Something ultra tasty and ultra healthy that someone brings to me or perhaps it just magically appears, and I don’t have to go deal with it at all, either making it, being interrupted by it, or cleaning up after it.
Or
Amazing food out with family and friends and no one sweated to cook and prepare the food, unless they love doing that.
I lean much more towards the twelve course meal with proper place settings than towards the meal-on-a-stick. I don’t know that I would be happy with a twelve course email, even if it were the old fashioned kind:
Where each course was not meant to be a full meal, but rather a sampling of an item…
Where the meal itself went on for two or three hours (or more), and conversation was an expected part…
Where everyone dressed properly, and the seating was deliberate, so as to promote interesting and civil discussions of various light topics…
Where (and this is VERY important) someone else did the cooking, the serving, the cleaning up, and so on…
I sit down every evening to dinner, and even if it’s only vaguely formal, it’s still dinner, with silverware, cloth napkin, water glass, wine glass, and good china. Of course, I’m the one that prepared it, and clean up after I’m finished, but it’s still civilized and pleasant. I eat out now and then with friends, but it’s less fancy than what’s in my home (and I’m fine with that).
Tonight it’s lamb, and steamed zucchini with butter, fresh carrots, and cherry tomatoes, and a glass of Pinot Noir (Williamette Valley Vineyards).
@CaptAmehrican Ah, the problem is, I live alone. On purpose. In the summer especially, I may go two or three days without talking to anyone (except for all you crazy people online), and I go out of my way to avoid guests. I have a house that’s considered a four bedroom house (two stories), with a “family room” and another room identified as a den/office (it’s not considered a bedroom because it doesn’t have a closet). I only have one bed (it’s actually a futon, because it’s more comfortable for me). There’s only one chair in the living room that’s meant to sit on.
Yes, I really am that antisocial.
@f00l I would never be happy living in such a large place (that palace in your picture). My current house is about 2200 sq ft, but I’d rather have it a tiny bit larger. I could probably live in half the space if I didn’t have a slight problem with loving certain kinds of beautiful things (Carnival glass, and antique tea sets, for example).
That’s a pix of Castle Hward, famously used as the film loc for the superb and gorgeous Granada TV/ITV mini-series shoot of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited in 1981, starring Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews. So very good.
And the whole point of having a castle or palace is that other people take care of it. Presumably other nicely well-treated people, so that we can all fantasize about living there with no guilt attached to the fantasy. The “homesteader(s)” have manageable apartments within.
The Queen and her family live this way, for diplomatic reasons (she has guests year-round except Xmas and perhaps Easter, guest lists often rec’d by the PM). The nobility live this way a little, if the house pays for itself and they have the $.
Pre-WWI, European nobility and the very wealthy did not retreat into apartments, but openly lived in the entire house; while every so often an heir married an American heiress so that they would have the $ to keep the place up.
After WWI, many European thrones were gone, but many nobility and the very wealthy still lived in the “whole house” and entertained constantly, if they could afford to.
The European “house party” at a great family seat had the lovely custom that everyone was cared for, and everyone was let alone to do as they pleased, except for lunch, dinner, and evening conversation; and many delightful activities were offered both to those who would preferred company and those whose preferred solitude. Kinda nice if you could get the invite, knew the customs, and could afford a reasonable wardrobe.
Makes for excellent nostalgia. After WWII much of that abated, as even the aristocracy started to work; but the wealthy still pull it off from time to time. The Queen does much of that year round, at Windsor and at Balmoral. When guests arrive, the staff unpacks and irons all the clothing, including underwear! Take some nice things, I say!
I actually know a member of the Howard family (a very old and important family among the Catholic nobility). Born here, no title or honorific, tho she might have one had she been born there. She’s not sure. Americans can’t have hereditary titles period.
If she goes there, supposedly they’ll put her up for a a few days, as befitting for a family member.
I think she’s never been across. She’s a fanatic compulsive coder and dev in Silicon Valley. She might go to England someday. ; )
I think Castie Howard is mostly open to the public. The family actually lives at another one (those wacky aristocrats and their castles)!
Still at Castle Howard from the TV production
Chatsworth (Duke of Devonshire)
Blenheim (Duke Of Marlborough)
(American $ paid for this one, by means of the dowry (something like $60M in todays’s $) of the unwillingly married, 17 year-old Consuelo Vanderbilt, later the unhappily married Duchess of Marlborough)
(Winston Churchill, nephew and later cousin of the Duke of Marlborough, grew up here)
The Duke and Duchess (Sunny and Consuelo)
A good intro to the late Victorian and Edwardian way of life among the rich and titled is in an early (perhaps 1st?) chapter of the first book of William Manchestor’s The Last Lion trilogy, a damned good Churchill bio.
huja (at sign removed deliberately, since I’m merely commenting, without seeing the need for notification)
I have puzzled through what I had written for hours, and finally identified the sentence you are speaking of (because I was very sure I hadn’t done this).
“I sit down every evening to dinner…” is the phrase you’re speaking of (it’s the only one that seems to make sense in this context). The word “dinner” is the object of that phrase, and not a verb (in this case). I’m sure that the language I speak, and the way I phrase things in general, is growing archaic, and it’s not surprising. I’m old, and every day I wake up, I’m a day older (better than not waking up at all, though, right?).
1 An aristocrat?
2 A castle or palace complete with staff and full funds for operation and maintenance and funds to fly back and forth and to live a lifestyle over here to match?
3 A gorgeous tea dress?
I’ll take items 2 or 3 without looking too closely at the gift horse.
Item 1 might be interesting, but I might only “take the aristocrat” to dinner, so to speak, and pump them for attitude, history, eclectic knowledge, and gossip. And invites, of course. Especially invites to places with big art and huge libraries and lots of moors and fields of heather cool dungeons and hidden rooms where they kept the crazy heir, and cool firearms for shooting practice, and a serious stable wouldn’t hurt, and stuff.
This castle will do.
Pierrefonds (Picardy)
(Merlin’s Castle in the TV series I think)
A tea dress I like:
This one is mid-Victorian, I think. Note the total over-doing of everything that the Victorians so loved.
OK, their ancestors loved over-doing stuff too.
Charles II as a baby:
@Shrdlu
After @huja’s comment, I re-read your post.
“I sit down every evening to dinner…”
I think your reading, which was mine, is the normal one. But @huja sparked me to play with it - I think it can be read either way?
I am now fuzzy on the details of whatever sentence structure knowledge I once held.
Uncertain about the answer in pure theoretical terms, but still, a nice moment of curiosity.
Blaise Pascal:
Provincial Letters: Letter XVI (4 December 1656)
I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.
(Literally: I made this one [letter] longer only because I have not had the leisure to make it shorter.)
From Wikipedia (Pascal entry):
Such statements have also been attributed to Mark Twain, T.S. Eliot, Cicero, and others besides, but this article at Quote Investigator concludes that Pascal’s statement is likely the original source of the phrase. http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/
I think I remember that Mark Twain quoted or paraphrased it at some point.
I have great and constant need of the excuse. Also the habit of not being brief, and the eternal lack of time conspire to gather me toward procrastination.
(goes without saying that I am entirely helpless here, and have no responsibility whatsoever.)
Here is an earlier version, not even close to pithy.
In English translation:
“In regard to the questions which you have asked me, I would like to have known what your own answers would have been; for thus I might have made my reply in fewer words, and might most easily confirm or correct your opinions, by approving or amending the answers which you had given. This I would have greatly preferred. But desiring to answer you at once, I think it better to write a long letter than incur loss of time…”
Something Parmigiana, with a bowl of pasta Bolognese and a Ceasar salad. Hopefully some nice Chianti, and good company to share it with.
/image Italian good company
Anything that I don’t have to cook, that doesn’t come out of a can, isn’t a microwave dinner, isn’t overly spicy or made of exotic creatures such as bugs or snakes.
12 course meal. One of the reasons I love cruising, 5 course meal every night, multiples of each course if desired, no prices on the menu because it’s all included so choose what you want not what you can afford. Nice dishware, excellent service, nice presentation, someone else cooks and cleans.
You can withstand a small portion of extreme flattery, without sustaining serious discomfort, injury or impairment, can’t you? I hope so.
Please be forewarned.
I got an image of your exquisite (as I presume) dinners in my mind,
and I thought of this:
From:
John F Kennedy
Remarks at a Dinner Honoring Nobel Prize Winners of the Western Hemisphere.
April 29, 1962
“I want to tell you how welcome you are to the White House. I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”
Hmmmm. I don’t think I regret doing that. Will you survive unscathed? ; )
Poplar Forest, Jefferson’s mini-Monticello and private retreat near Lynchburg, VA.
(Now a operating as a museum, and undergoing repair and restoration)
Visitors, invited and un-, arrived at Monticello every day to shake the hand of the man who had written the Declaration of Independence. So Jefferson designed and built a far smaller and more rural retreat for privacy and solitude for a few weeks or months each year, when he could manage an escape.
We have now a now a slight family connection (by way of a recent marriage) to this lovely house (someone is related to someone who is related to someone who … [you know the South]); but unfortunately, afaik, no family connection to anyone named Jefferson.
“My, my. Do tell.” (As Always-Right Grandmother might say.
I was texting the family historian this morning, about Mother’s Day, and I mentioned going to Poplar Forest and Monticello.
He and I wandered over to how Always-Right Grandmother used to say she regretted we didn’t have a direct family connect to TJ, and how both my historian-source and I had been kinda sorry that we unknowingly grabbed our connection to TJ via this recent marriage, and unfortunately Always-Right Grandmother was no longer alive to make everything possible out of it.
She would have loved this so much that it might have gotten her off the topics of modern politics and modern degeneracy for a while.
Aside: Modern Degeneracy:
When Always-Right Grandmother talked about the epic and continual contagion of modern degeneracy, back when I was a teenager, she would smile and pat my knee or shoulder, if I were close enough, and say: “Now, not you, dear. I don’t mean you.”
By which she actually meant, but only said in private: “Yes, you, dear, I do mean you; but you don’t embarrass us so very often, and you don’t start political arguments in public, and I know you intend only the best, and it would be lovely if you would stop being a communist, and I’m sure you will become sane someday, and we forgive you, and don’t forget, you are family.”
Her definition of “communist” was anyone to the left of President Reagan, once he entered politics.
We were all used to this. It was a running family meme to imitate her.
Back to Ancestry Madness
We had no idea we were getting ancestry bragging material in this recent marriage, until we got to the wedding and found an astonishing knowledge and awareness of Virginia history in a few elderly members of bride’s family.
A few members of the bride’s family Seriously Had History. And Knew Stuff. They knew stuff about us! That we had no clue about.
Perhaps it comes from living in Virginia.
(Time to salute @OldCatLady and Florence King’s Southern Ladies and Gentlemen)
I did hear someone kinda sniff, after a few glasses of champagne,
“Your people all always kept wandering off to places like Texas”.
(The word “Texas” in that sentence was pronounced with a certain emphasis. Clearly, only slightly disreputable or mad people of questionable judgement ever did anything like that.)
And I tend to agree with her about the disreputable and questionable quality of such a choice. Texas, indeed! The very idea!
So my history relation talked at length with our new relations-by-marriage during the many slightly drunken wedding festivities, and one of them ratted out the TJ and GW connections. And my history source somehow managed to remember a few facts when he was sober again, and check them out
So I stand corrected. It seems, once your family bags a few genuine Virginian members of the Lee family from the Old Dominion days, you get Virginians and more Virginians and then some Virginians and a few Virginians. I kinda feel for my Grandmother. In the days before the internet, I guess doing the looking up connections involved more than coffee, a couch, and a laptop.
So we’ve got our Lee’s, we’ve got our Jefferson’s, we’ve got our Washington’s (I couldn’t quite follow how that managed to be), we even have Helen Keller somehow or other.
And is possible, thru some bizarre path, that we have the outlaw James brothers, Frank and Jesse. Undetermined, as yet.
(Of course, ancestry fanatics are often only into the famous or infamous ones, and whatever weirdness has to be involved in “validation” is obviously acceptable and simply serves to prove the point.
Everyone has, I would think, some notable relations or ancestors somewhere, if people are willing to use the same research methods and the same degree of fanatic imagination, and the same habits of “overlooking negative evidence” and “overlooking absence of evidence” that this sort of researcher sometimes justifies, according to my hero, Florence King.)
The point is selective emphasis. And selective forgetting-to-mention the qualifiers. It’s an art.
I am trying to image Always Right-Grandmother let loose on the internet. The image is either totally horrifying or totally delightful, I can’t decide.
She was very conservative, in personal style and approach, as well as in politics. I don’t think our current President would be much to her taste. In my mind, I can hear her pronouncing the word “vulgar” with a very distinct final, dismissive tone in her voice.
I was thinking I could be in FL in way less than 24 hours, barring some damned cop.
Was something like 27 hours or 28 hours FW-Miami, when we drove like we didn’t care. Actually, as I recall, we were never very unsafe, and didn’t speed in cities and towns. Just went fast on the interstates.
Now how do I compensate for and recover from having seen that, fantasized about it, wanted it, and now I find out it’s in Italy and going to Italy doesn’t fit into my life this month?
Something ultra tasty and ultra healthy that someone brings to me or perhaps it just magically appears, and I don’t have to go deal with it at all, either making it, being interrupted by it, or cleaning up after it.
Or
Amazing food out with family and friends and no one sweated to cook and prepare the food, unless they love doing that.
/image tex-mex
I lean much more towards the twelve course meal with proper place settings than towards the meal-on-a-stick. I don’t know that I would be happy with a twelve course email, even if it were the old fashioned kind:
Where each course was not meant to be a full meal, but rather a sampling of an item…
Where the meal itself went on for two or three hours (or more), and conversation was an expected part…
Where everyone dressed properly, and the seating was deliberate, so as to promote interesting and civil discussions of various light topics…
Where (and this is VERY important) someone else did the cooking, the serving, the cleaning up, and so on…
I sit down every evening to dinner, and even if it’s only vaguely formal, it’s still dinner, with silverware, cloth napkin, water glass, wine glass, and good china. Of course, I’m the one that prepared it, and clean up after I’m finished, but it’s still civilized and pleasant. I eat out now and then with friends, but it’s less fancy than what’s in my home (and I’m fine with that).
Tonight it’s lamb, and steamed zucchini with butter, fresh carrots, and cherry tomatoes, and a glass of Pinot Noir (Williamette Valley Vineyards).
@Shrdlu how does one get an invite to dinner at your place? It sounds fantastic.
@Shrdlu
Damn.
/giphy wide-eyed
I want to live in that castle. I just don’t want to bother with any of the work.
As bad as I am at dressing up, I could manage it for that. I do have a real thing for lawn dresses and tea dresses.
@CaptAmehrican Ah, the problem is, I live alone. On purpose. In the summer especially, I may go two or three days without talking to anyone (except for all you crazy people online), and I go out of my way to avoid guests. I have a house that’s considered a four bedroom house (two stories), with a “family room” and another room identified as a den/office (it’s not considered a bedroom because it doesn’t have a closet). I only have one bed (it’s actually a futon, because it’s more comfortable for me). There’s only one chair in the living room that’s meant to sit on.
Yes, I really am that antisocial.
@f00l I would never be happy living in such a large place (that palace in your picture). My current house is about 2200 sq ft, but I’d rather have it a tiny bit larger. I could probably live in half the space if I didn’t have a slight problem with loving certain kinds of beautiful things (Carnival glass, and antique tea sets, for example).
@Shrdlu you and I really could be great friends!
@Shrdlu
That’s a pix of Castle Hward, famously used as the film loc for the superb and gorgeous Granada TV/ITV mini-series shoot of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited in 1981, starring Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews. So very good.
And the whole point of having a castle or palace is that other people take care of it. Presumably other nicely well-treated people, so that we can all fantasize about living there with no guilt attached to the fantasy. The “homesteader(s)” have manageable apartments within.
The Queen and her family live this way, for diplomatic reasons (she has guests year-round except Xmas and perhaps Easter, guest lists often rec’d by the PM). The nobility live this way a little, if the house pays for itself and they have the $.
Pre-WWI, European nobility and the very wealthy did not retreat into apartments, but openly lived in the entire house; while every so often an heir married an American heiress so that they would have the $ to keep the place up.
After WWI, many European thrones were gone, but many nobility and the very wealthy still lived in the “whole house” and entertained constantly, if they could afford to.
The European “house party” at a great family seat had the lovely custom that everyone was cared for, and everyone was let alone to do as they pleased, except for lunch, dinner, and evening conversation; and many delightful activities were offered both to those who would preferred company and those whose preferred solitude. Kinda nice if you could get the invite, knew the customs, and could afford a reasonable wardrobe.
Makes for excellent nostalgia. After WWII much of that abated, as even the aristocracy started to work; but the wealthy still pull it off from time to time. The Queen does much of that year round, at Windsor and at Balmoral. When guests arrive, the staff unpacks and irons all the clothing, including underwear! Take some nice things, I say!
I actually know a member of the Howard family (a very old and important family among the Catholic nobility). Born here, no title or honorific, tho she might have one had she been born there. She’s not sure. Americans can’t have hereditary titles period.
If she goes there, supposedly they’ll put her up for a a few days, as befitting for a family member.
I think she’s never been across. She’s a fanatic compulsive coder and dev in Silicon Valley. She might go to England someday. ; )
I think Castie Howard is mostly open to the public. The family actually lives at another one (those wacky aristocrats and their castles)!
Still at Castle Howard from the TV production
Chatsworth (Duke of Devonshire)
Blenheim (Duke Of Marlborough)
(American $ paid for this one, by means of the dowry (something like $60M in todays’s $) of the unwillingly married, 17 year-old Consuelo Vanderbilt, later the unhappily married Duchess of Marlborough)
(Winston Churchill, nephew and later cousin of the Duke of Marlborough, grew up here)
The Duke and Duchess (Sunny and Consuelo)
A good intro to the late Victorian and Edwardian way of life among the rich and titled is in an early (perhaps 1st?) chapter of the first book of William Manchestor’s The Last Lion trilogy, a damned good Churchill bio.
Edwardian lawn dress
1920’s lawn dress
(simplified, and hems went up)
I have a fascination with these.
@Shrdlu You get a gold star for using dinner as a verb.
@f00l I wish you hadn’t posted those. Now I want one.
huja (at sign removed deliberately, since I’m merely commenting, without seeing the need for notification)
I have puzzled through what I had written for hours, and finally identified the sentence you are speaking of (because I was very sure I hadn’t done this).
“I sit down every evening to dinner…” is the phrase you’re speaking of (it’s the only one that seems to make sense in this context). The word “dinner” is the object of that phrase, and not a verb (in this case). I’m sure that the language I speak, and the way I phrase things in general, is growing archaic, and it’s not surprising. I’m old, and every day I wake up, I’m a day older (better than not waking up at all, though, right?).
Everything changes. Everything.
@Shrdlu It takes me longer to write a simple sentence using short words than to write a complex or compound one using longer words.
@OldCatLady
You want which?
1 An aristocrat?
2 A castle or palace complete with staff and full funds for operation and maintenance and funds to fly back and forth and to live a lifestyle over here to match?
3 A gorgeous tea dress?
I’ll take items 2 or 3 without looking too closely at the gift horse.
Item 1 might be interesting, but I might only “take the aristocrat” to dinner, so to speak, and pump them for attitude, history, eclectic knowledge, and gossip. And invites, of course. Especially invites to places with big art and huge libraries and lots of moors and fields of heather cool dungeons and hidden rooms where they kept the crazy heir, and cool firearms for shooting practice, and a serious stable wouldn’t hurt, and stuff.
This castle will do.
Pierrefonds (Picardy)
(Merlin’s Castle in the TV series I think)
A tea dress I like:
This one is mid-Victorian, I think. Note the total over-doing of everything that the Victorians so loved.
OK, their ancestors loved over-doing stuff too.
Charles II as a baby:
And all grown up:
@Shrdlu
After @huja’s comment, I re-read your post.
I think your reading, which was mine, is the normal one. But @huja sparked me to play with it - I think it can be read either way?
I am now fuzzy on the details of whatever sentence structure knowledge I once held.
Uncertain about the answer in pure theoretical terms, but still, a nice moment of curiosity.
@OldCatLady
Blaise Pascal:
Provincial Letters: Letter XVI (4 December 1656)
(Literally: I made this one [letter] longer only because I have not had the leisure to make it shorter.)
From Wikipedia (Pascal entry):
More on other sources:
http://www.classy.dk/log/archive/001074.html
I think I remember that Mark Twain quoted or paraphrased it at some point.
I have great and constant need of the excuse. Also the habit of not being brief, and the eternal lack of time conspire to gather me toward procrastination.
(goes without saying that I am entirely helpless here, and have no responsibility whatsoever.)
@OldCatLady
Here is an earlier version, not even close to pithy.
In English translation:
St Augustine, “Letter 54” (AD 400)
(Also called Book I of Replies to Questions of Januarius.
http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1102054.htm
I think some Latin scholars and Roman historians trace the thought to Cicero. I can’t find one yet tho.
fresh roasted and ground coffee with dark chocolate and cheese
@Cerridwyn cheese in your coffee?
@mikibell no, beside it. you drink the coffee and nibble the chocolate and cheese, can throw in some nice compote and crackers if you like
@Cerridwyn heheheheh sorry, it was too easy…but sounds yummy!
@Ignorant Not easy to eat off a stick.
@huja it’s fucking chunky!
Slab o bloody cow, baked sweet potato with brown sugar and butter, and green salad with maries bleu cheeze dressing.
@cranky1950
And weird wimmen for company?
@f00l fersure
@cranky1950
/giphy You’re cranky.
@hems79
@cranky1950
Re Being cranky:
One can only hope.
Fish meat balls, white sauce, and boiled potatoes. It’s the meal I miss the most from Norway.
@RiotDemon wow, i remember my grandmother making that. I couldn’t stand to look at it, LOL, guess it was all the white
@Cerridwyn that’s the best part, lol
Whenever I get a can of the fish meatballs, I always find it weird that they show carrots in the mix. Don’t taint my pool of white food, k tnx.
Fancy twelve course meal… deep-fried and served on a stick.
No favorite- lots o’things I love eating though- my scale says TOO many!
Something Parmigiana, with a bowl of pasta Bolognese and a Ceasar salad. Hopefully some nice Chianti, and good company to share it with.
/image Italian good company
@2many2no My kingdom for a good, classic Caesar salad.
Anything that I don’t have to cook, that doesn’t come out of a can, isn’t a microwave dinner, isn’t overly spicy or made of exotic creatures such as bugs or snakes.
Pasta anything or double-deckers.
12 course meal. One of the reasons I love cruising, 5 course meal every night, multiples of each course if desired, no prices on the menu because it’s all included so choose what you want not what you can afford. Nice dishware, excellent service, nice presentation, someone else cooks and cleans.
Soylent Green
@mrapathy
/giphy Soylent Green
@2many2no
/giphy soylent
@shrdlu
You can withstand a small portion of extreme flattery, without sustaining serious discomfort, injury or impairment, can’t you? I hope so.
Please be forewarned.
I got an image of your exquisite (as I presume) dinners in my mind,
and I thought of this:
From:
John F Kennedy
Remarks at a Dinner Honoring Nobel Prize Winners of the Western Hemisphere.
April 29, 1962
“I want to tell you how welcome you are to the White House. I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”
Hmmmm. I don’t think I regret doing that. Will you survive unscathed? ; )
Poplar Forest, Jefferson’s mini-Monticello and private retreat near Lynchburg, VA.
(Now a operating as a museum, and undergoing repair and restoration)
Visitors, invited and un-, arrived at Monticello every day to shake the hand of the man who had written the Declaration of Independence. So Jefferson designed and built a far smaller and more rural retreat for privacy and solitude for a few weeks or months each year, when he could manage an escape.
We have now a now a slight family connection (by way of a recent marriage) to this lovely house (someone is related to someone who is related to someone who … [you know the South]); but unfortunately, afaik, no family connection to anyone named Jefferson.
Update: Ancestry madness!
“My, my. Do tell.” (As Always-Right Grandmother might say.
I was texting the family historian this morning, about Mother’s Day, and I mentioned going to Poplar Forest and Monticello.
He and I wandered over to how Always-Right Grandmother used to say she regretted we didn’t have a direct family connect to TJ, and how both my historian-source and I had been kinda sorry that we unknowingly grabbed our connection to TJ via this recent marriage, and unfortunately Always-Right Grandmother was no longer alive to make everything possible out of it.
She would have loved this so much that it might have gotten her off the topics of modern politics and modern degeneracy for a while.
Aside: Modern Degeneracy:
When Always-Right Grandmother talked about the epic and continual contagion of modern degeneracy, back when I was a teenager, she would smile and pat my knee or shoulder, if I were close enough, and say:
“Now, not you, dear. I don’t mean you.”
By which she actually meant, but only said in private:
“Yes, you, dear, I do mean you; but you don’t embarrass us so very often, and you don’t start political arguments in public, and I know you intend only the best, and it would be lovely if you would stop being a communist, and I’m sure you will become sane someday, and we forgive you, and don’t forget, you are family.”
Her definition of “communist” was anyone to the left of President Reagan, once he entered politics.
We were all used to this. It was a running family meme to imitate her.
Back to Ancestry Madness
We had no idea we were getting ancestry bragging material in this recent marriage, until we got to the wedding and found an astonishing knowledge and awareness of Virginia history in a few elderly members of bride’s family.
A few members of the bride’s family Seriously Had History. And Knew Stuff.
They knew stuff about us! That we had no clue about.
Perhaps it comes from living in Virginia.
(Time to salute @OldCatLady and Florence King’s Southern Ladies and Gentlemen)
I did hear someone kinda sniff, after a few glasses of champagne,
“Your people all always kept wandering off to places like Texas”.
(The word “Texas” in that sentence was pronounced with a certain emphasis. Clearly, only slightly disreputable or mad people of questionable judgement ever did anything like that.)
And I tend to agree with her about the disreputable and questionable quality of such a choice.
Texas, indeed! The very idea!
So my history relation talked at length with our new relations-by-marriage during the many slightly drunken wedding festivities, and one of them ratted out the TJ and GW connections. And my history source somehow managed to remember a few facts when he was sober again, and check them out
So I stand corrected. It seems, once your family bags a few genuine Virginian members of the Lee family from the Old Dominion days, you get Virginians and more Virginians and then some Virginians and a few Virginians. I kinda feel for my Grandmother. In the days before the internet, I guess doing the looking up connections involved more than coffee, a couch, and a laptop.
So we’ve got our Lee’s, we’ve got our Jefferson’s, we’ve got our Washington’s (I couldn’t quite follow how that managed to be), we even have Helen Keller somehow or other.
And is possible, thru some bizarre path, that we have the outlaw James brothers, Frank and Jesse. Undetermined, as yet.
(Of course, ancestry fanatics are often only into the famous or infamous ones, and whatever weirdness has to be involved in “validation” is obviously acceptable and simply serves to prove the point.
Everyone has, I would think, some notable relations or ancestors somewhere, if people are willing to use the same research methods and the same degree of fanatic imagination, and the same habits of “overlooking negative evidence” and “overlooking absence of evidence” that this sort of researcher sometimes justifies, according to my hero, Florence King.)
The point is selective emphasis. And selective forgetting-to-mention the qualifiers. It’s an art.
I am trying to image Always Right-Grandmother let loose on the internet. The image is either totally horrifying or totally delightful, I can’t decide.
She was very conservative, in personal style and approach, as well as in politics. I don’t think our current President would be much to her taste. In my mind, I can hear her pronouncing the word “vulgar” with a very distinct final, dismissive tone in her voice.
Happy Mother’s Day, Always-Right Grandmother!
Fried baby artichokes
,
spaghetti alle vongole
spit-roasted suckling pig,
tartufo.
@OldCatLady
Save some, please. I’ll be right there.
@f00l It was during a trip to Rome, at a very busy restaurant in Trastevere. Road trip!
@OldCatLady
You’re messing with me.
I was thinking I could be in FL in way less than 24 hours, barring some damned cop.
Was something like 27 hours or 28 hours FW-Miami, when we drove like we didn’t care. Actually, as I recall, we were never very unsafe, and didn’t speed in cities and towns. Just went fast on the interstates.
Now how do I compensate for and recover from having seen that, fantasized about it, wanted it, and now I find out it’s in Italy and going to Italy doesn’t fit into my life this month?
/image Rome
