Daily Blague

After dinner (a pizza), I decided to call our great law school friend who lives in Western Connecticut. She was home, and Kathleen was home, and we all had a great chat. Our friend adopted a Chinese baby girl a few years ago, as a single mom, something that, according to the latest news, is no longer going to be doable.

Our friend is our age, or at least Kathleen's, and having a small child in the house can be really, really tiring once you've passed fifty. What she's really tired of, as it happens, is being asked if her daughter is her granddaughter. But there's no doubting that age brings a certain distancing wisdom. Children are preposterously astute in the know-your-audience department, and I doubt that the adopted child of thirtysomethings would have dared announce, as our friend's daughter did recently, that she was so dissatisfied with the current arrangement that she planned to return to China - "after the holidays." We're talking about a four year-old. She isn't leaving before Santa Cauls.

And then I ruined our lovely evening. I overstate. I wanted to write a few Christmas cards, but couldn't for the life of me remember where I'd put them. A senior moment. Now that everything has worked out well, I see that I must learn to stop being angry with myself for these lapses, simply because, once they've flared, I'm all too willing to pour them on to Kathleen, and make her, if not the responsible party, then the person who ought to have been responsible. As conflicts go, tonight's was a mere burst of flame followed by the darkness of all's-well. I ran around for under ten minutes exclaiming that I couldn't be expected to remember everything and that I could use a little help &c,  even if it did mean following me around the apartment and taking note of where I put every little thing. (Shades of Bringing Up Baby?) While I was declaiming operatically, though, my memory was working: I remembered one thing, and that led to remembering where the cards were. I apologized profusely. I sat down at the desk and wrote the cards while Kathleen, exhausted by the ordeal, went to sleep.

She forgave me, but I am going back to China after the holidays. I'm too ashamed of myself not to.