels:

*“Rich folks may ride on camels, but it ain’t so easy for ‘em to see out of a needle’s eye.” (Chapter 25)

*“Your countenance is quite an angel’s! Which but for pimples it would be.” (Chapter 46)

And here are a few more bits from the novel that I especially enjoyed:

*. . . this horse and the hooded vehicle, whatever its proper name might be. . . it was more like a gig with a tumour than anything else. . .
(a note for this line says that a gig did not normally have a hood–Chapter 5)

*An ancient proverb warns us that we should not expect to find young heads upon old shoulders; to which is may be added that we seldom meet with that unnatural combination, but we feel a strong desire to knock them off. (Chapter 11)

*. . . Nadgett. . . was born to be a secret. He was a short dried-up withered old man, who seemed to have secreted his very blood; for nobody would have given him credit for possession of six ounces of it in his whole body. (Chapter 27)

*Change begets change. Nothing propagates so fast. (Chapter 18)

Putzer the Attorney and I were sitting in my sun room this morning drinking coffee when she got a text from her husband James in Walla Walla.

“Don’t forget your wallet,” it read.

“Do you get tired of hearing that?” I asked her.

“Yeah, it’s gotten annoying.”

Of course you’ll all want to know what that’s about. It makes reference to a time several years ago when Putzer came to Seattle fairly often in connection with the corneal transplant surgery she had in both her eyes. Since I live a few miles from where the surgical rehearsals, drama and cast parties took place, she often stayed with me before her appointments.

After one of these visits, I put her on the bus to the airport, and skipped off to meet my friend Nancy for our weekly walk around Green Lake.  Putzer got to the airport and discovered she did not have her wallet with her. She couldn’t get a hold of me because I was blithe-ing my way around the lake. When I got home from the walk, the wallet was sitting on my dining room table and my answering machine was blinking.

Putzer was on the flight to Walla Walla when I left her the message that I had her wallet. By the end of the day we had established that Jim who was visiting his father in Abbotsford, British Columbia could pick it up at my house on his way back to Walla Walla. And I heard all about the pat down and interrogation at the airport.

So that’s what that was about. I can see where it would be annoying. If it were me and people were still teasing me about two years later, I’d be crying.

It’s interesting that this has become the story about how Putzer left her wallet at my house with the entirely unfair suggestion that if she isn’t teased about it several times per visit to Seattle she might do it again.  It hasn’t, for example, become a story about how she got through airport security without I.D. because she doesn’t look like a terrorist or how fortunate she was that Jim was to be in Seattle within a day and could pick up the wallet. It’s not about what a Luddite I am that I didn’t even own a cell phone, let alone own one but not turn it on, which is the case with me now.

This week Putzer was here for A Situation and once again I was being blithe. I was visiting a friend on Camano Island, and staying in a very comfortable beach house, eating good food and romping with dogs on the beach.  Putzer had been given a key to and the run of my house.

I had made my usual arrangements to have my neighbors feed my cats. Gwen, who knows something about just about everything takes the morning shift and Bill comes over around 5:00. The cats go without their Peking duck meal for elevenses when I’m gone. It’s really too much to expect neighbors to understand, let alone indulge them three times a day. I asked Bill and Gwen to carry on as usual or at the very least, check to see if Putzer, the attorney-at-law, mother and grandmother was managing okay.

The truth is I didn’t think she had the proper attitude about my cats. In the first place she tends to treat them like animals as opposed to Fur Persons. Secondly she likes to tell a story about a time she stayed with her daughter and heard the cats scratching on the door of the master bedroom door at 4 in the morning. Her son-in-law got up, staggered into the kitchen and fed the cats. At 4:30 they scratched on the bedroom door again. Her daughter got up, staggered into the kitchen and fed the cats.

“What’s your point?” I ask, stony-faced.

Putzer emailed me before this visit to comment that she had never actually been apprised of the cats’ eating schedule. She’s right. She hadn’t been. The reason for this dates back to a sarcastic question she once asked me, something along the line of “Do you just feed them continually?”

I wrote back and said that they each get one scoop of dry food at 6 AM and one at 5 PM. For their elevenses they get one can of BFF Tuna and Shrimp in gravy, and one packet of BFF Tuna and Duck (hence the Peking duck reference) split three ways. Give or take the odd dribble of kibble when their whining gets to me. But she wasn’t to worry. Gwen and Bill would manage all that. And I would be home sometime on Saturday to resuscitate them if they were anywhere near starvation. She didn’t need to do anything. She could just have her sarcastic comments and smirking stories to keep her company.

Putzer wasted no time expanding to fill my house with her stuff on Friday afternoon.  She was so relieved after untangling The Situation that she foraged until she found the really expensive Scotch and had two drinks. She fed the cats. Bill came over and was told everything was under control. I assume it all happened in that order.

When I came home on Saturday afternoon, Putzer told me she had had a time finding the cat food. I pointed to the huge jar of kibble that juts into the passage between the living room and the kitchen.

“This?” I kicked at it. “You couldn’t find this?”

“No, I found that,” she said. “It was their elevenses. I didn’t know where the Peking duck was. And Gwen didn’t know either. But I finally found it.”

“You gave them their elevenses? You didn’t have to do that!”

“You know I can feed cats?”

Gwen came over later and the three of us made further inroads into the Scotch while hearing about the cats and the Peking duck and the further adventures of Putzer, the Attorney.  She left this morning. The house looks empty after she clears out and it’s quiet except for the cats whining at me to feed them. Putzer leaves me little reminders of her visits. I find her eye drop single-use vials all over the house. It was just the one time that I found her wallet.