In the Midst of Celebration

The ghosts of January are close upon me. They fill my dreams, stop me mid-stride in crowded spaces, blur my vision with sudden tears, reminding me in these days of stillness how much I loved them, how much I still do love them, and what longing after all these years, what longing they can still provoke.

This past Saturday, David and I had a few members of an extended New Orleans clan for dinner. Quite by chance, our paths have crossed with theirs, those few who have ended up, for the moment, living in Louisville, by way of North Carolina, Paris, France, and Nebraska. Upon inviting each of them, I said I wanted a little of their New Orleans family madness to warm my winter dining room.

They talked about Sunday suppers at the table of their maternal grandmother, a formidable woman who had birthed eleven children. The cousins, their parents and all the ghosts would gather to accommodate the aging matriarch. Everyone knew but no one really said anything about Uncle Reggie who had left his wife Ida and their four children for a woman named Edna. Edna and Uncle Reggie lived in a warehouse down by the docks in one room with a bed, a hot plate and a small refrigerator. The rest of the warehouse was filled with Uncle Reggie’s dream, a boat that would take Edna and him around the world. He built it by hand. It was beautiful. They did sail around the world while Ida and the children languished in New Orleans. One of those children has become famous and spurned his father’s recent attempt at reconciliation.

Our dear friend, Charlotte, whose mother was one of the eleven, remembered her mother picking her up from elementary school and whisking her off to the nearest Catholic Church just in time for communion. Charlotte’s mother, Ivy, went to communion every day of the week. Charlotte, as one of the younger of seven, found herself often accompanying her mother. Before the evening was over, Charlotte told me in mock horror, she hoped I realized I was going straight to Hell (because I am not Catholic). I ignored her. Charlotte has been telling me this since the day I met her. In the meantime she and David and I have walked the streets of her beloved Paris together, listening to her perfect French and wonderful stories. Such is the friendship between us.

But what hung over dinner for me was not the memory of Paris, but the absence of our youngest guest. Charlotte’s cousin, David, is a pediatric resident at Kosair Children’s Hospital here in Louisville. His current rotation is in intensive care. When I invited David, he said he had to work all day Friday and until noon on Saturday, but he would be with us for dinner on Saturday night. What he could not have anticipated was that by then he would have gone thirty hours without sleep and lost three patients, one of whom was a twenty year old he’d spoken with only minutes before her sudden death.

I call it hazing by death. Charlotte assured me he’d be okay.  This young man, not yet out of his twenties himself, was eleven when he was diagnosed with cancer and his mother told him she and his father were taking him to St Jude’s where he would get well. He did just that, despite, as he told me at dinner on Christmas Eve,” I wasn’t expected to live through the weekend.”  When I asked him why he had lived, he said his doctor at St Jude’s chose the right course of treatment.

With all of this in mind, I took a walk this morning. It was cold. I pulled my hat well down over my forehead to shield my eyes from the wind.  My coat and skirt were long, my gloves lined with rabbit fur, my stockings were wool and I was warm. St James and Central Park were empty except for the skittering squirrels and on Belgravia the tree men were out raising the canopy of our larger trees. As I walked I thought of our grandson’s tapered fingers as he nimbly opened a band aid recently, how even at three he knew to pinch the tip end of the casing before carefully peeling it away to free the bandage itself. I’ve seen his great grandfather repeat that exact action a hundred times. He was a physician and it was amazing to me to see his hands again, all these years beyond his departure from us, once again in such caring and precise action.

A winter dining room, a winter walk, the ghosts of January and my grandson’s eyes as he sat thinking in the midst of celebration.