Lessons in Eating Alone

When I was a kid in Paris, my parents would ask the one-floor-up neighbor at 3, rue de la Terrasse, to babysit me.   These were rare occasions I always enjoyed. Madame Yelena Sokolov’s apartment was far more interesting than the one I lived in, and she always addressed me as Jeune (young) Monsieur Thierry. I never learned her maiden name. She was the daughter of a White Russian refugee, and she claimed a direct if confusing link to Nikolai Alexandrovich Romanov, the last tsar of Russia. She smelled of lavender and her white hair was always up in a tight bun. She had high cheekbones, thin and serious lips, an aquiline nose and piercing blue eyes. In her younger years she must have been stunning. My father occasionally flirted with her–or tried to. She was not particularly amenable, and, in retrospect, it is clear she thought my family was one step up from barefooted serfdom. Mme. Sokolov fixed herself three complete meals each day and never ate leftovers. Sometimes, when I was in her apartment, she would set the table for one with two forks, two knives, three glasses and two linen napkins–one for the main course and one for dessert, which was usually sherbet in a silver cup. I was never invited to sit at her table. I had a special small chair and was given a tray to balance on my knees, which I did fearfully. She served me minute amounts of her own minute servings. I remember veal in a sweetly bitter sauce, fish so white it dazzled the eye, tiny potatoes no bigger than grapes, and only once a thin slice of bleeding meat that may have been Steak Tartar or perhaps a Russian version of Beef Carpaccio. Everything she cooked, she consumed. When she ate, it was with both hands on the table, holding a fork with the tines pointed downward, and a small, very sharp knife. Her back was straight, and if mine was not, she would mutter, “Votre dos, Jeune Monsieur Sagnier. Nous ne sommes pas des paysans.” Being called a peasant was the ultimate slur. I remember thinking it must be very sad to always cook for oneself and eat alone. Now I do it two or three times a week, sometimes sadly, but mostly not. I seldom set the table, though I always sit, and think eating while standing is a crime against taste and worthy manners. My cooking repertoire is limited. I make a good Salade Niçoise and decent shepherd’s pie. My ratatouille is famous, my rice and beans acceptable. My pasta is always al dente. I often cook in large quantities and eat the same thing for a week or longer. I throw out too much food and feel guilty for it. I occasionally bake, more often grill, and on very rare occasions invite people to my home to dine. I often think of Madame Sokolov’s lonely culinary exploits, and where I had seen aloneness, I now believe there existed a wonderful expression and reward of the self. Madame Sokolov never once evinced the slightest hint of melancholy. She was proud, kind in a fashion that no longer exists, self-contained, her manners impeccable. She had an elegance that brooked no nonsense and the ways of an exiled princess which, for all I know, is precisely what she was. I have no idea what became of Madame Sokolov.  Her name, it turns out, is among the most common in Russia. It is cited in a 1920’s book titled “The Last Days of the Romanovs.” Grigori Sokolov is a celebrated pianist. Alexander Sokolov was a champion arm-wrestler. Authors, painters, and several families in Minnesota also bear the name. I doubt her history will ever be known. But I think of her teaching manners to a small child of another culture, cooking alone in a minuscule kitchen, among the last of her class and bearing, a proud survivor of the Russian revolution. I hope she was celebrating herself. If you enjoy these blogs, be sure to read my novel, L’Amérique, available from Apprentice Press and Amazon.

Marie-Thérèse Henriette Hughette Février Sagnier

Today marks the 32^nd anniversary of my mother’s death. Marie-Thérèse Henriette Hughette Février Sagnier was an amazing woman, a liberated person long before it was fashionable, a feminist, an artist, writer, painter, an amateur actor and musician.

She was a soldier, too, and my favorite photo is of her and her new beau—my father—both wearing the uniforms of the Free French and smitten with each other. They are standing in a Dresden-like scene of total wartime devastation. Their feet are firmly planted in bombed-out rubble, and a spectral vision of a half-destroyed church is behind them. They are smiling and in love.

This icon was always in a prominent place in our family homes. I never thought to ask about it, and only recently a friend noticed that in the photo, my mother is holding a dog on a leash, a large black thing that may have been a poodle. Another mystery. When I was growing up in Paris, we never had a dog. We couldn’t afford one.

She was not an easy person with whom to get along. She was ambitious, anxiety-ridden, an early user of pharmaceuticals to ease her angst and force a smile. She liked her evening scotch and soda a bit too much. She could be critical and judgmental, traits she inherited from her own father, a man from whom she ran away when she was sixteen years old.

She had an uneasy relationship with her two daughters by an earlier marriage, one of whom wrote and published a series of books my mother found unfair, short works that roundly criticized everything about my mother’s life—her divorce from my sisters’ father, her remarriage, her decision to come with her new family to the United States. The books pained her, even as she was proud of her daughter’s rise to a moderate fame in the French literary world.

America confused her. She did not speak English when she arrived, and always struggled with the unfamiliar tongue. The newness of the country left her both amazed and wanting to go back to the familiarity of France.

She and my father returned to Paris after his retirement. Cancer took her quickly. She never complained, and on the eve of being hospitalized for the final time, she hosted a bridge party and served hors d’oeuvres she had assembled in her kitchen.

She gritted her teeth and smiled through the afternoon, and the next day was taken by ambulance to the American Hospital in Paris where, decades earlier, she’d given birth to me.

Our love and relationship were tumultuous. She wanted me to become a diplomat and serve in the Foreign Service. I didn’t. She forgave my shortcomings when my stories appeared in the Washington Post. She would call her friends and, “oh, by the way,” mention my byline in that day’s newspaper.

It made me happy to please her. Thirty-two years later, she is still a daily presence in my life.

La Famille, Part Five

My Oncle Jacques was not a nice person. He was tall and slim, with the slicked-back hair popular among American movie stars, and he wore thick, black-framed glasses that he hoped made him look like an intellectual, which he was not. What he was, as his father—my paternal grandfather—liked to remind everyone, was a gifted concert pianist who, for two decades, was the toast of France and, for reasons unknown, Rio de Janeiro.

It’s difficult for me to offer an honest opinion of him. He mistreated his younger sister—my mother—and often behaved like a lout, with the approval and support of his father.

Shortly after the demise of Le Petomane, the flatulist Joseph Pujol, practical jokes were the height of entertainment. Pujol’s strange ability to fart songs and extinguish candles at a distance had made farting all the rage. Oncle Jacques and his father’s favorite trick was to sit on either side of a woman dinner guest. My grandfather would surreptitiously tug the woman’s dinner napkin off her lap and onto the floor, and discreetly point to the cloth. The woman would lean to one side to retrieve the napkin, and my uncle would slip a whoopee cushion onto her chair. As she straightened up, the cushion would emit a dreadfully loud farting sound and silence the table. My grandfather, always the gentleman, would pat the prank victim on the arm and say, “Please, Madame, it could happen to anyone.”  

All in good fun.

Another flatulent pastime was conducting a telephone conversation while in the toilette, breaking wind and flushing every time the party on the other end of the call began to speak. Oncle Jacques did this with elan and enjoyed the embarrassment it caused among female acquaintances.

He was also a storyteller. In his keyboard repertoire was the very complex and demanding Left Hand Concerto by Ravel. Oncle Jacques would whisper to fans that the composer had written the piece to develop Jacques’ left hand, which was weaker than his right one. This was untrue. Ravel’s work was created for a military pilot who had lost his hand fighting the airborne enemy during World War 1. Jacque’s lie was never challenged and enhanced his already significant reputation.

For all his shortcomings, Jacque’s talent lives on. Most of Poulenc and Ravel’s recorded works exist thanks to Jacques’ LPs and CDs  available in record stores and online. He was an Oscar Wilde character, living for weeks and months in an admirer’s chateau where he would entertain guests and in turn be offered hospitality, meals, trips, and clothing. He was one of Jean Cocteau’s horizontal friends and I have an old photo of him with Coco Chanel, Igor Stravinsky and other luminaries of the time.

Members of the family did not get along. Jacques, in particular, considered himself a leading light, and was often at odds with uncles, aunts and cousins. He particularly disliked my Tante Thérése, a member of the Bertrand clan, who had married very young and, before being widowed, had lived an adventurous life in the French colonies. Their enmity grew as the years passed, and eventually they refused to be in the same room together.

Tante Thérése died in the late 50s and was ensconced in the Bertrand/Fevrier crypt at Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. My uncle, I am told, was delighted. He died a few years later, struck down by a motorbike ridden by a drunk shoemaker. There was only one space left in the family’s crypt, and Oncle Jacques was laid there, next to Tante Therese for all eternity.

If you enjoy these blogs, be sure to read my novel, L’Amérique, available from Apprentice Press and Amazon.

Family–An Aside

I often think about death. I don’t talk about it too often because it’s considered inelegant, and it makes others squeamish. But birth and death are the two most important events in one’s life, and talking openly and seriously about the latter should be encouraged, rather than avoided.

I have reached and surpassed my past due date, which for males in the U.S. is 73.5 years. Life expectancy for U.S. men has fallen and it is now six years less than that of women.

At my age, I have lost both parents, one older sister, uncles, aunts and cousins, three best friends, one significant other, and a number of acquaintances, casual colleagues and comrades, teachers and students and neighbors.

I have enough health issues both significant and not to realize and accept that there’s not an infinity of time left. I am not a religious man, though I do believe there is some sort of higher force out there, and that it isn’t me. I don’t believe in heaven or hell, but I do allow that anything’s possible. I’ve often wondered why pain and discomfort are far more the norm than happiness and pleasure, and why this higher power has not made the business of creation less violent and more amicable. I believe that Tennyson nailed it: Nature (is) red of tooth and claw. But I wonder why…

I remember reading years ago that the body doesn’t remember pain. I’m not sure whether this is a quote or urban knowledge, and it doesn’t really matter—it’s true. Would we be as willingly violent if we remembered ever scrape and scratch?  Would women be willing to have a second child if they could remember the almost unbearable pain associated with the first? And why pain? Why hasn’t nature allowed birth to be a pleasant experience? Why are violence and creation cousins so inextricably linked? There’s something of a bait-and-switch here. Sex is pleasant, hopefully for both parties involved, but the end result of sex, its culmination—birth—is painful and, until recently, often fatal to the child bearer. This makes no sense. The Zulus knew this and understood that when a woman gives birth, it’s the man who lies down.

What I find interesting about death and illness is the embarrassment that surrounds them. When asked how we are by friends, we do not respond with a litany of ills. We say we’re good, fine, thank you, and we turn the question back to the querier, “And how are YOU?”  

My answer to the inevitable is, “I’m peachy!” If that doesn’t lead to a change of subject, I’ll go with peachy KEEN!  That seldom fails.

I have had the dubious distinctions of seeing both my mother and father shortly after they died. My mom was in a room in the American Hospital in Paris which, strangely enough, is where she gave birth to me. Lifeless, she seemed so small, it was difficult to associate her slight body with the sheer dimensions of her personality. My dad died in the U.S. following a fall from a window. He too was small in death, and neither wore a revealing expression. They were not serene, or happy, or sad. They’d become empty vessels whose usefulness was past.

I know both suffered, and death must have been a welcome escape. I’m grateful for that, but unlikely to ever understand why pain was necessary.

La Famille Part 4

I know so little of my father’s history that I’m almost embarrassed. Of course, he wasn’t the most garrulous man, and whatever prompted him to leave his London-based Franco-English family when he was still young will remain a mystery. One event in particular stayed with me for decades and is unlikely to ever be solved.

I was 17 years old, returning from a party. The front door to our house was open. My mother was at the top of the stairs, my father at the bottom. Both were yelling. They fell silent when they saw me. My mother turned, went into their bedroom, and slammed the door. I was standing five feet from my father when he turned away, shaking his head. “I never should have left my first wife,” he said.

The incident was never mentioned until decades later, when he was in the hospital after a violent encounter with a tenant in the Alzheimer’s-friendly building where they both lived. My father didn’t remember what had happened and could not understand why he was hospitalized and strapped to his bed like an animal. I explained and he muttered, “C’est absurde. Ridicule…“ Then I asked, “Papa, tu étais marié avant Maman?” I saw something in his eyes, which vanished as quickly as it had appeared. “Qui t’a dit ça?”

“You did. You and Maman were arguing, and you said you’d been married before…”

I unbuckled the straps at his wrists and ankles. He sat up painfully and tried to stand. I pushed him back gently. He sat on the edge of the bed. “There was no one before your mother. Or after.”

I insisted. “But you said…”

“No. I didn’t.” He yawned. “Je suis fatigué.”

He lay back down on the bed and yawned again. He closed his eyes.

At that moment, a doctor came in. She was a slight woman, with a pronounced Balkan accent. “Ah,” she said. “You are the son? He said you would come.”

We spoke for a few minutes about my father’s condition. “You can take him home tomorrow,” she said. “He’ll be much better off with you than here.”

I wanted to ask the doctor if he had mentioned a first wife, then thought better of it. If he hadn’t spoken about it for almost half a century, I had no right to question his secret.

Maman’s family was different, openly outrageous as it clung to a vestige of upper middle-class values. My great uncle Jules, my maternal grandfather’s brother, was an architect of some notoriety. He had designed various buildings in Paris, and his chef d’oeuvre was a large rectangular structure that was the headquarters of the Banque de France.

Jules and his wife—I believe her name was Sidonne—did not like each other, and as the years passed by, the dislike turned to a vociferous loathing often voiced during family gatherings. Sidonne, it appears, was not highly regarded. The Février/Bertrand clan thought Jules had married far below his station, and the union’s sole saving—and unspoken—grace was Sidone’s wealth. An only child, she had inherited a copious amount of Francs shortly after wedding Jules, and kept the purse-strings tightly knotted.

Jules devised an elegant retribution. When the Banque de France building was inaugurated, he led guests to the roof and pointed out the gargoyles sculpted by Italian artisans. There was an even dozen, distributed so that their gaping mouths spewed forth gushes of water off the roof every time it rained. There, among the horrific griffin, wyvern, and chimera, was a gargoyle sculpted as a monstrous woman’s face, a medusa with a gaping maw, a perfect if exaggerated rendition of his wife Sidonne’s head.

When Sidonne died not much later, Jules inherited her money, a tidy sum that enabled him to start keeping company with an 18-year-old chorus line dancer from the Folies Bergères. Enamored, he bought her a small candy store, as she had a sweet tooth. The girl—I was told all this by my mother—was an average dancer and could barely count to ten. While Jules was visiting Poland, she sold the bonbonière and fled Paris with a stagehand. Neither were ever seen again.

If you enjoy these blogs, be sure to read my novel, L’Amérique, available from Apprentice Press and Amazon.

La Famille, Part 3

The building in Paris where I was raised was erected in the late 1890s with all the modern appurtenances. There was running water, an elevator, flushing toilets, and even electricity, which had been introduced to the capital in 1870. It was built like an L lying on its side, with a central courtyard and a porte cochère, an entrance wide enough to accept horse-drawn carriages. There were five floors, the topmost featuring a balcony. It was a good, but not great, address. The 17^th arrondissement was close to the Parc Monceau and its Metro stop, and the surrounding streets were lined with brasseries, cafés and bistros.

Of the five floors, three were peopled by the Bertrand/Février/Sagnier clan. On the rez-de-chaussée, on either side of the porte cochère lived my great Oncle Répaud, a roundish man, hero of the first world war during which he was wounded. Répaud had a three-legged dog, Soldat, who had a perpetual sub-sonic growl which did not make him popular among the tenants. Répaud walked the beast several times a day. I did not like the dog and it did not like me. I suspect Oncle Répaud did not like him much either. Soldat was neither friendly nor attractive but his infirmity made him the perfect companion for a wounded hero, and so both the three-legged animal and its hobbling companion tolerated each other.

Thursday afternoons, I made it a point to accompany them on their walk around the block, School was let out early, and the new Tintin magazine was delivered to the news kiosks. Répaud and the kiosk owner were Thursday afternoon friends. They gossiped, spoke of the war, shook their heads sadly at the state of the country’s armed forces, lamented their ages and tearfully recalled each other’s heroism.

Répaud bought three newspapers and two magazines from the kiosk owner, who slipped Spirou and Tintin between France Soir and Le Figaro, “pour le petit,” which was me.

After the kiosk was la bonbonière, the candy store where my uncle purchased two single pieces of rum-filled chocolate for me, and a small box of chocolate-covered nougat for his former wife, Tante Jacqueline, who lived in our building on the rez-de-chaussé. Though divorced Oncle Répaud and Tante Jacqueline remained more than fond of each other. He gave her small gifts and a monthly stipend allowing her to live quite comfortably. She looked after him, did his laundry, darned his socks, and twice a week prepared his lunch—a cut of horsemeat for which he’d developed a taste during the war—Brussel sprouts, a beet salad, and a generous slice of Port Salut cheese which he spread on a baguette already slathered with butter.

I liked Tante Jacqueline. She was tall, pale and thin, her white hair almost always covered by a hat and veil. My mother said this aunt had been a great beauty, courted by many but won by my uncle’s dashing presence. Her apartment, to which I was invited two or three times a year, was a museum of oil paintings, some of which she had purchased from my mother, century-old newspapers and photo albums, and a large chandelier missing many crystals. She was not above reprimanding me softly if my shoes were unlaced, or my shirt untucked. She taught me three ways of knotting a tie, which, in these days of man buns and clip-ons, I can still do with my eyes closed.

If you enjoy these blogs, be sure to read my novel, L’Amérique, available from Apprentice Press and Amazon.

Family, Part Deux

There were no other children in the apartment building where we lived in Paris. It strikes me as peculiar that I never noticed this as a child. This odd fact was lost upon me as an adult. Perhaps it’s because I didn’t lack playmates.

My mother’s dress-making shop occupied two rooms in the apartment. She was a talented seamstress with Coco Chanel ambitions, and she had a small staff of models and designers who worked for her part-time. Fittings were on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. I would sit on the floor as her young models, often half-naked, tried on various apparels. I do remember that the models found my presence amusing and went out of their way to display breasts and butts. I didn’t know why this thrilled me, but it did.

My half-sisters, Isabelle and Florence, came to visit once a week but were a lot older than I and so uninterested in entertaining me. My mother had clients with children, and these women occasionally came for a fitting. My favorite playmate was Babette, the daughter of a couple with a de in their name, a sure sign of lost nobility. Babette, eight-years-old knew everything about everything. We would be on the floor and she’d point to a model. “Celle la,” she would nod, “her breasts are ridiculous. See how they hang?” She would sniff in disdain. “Papa would like her. Maman always says Papa likes cows.”  Few things escaped her notice. “Et l’autre,” she’d nod in the direction of the other model, “she has a bottom like the back of a Renault. And huge feet! Why does your mother hire these women? When I’m older, I’ll be a model like Dovima or Suzy Parker. I’ll be famous and beautiful.”

The other person with whom I spent a lot of time was Louise, a stout woman from Quimper, in Bretagne. Louise could neither read nor write. She was one of the tens of thousands war widows left homeless when the hostilities ended. I don’t know how Louise got to Paris, or where my mother met her, but my parents did what countless families did: they took her in, in exchange for babysitting, cooking, cleaning and, on rare occasions, serving dinner to guests.

I remember that on Sundays, her day off, Louise would don the traditional Bretonne garb—a billowy black skirt since she was a widow, a starched white apron, wooden clogs which she wore with American-made socks, and a coiffe, an elaborate headdress made of lace and ribbons. Louise’s coiffe took a half-an-hour to arrange. She would then meet other women from her region, all wearing coiffes from their villages.

On occasion and with my mother’s permission, Louise would show me off to her friends. Outfitted in dark blue short-pantsed suit, I would follow Louise from one Breton bistro to another. In each, I would be given a thimbleful of home-made fruit liqueur so that by the end of the afternoon, I was as drunk as a small child could get. Louise called me her petit homme, her little man, and was inordinately proud that I never threw up. I was, she said, un vrai Breton.

Family

I never knew my family well. I do not know, for example, why my father left England, never to reunite with his family. I did not know I had paternal uncles, one of whom died in the blitzkrieg of London, or that an aunt, my brother’s sister, fell to alcoholism.

I barely knew my grandparents, paternal or maternal. The latter, Henri, was a shadowy old man who lived two floors above us in the building on the Rue de la Terrasse in Paris. We saw him twice a year, at Easter and Christmas when he hosted a sparse lunch eaten mostly in silence. His wife, my mother’s mother, had died of an embolism and soon after the death, he had remarried a sickly woman who seldom left her bed.

Henri wrote operas, one of which—Mona Vanna—had a modicum of success as it was co-authored by the Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck. Henri traveled to America and saw his work performed in New York and Chicago. I don’t know what he actually did for a living, as one would hardly survive on the earnings of a single work.

Henri, his second wife, and my mother’s brother, my Oncle Jacques, lived on the fifth floor. Jacques was a well-known concert pianist who played Ravel and Poulenc, both friends of the family. He was also an unkind egotist who called me an idiot when I was five years old and had failed to properly tie my shoes. To this day, you’ll find CDs of his interpretations of both composers’ works in record stores.  He died in the mid-60s, struck down by a moped as he crossed a street in St. Malo. I inherited a silk scarf and a gold money clip from him. Both have vanished.

My father’s father came to see us in Paris only once. He was a small, wizened man dressed all in black, and though I knew I was his grandson, I could never fully establish in my mind that my father and he were related. I don’t remember if he spoke French or not, and I can’t recall hearing a single conversation between he and my parents during his visit.

My mother, Marité, left her home at an early age and associated with the Parisian artists of the time. She studied under the French painter George Braque, met a Jewish Algerian doctor, Marcel, and married him, not a popular move for the daughter of a French upper middle-class family. They had two daughters, Isabelle and Florence, my half-sisters whom I loved and admired but saw too seldom.

When the Germans marched into Paris, Marcel, Marité and the two girls fled the city and went to Algiers, where Marcel’s family lived. The marriage foundered, and Marité joined the Free French and drove trucks. At the end of the war, she met my father in Marseille where they were demobilized. He followed her back to Paris.

There was a long and painful trial to establish custody of the girls, and my mother lost. I remember tears, arguments, and, eventually, the decision to move to America where my father would find work with the Voice of America and the family could begin anew.

Both Isa and Florence visited, but the relationship between Florence and my mother had suffered fatal wounds when Flo had opted to stay with her father. Mother and daughter never fully mended the fences and though I do believe in their efforts to make things right, both were strong unforgiving women with indomitable wills. Florence died more than a decade ago.

There are Sagniers in London, and I’ve been told that the actress Ludivine Sagnier is a first cousin, but I have never met her and probably never will. I have nephews and grandnephews whom I saw at Flo’s funeral. They are successful in both the arts and French politics.

I scattered my parents’ ashes in the Père-Lachaise cemetery, reputed to be the most visited necropolis in the world. There is a family crypt there that I discovered by accident. It is filled to capacity with a half-dozen maternal ancestors that are entombed within, including mean Oncle Jacques. May they all rest in peace.

A Christmas Quandary

You are at a Christmas dinner party and the meal will be served in a half-hour or so. The guests are friendly people whom you see once or twice a year; you know their names and marital status, but little else. The conversation is safe—the weather, because yes, it has been unseasonably warm for this time of year. The couple that just returned from Bangkok adds that it was very warm there too.

Conversation falters when the hostess enters the room bearing a large plate of giant shrimp, monstrous crustaceans, really, almost a meal onto themselves. The guest on your right takes one, dips it into the cocktail sauce, and pops the entire animal into his mouth. He chews contemplatively and his wife takes a shrimp too. You reach for one yourself. These are shelled shrimp save for their tails, and ever since you were a child, you have been perfecting the art of taking a shrimp, holding it daintily between thumb and forefinger, and extracting every gram of flesh from the tail.

Having consumed one, the immediate question is how long must you wait before taking another? There are eight of you, and you have surreptitiously counted the shrimp. There were 14, now only 11 remain.

But suddenly, the guest on your left takes two shrimps and in the blink of an eye, pops them both in his mouth sans cocktail sauce, and swallows them whole almost without chewing. You know this because his Adam’s apple bobbed only once. You and the neighbor on your right exchange covert glances. There is a shrimp hog amongst you, and the crustacean cocktail rule that reigned a moment ago has been superseded.

You wait. There’s a strong possibility that one or more guests are allergic to shrimp. That, indeed, is the case. The impossibly thin husband and wife sharing an easy chair look at the platter’s offerings, shake their heads and smile ruefully. One shrimp in a moment of weakness would send them both to the hospital.

You decide it’s now or never and in a moment of selflessness take the smallest remaining shrimp. The hostess and her husband take one each and you wonder if perhaps they’ve already had a shrimp or two before serving the guests. Do the party hosts get special dispensation and if so, is it fair?

Your neighbor to the right rolls his eyes and leans forward to spear another offering. He glances at you and notes your disapproving look, sighs and demonstrates his good manners by disallowing himself the treat which, good manners be damned, really should be his. Both couples who have yet to partake do so.

Only two giant shrimp are left and just as you figure you too will become a shrimp hog because really, you hardly know these people, the hostess takes a shrimp and returns the almost empty platter to the kitchen. You rise from the sofa to help clear the napkins and shrimp tails, deciding you will have the last one as soon as the hostess turns her back. At that very moment, she picks up the sole surviving marine treat and gives it to the family dog, who wolfs it down without chewing. Your breath catches in your throat. The dog gives you a knowing look.

You spend the better part of the meal doing the math dealing with the dog, the guests and the shrimp. At the end of the superb repast, a sliver of the excellent desert remains. You and the shrimp hog exchange glances.

Origins

I have been writing Epiphanettes since September 2010. I can’t remember why I started writing, other than writing is what I do. The word Epiphanettes was picked from a collection of epiphany-related terms I invented.  An epiphanette is a small epiphany. An epiphanot is when you realize an epiphany isn’t. An epiphanut is a deranged person’s epiphany, and an epiphanot-so-much is an epiphany that misses the mark or doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. There are other epipha-related yet-to-be-created words, I’m sure, and I’ll let other writers explore these.

I’ve tried to keep most blogs to about 300-400 words, because if you can’t say it succinctly, it may not merit being said at all. The fact that in my opinion, most people have ADD and can’t read more than 500 words in one sitting was a contributing factor influencing my brevity. I  have various blog sites, and all told I think I may have about 1,000-or-so readers. Some of them like to comment on whatever I’ve written about, but most don’t. I generally don’t write about very heavy stuff like politics and politicians, global warming, war, or natural disasters. Other writers are far better versed in those subjects than I am.

I have written extensively about cancer because I have cancer, and documenting the path of my disease has proven helpful in accepting it. I have been operated upon 39 times in a dozen years to remove tumors that are almost always malignant. I’ve gone through round after round of chemotherapy, as well as six months of immunotherapy.  The latter is administered through an IV. Chemo is more direct. What is essentially a poisonous solution is injected into my bladder via my urethra. Both treatments have side-effects. Chemo makes me sick; immunotherapy has caused something incurable called peripheral neuropathy, a loss of feelings in my feet and hands. Neither treatment is fun at all. At this point, my doctors tell me there are two options left: removal of the offending bladder or radiation. As choices go, this is not ideal, and I am slowly coming to the realization that perhaps the treatments are worse than the illness and that it is time to stop looking for a silver bullet.

I’ve written about family perhaps because I don’t really have one. I’m single and my parents died decades ago. I have a half-sister who lives in Paris. She is a composer of operas for children, a big fish in a small pond and I adore her.  We talk every month or so. My other half-sister died in France a while back. Bladder cancer killed her, and it is perhaps a coincidence that I am dealing with this type of cancer myself.

I love writing and have had a bunch of books published. One was even nominated for a Pulitzer but I am not allowed to profit from this small honor since I didn’t win.

I also write and play music. For a few years I was part of a band that gigged locally and released a CD, Say Goodnight which I think is pretty damned good.  Since the band’s demise, I have been incredibly lucky to benefit from the talents and wisdom of two long-term musical friends, Rich and Mike, Rich, a vocalist and keyboard player, is deeply involved in an organization called Cancer Can Rock, which records musicians and songwriters with cancer for posterity. Mike and I formed a duo, Cash & Carry, which also records. Mike is an accomplished bassist and guitarist, as well as the more than proficient recording engineer/arranger of our songs.

There’s more, but I’m beginning to lose interest in the subject. I’m sure this is temporary. Who doesn’t like writing about themselves? There will be another Epiphanettes soon.