Well, now!

Here it is the 21st, and I still have not finalized my Christmas menu, nor have I sent Christmas cards. Ever year I think, "we should send homemade cards" and I even have a drawing, but it involves seven linoleum blocks, so it will have to start around September, when it is just too hard to get into the Christmas spirit.

Oh well.

The good news is that we are going to be able to spend a whole week in Sacramento with my parents, something that has made Amalia positively giddy. Grandparents are great. They spoil you. They want to spend a lot of time with you. And when it comes time for discipline, they hand that off to parents, making the parents the bad guys. That's me: Babbo Spoilsport.

I remember those days fondly. Now I get the other end of the stick, and I have to say it doesn't annoy me nearly as much as it should. In fact, I find watching my parents interact with Amalia just about as much fun as watching Amalia interact with her peers.

Today her school had a field trip where all three of the kindergarten classes went to an old folks home to sing. They were all dressed festively, and were on very good behavior.

It is something that we read about often, and probably think about, too, but if you really want to do a good deed, go visit (singing is optional) someone in one of those homes. For me it is always a little sad, though, because I remember when my own grandparents, who I was very close to, had to go into one of those places, as they needed medical attention far beyond what we could provide.

But those memories are not entirely maudlin, as there were those times when I would visit my grandfather, who had completely lost it in terms of his knowledge of time-space, especially after my grandmother died, and he would delight in telling me all of the things that he did that morning. Now, these were generally culled from a lifetime of happy memories, and weren't humanly possible to do in one morning, but the nature of his dementia was that they were as fresh as the sunrise, and having someone to tell them to was almost as fun as the things themselves. In his memory close friends who had been long gone were there, fishing, working on iron, building things, etc.

I still miss them, and know that they would have loved Amalia (and vice versa). My grandmother died right before Christmas eleven years ago, and my grandfather died a couple of weeks before our wedding, ten years ago. I still think of them every day, whether it is because I find a neat object (they were constantly picking up treasures they found on their long walks), or because I am using my grandmother's old work bowl, or my grandfather's anvil (he made it himself from a piece of railroad track).

I also think of my grandmother when I am cooking, as she definitely disapproved of the direction my cooking was going in: all that French influence seemed to her like superfluous garnish on the good, wholesome Italian food she loved. She never minded the Chinese or Mexican influence, though. But when the cream and butter came out, she would give me that "what do you need that for?" look. And God forbid I did something as crass as stirring pasta, rather than tossing it.

Of course it paid off. I might like the exploration of the nouvelle cuisine, or the sumptuous splendor of la grande cuisine, but when it comes time for comfort food, it must be straight from the Tuscan hills.