Oatmealgate And Swiss Cheese

Three days after Christmas the house is quiet again, not even a mouse. Christmas Day was the peak, with seventeen family members, fourteen of them human and three of the doggie persuasion. All of the dogs are elderly, and half of the humans are getting there. The other half need to make us getting-theres some grandchildren.

Sheafs of Post-it*-based and other hand-lettered signs carved some order into the chaos, or at least alleviated some of the need for control that arises when you have a family with a statistically improbable number of alphas.

My first entry in the unspoken, unwinnable, irresistible Lead Alpha competition was the square blue post-its accompanying each dish of Christmas Feast, denoting gluten-free, dairy-free, vegetarian or take-ya-chances. One of us is in the process of experimenting with whether or not soy is affecting her. I’m glad soy starts with a unique letter so that our post-it food labels can remain relatively small.

Earlier in the week, when Max was staying over, he made a pot of oatmeal with blueberries and peanut butter. Knowing that I love all of those ingredients, he handed me a bowlful and said, How do you like it? I ate a spoonful and said, I don’t really like it. Maybe it needs sliced bananas.

Max pretended not to be offended, but I’ve caught mumbles of Oatmealgate and accusing glances in the intervening days. By the way, the sliced bananas helped.

As with most of our family feasts, Christmas Day's was a potluck. A controlled potluck, with Google Sheets* sign-ups and enough illusion of choice that hardly anyone felt railroaded. I learned this technique as a mother of a toddler, when you ask your child to choose between the red shirt and the purple shirt. Choices are more approachable when narrow.

If Netflix* ever made a story about my relationship to chess, it wouldn’t be called The Queen’s Gambit and it wouldn’t be a six-hour award-winning limited series. The whole shebang would be about five minutes long. The beginnings and middles of chess games overwhelm me with their multiple universes of choice. I’d prefer that the beautiful young actress play the whole game until just the king and a pawn were left. Then I’d swoop in and totally enjoy moving them one square at a time until the end. Which thankfully would come within a couple of moves. I don’t even care that much if I win.

Christmas Day saw the next move in Oatmealgate. Max had chosen/been assigned to make a dairy-free dessert, and I’d chosen a gluten-free one. His crispy-chewy crinkle cookies contained chocolate, which I can’t eat. My turkey-sized (Turkey-sized?) apple pie contained butter, which he can’t eat.

Besides the what’s-free-of-what post-its, I laid down two big blue painter’s tape arrows in front of the Christmas tree. The right-pointing arrow said Secret Santa and the left-pointer said White Elephant. Renie’s new husband, MCB, created a stir when he asserted that we weren’t doing a White Elephant but rather a Yankee Swap. No one knows that term here, said I, feeling that MCB had deducted points in my competition for Lead Alpha. If you know what the MC stands for in MCB, well, you’d understand that his alphatude is well-recognized, not just by our family, but by the US Navy. You don't mess with the US Navy, but you can still curse it a little, as long as you do it quietly.

Renie’s alphatude was put to work in setting the two dinner tables. She’s good at organizing and decorating, dang good. Let her loose and she'll make something splendid, even given the meager materials at hand in her sister's house. But MCB and Beau tried to horn in on the table-setting territory she’d claimed, by asserting that the tables should be arranged, not parallel, but in an L or a U or some other non-curvy letter, so we narrowed Renie’s territory to the tableware itself, and let the male alphas in the house establish the table layout within the room. My control freak pretended to tame itself by saying, Well, you guys decide. The only parameters I insist upon are: seating for fourteen, tables close enough to encourage cross-table conversation, and don’t block fire exits. Renie added, Traffic flow! Don’t forget traffic flow!

Beau and MCB settled on parallel tables. Secret alpha points to Renie and me, and the illusion of choice to them. (I’m a horrible person in secret.)

Alphas. We’ve become a congenial pack of them over the years, learning to laugh at ourselves and poke at each other good-naturedly.

Beau and Gnat (Lead Alpha of the next generation) were firm on the rule that everyone must take a covid antigen test Christmas morning, before showing up at the designated two pee-em start time. Beau and I stocked a few extra tests, and Renie set up a testing station in the guest bathroom, with signs on the front door and at each turning point inside the house, directing the untested to the testing site. Turns out those home test kits were in short supply right near Christmas Day. Glad we stocked up ahead of time—and copious thanks to Lee for giving us some of her NHS stash. We needed ‘em.

Bee and EJ sent a photo of their negative tests from home before they left for our place. I sent a photo back to them of our negative results. As Renie’s sign in the upstairs bathroom said, Covid tests: Where negative is a positive result!

I’d set up rules in the initial email and reminder emails for how the presents should be labeled. Secret Santa gifts might as well have the identity of From revealed, because you’d want to know which Santa to thank for clicking on one or more of the entries in your column of the Wish List tab on the Google Sheet. But White Elephants should be completely unlabeled to remove any trace of bias, like that inflammatory East Coast-West Coast Yankee-Elephant business.

The left- and right-hand gifts looked great under the tree, a baby redwood this year, appropriate for our geographic area. Another local choice could have been a eucalyptus, but Santa’s Tree Farm* didn’t have those. Eucalyptus trees are invasive anyway. We’re not supposed to like them, even though they’re cute and shaggy and smell like the Vicks VapoRub* Mom used to rub on our chests when we had a cold.

Max and I were the Christmas tree sawyers again this year. That’s the way it goes in our house, as Beau is a confirmed grinch when it comes to Christmas trees. The limit to his contribution is to lend Max and me his Subaru Outback to transport the weird tree we’d likely choose. This year's wacko, our first baby redwood, is not really suitable for a Christmas tree because the branches are too soft and pliable to hold a substantial ornament, let alone a goodly fraction of the five boxes of ornaments we keep in the Top Secret Place. The ends of baby redwood branches are seriously pokey and they fail to contribute that nice piney smell to your Christmas-y home. But it’s almost ethereal in its beauty. We placed a few tiny, lightweight ornaments on the branches and spiraled one little strand of white lights from top to bottom. The effect was unfamiliarly tasteful.

Last year, Beau and I were hunkered down by ourselves for a zoom-only Christmas. The weird tree that seemed appropriate for 2020 was a Brussels sprouts branch procured from the local produce stand and decorated with some tiny shinies. We put it on the coffee table a few days before Christmas and then undecorated and ate it on Boxing Day.

The year before that, 2019, Max got home from college only a couple days before Christmas, so the inventory at Santa’s Tree Farm was sparse. We drove in and picked up our paper map of the tree territories, segregated by subspecies, and the woman in the cute lil Santa shed at the entrance said apologetically, Slim pickins, I’m afraid. We said, That’s perfect for us. We want a weird tree. She shrugged and waved us on. They're all $75, she warned.

Is it just us, or would most people be tempted to take a six-inch pine branch to the checkout and ask if they were really going to charge us $75?

That year our tree was called The Cube. Four feet tall, four feet wide, not even the hint of a conic profile. I sawed down The Cube and Max and I hefted it on top of the Subaru. (Don’t worry, Beau, we put a blanket under it.) We hadn’t thought to bring any ropes, so Max rolled down the window on the passenger side, perched on the door, and held The Cube as best he could with his bare hands while I drove the Subaru gingerly for a mile or so over the bouncy rutted mud to the Reindeer Shed, where elves tied the tree properly for the trip home. Max climbed back into the car, secured his seat belt, and rolled up the window to keep out the bitter fifty-two-degree air. The on-shore breeze made it feel like fifty-one.

Twas an adventure. A better story than going to the tree lot on El Camino and buying a “desirable” tree whose perfect cone was created using a lathe. And don’t get us started on flocking. Ems is from Maine, and didn't believe that flocking was real until she visited us here one Christmas. Flocking a Christmas tree is like icing a Pop-Tart*, unholy.

This year Max cut down Baby Redwood himself because I was still recovering from the smiting incident. He carried Baby to the car and it fit inside. No need for elves.

There’s one big Christmas ball on Baby, situated very close to the trunk so that its weight is supportable. It’s a (an) historic ornament, its golden gildiness flaked off in several spots. My mom and dad bought it at Neiman Marcus in Chicago in the late 1950s, during a snowy car trip north from Champaign-Urbana. In the halcyon days before kids.

This Christmas Day, with fourteen people and three dogs in the house, the ambient noise level was pegged at Festive. Part of the festivity stemmed from the arrangement of the groups at two (parallel!) tables. After loading a plate with yummies, the first elder sat at the larger table. Then the first younger took his plate to the smaller table and alphily declared it the Under 35 Table. That made our table the Over 55s. We could have called it the Over 35s, but who would we be kidding?

The Unders pulled an extra chair from the larger table and all squished around the smaller table, leaving the Overs with lots of elbow room but an inability to hear each other above the festive din from the Under 35s.

This is a well-documented problem with Over 55s. I went to an audiologist a couple of weeks ago who confirmed that I can hear electronic beeps just fine but can’t make out words. It’s not a problem with the sensors; it’s the computer. One manifestation of what I’m calling swiss cheese brain.

I had an MRI of my head recently, and the scan showed a lot of dead spots. The neurologist pronounced it normal for my age, especially given my fifty years of migraines, each one snuffing out a few neurons. But the radiologist said I have more dead spots than normal. Well, normal-schmormal, is how I respond to that, leveraging the intellect of my swiss cheese brain.

Even though I really like my brain and was once called The Smart One (there’s a story about that), I’ve consciously decided to be cheerful about this. Having a swiss cheese brain isn’t really that bad. I said to Lee, People buy swiss cheese even though it has holes. There’s still a lot of cheese there. She nodded nonjudgmentally, having given in to my cheesy wisdom some years prior.

I’d like to think my brain looks more like muenster than swiss—i.e. small holes instead of big ones. But the phrase muenster brain is harder to process and harder to spell, especially if you’re similarly holey. And I don’t like muenster cheese.

Not that I like Swiss cheese all that much either, but given that in 1960s Pennsylvania there were only two kinds of cheese, swiss and american, well, swiss was the better choice.

My favorites these days are Dubliner and Manchego. The latter I discovered oh, a dozen years ago, when F and I were invited to Max’s violin teacher’s house for dinner. A dinner at which she proudly declared that she hates children. Makes sense: All the kids in her violin studio studied Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star for the first year, variations A through Q. What did I do to my child.

Remember when we used to de-fragment the hard drives on our laptops? I’d like to de-frag my swiss cheese brain so that the dead areas could be shunted off to an area I don’t use much. Perhaps the Professional Team Sports subsystem. Or maybe I could free up some memory by unloading the data I no longer need onto an external hard drive, like the phone number of a twenty-two year old woman I idolized when I was a teenager, Sally Bailer.

866-8409, back when area codes were not strictly necessary. Landline of course, or phone, as we called them back then.

Sally is responsible for my current adult height, which is not really the 5’11” I claimed in The Good Blanket. I wanted to be exactly like Sally when I grew up, and Sally was 5’4”.

In my life, that was the only wish that was granted. (Do I hear a tiny violin? I just hope it's not playing Twinkle.)

Never mind that my birth mother’s twin sisters are exactly 5’4”. The day I met them, I was about forty and they were fifty-eight. They said, Hello! Which of us is taller? And they took off their shoes and stood back to back.

Hello! You’re the same, exactly the same, I said. They were disappointed in me, and insisted that I stand back-to-back with each of them in turn, as if the transitive property doesn't hold with height. Result: exactly the same, all three of us.

They’re very competitive. My birth mother reported that on their sixtieth birthday the twins were wrestling on her living room carpet to determine which of them was stronger. Forget Sally. They’re the ones I want to be like when I grow up.

Meanwhile I’m learning to wholly enjoy my holey brain. Short term memory is not what it used to be, and the processing speed of the CPU is starting to look like an Intel 486. (And if you know what that is, you probably know what I’m talking about.) The joyful noise coming from the Unders table is not only about decibels, you know. It’s more about intellectual frolicking at a speed at least twice what I can keep up with.

I don’t despair, not usually. I try not to focus on what’s lost. Instead I breathe in the cloud of noisy, marvelous, joyful next-gen relationships at the Unders table: siblings, partners, new step-siblings. Together, happy, bonding, love. Not that I’m planning to go anywhere anytime soon, but when I do, they’ll have one another.

Meanwhile I’m going to enjoy my cheese, holes and all.

******

*Post-it is a registered trademark of 3M Corporation, which made its fortune in stadiums, and then used the money they’d taken in selling tickets to fund a special kind of adhesive that only sticks when you want it to. The yellow color of the original Post-it is also a registered trademark, no lie.

*Google Sheets and Google itself are registered trademarks of Alphabet Corporation, whose first product was a delicious oat-based cereal called Post* Alpha-Bits.

*Post is a registered trademark of Post-it.

*Pop-Tart is a registered trademark of the Kellogg Corporation, a competitor to Post. See above.

*Santa's Tree Farm, as applied to a local business whose location shall not be revealed here for obvious reasons, is in clear infringement upon trademarks filed by the North Pole Corporation in the year 0.

*Netflix is a registered trademark, too, but there’s nothing funny about it.

*Vicks is a registered trademark of Vicks Corporation, but VapoRub is a common-law trademark. Now that in itself is fascinating. Why didn’t they register VapoRub? Was there already a similar trademark, and the US Patent Office said, No way, Vicks! Too similar to another registered trademark: VapoBub*.

*VapoBub is a pen into which you pour a teaspoon of soapy solution, and your kids can blow on one end to create bubbles. The hook is that kids will be ready to vape when they grow up, except the airflow is in the other direction. Don’t mix that up. The bubble solution tastes gross.

[Max fiercely cutting down the baby redwood at Santa's Tree Farm]