when you're older

okay the easiest thing to talk about is CARMEL. she's my aunt's mother-in-law (or my mom's sister's husbands mother, if you prefer)... and she's 90.

i have no actual memories of her but as some sort of non-existent fixture during holidays- and i don't know if i've actually had any serious conversations with her but for a few years ago saying she wasn't too old to travel and that if she wanted to go to spain, she should go to spain. but nothing came of it. and that was the extent of it. she's always struck me as sort of inherently oblivious and given her 2 sons, i think probably high-maintenance, demanding and critical. but i only witness snippets of this and not enough to draw my attn away from my aunt dust-bustering crumbs off the kitchen floor, or pondering their white carpets or why soda drops need to be cleaned off the stone on the patio- and well my aunt is positively set on edge by her mother-in-law and that's fun to watch. i'd always heared tell Carmel and her late husband, were dancers, and more obsucrely round-house dancers, from what i gather is a sub-set of square dancing. and it all looks fairly mellow- if you've ever seen 'schultze sings the blues' the bizarre subset might be a little clearer to you... bcs it's not obnoxious polkas per se or country music... it can be waltzes and trots and salsa and who knows what...

and well anyway after an entire weekend of camping we had to pull up steaks and make it down the coast and inland in time for her 90th birthday. mandatory. we got home, threw everything out of the truck, said hi to the animals, took showers and were on the road again in under 2 hours. going inland is always a bit of a shock- many people who complain about how "LA" -LA is- have only stayed on clearly demarcated pathways and as i feel have failed to go beneath the glossy veneer. bcs there in lies America. i don't need the midwest to go there. it took about 40 minutes. we arrived at a "women's league club"... an old and dying bastion of civilization where gentiel sorts of many kinds, youth and who knows who would join a club in the good old days and i guess it was a fair sort of community, especially for the non-church types. but not a lot of people these days join women's and men's clubs... and i think it's worth further investigation, these lost little trinkets of history.

but i digress. we enter this carefully manicured place and are greeted by my aunt, uncles and carmel. it's like any old hall i suppose with a well kept wood floor for dancing, dark wood arches running the length and a couple really beautiful victorian pieces tucked in the corner and out of place. naturally my first question is where the hell am i? and when can i leave? my father and i are plotting exit strategies and possible escapes to the nearest fast food eateries. and as i sit mystified by the entire affair i become more and more entranced-

the first easy thing to do when you're the youngest person in the room by 30 years, is bury your nose in the "life of carmel" newsletter they hand you walking in, and start telling outrageous camping stories about a pod of dolphins, a family of koreans, and 3 shots of whiskey... those went over with mixed success. but what struck me most about the newsletter was how she went to business school for some working skills only to become an executive secretary- our current worst nightmares... but how telling of the times. i wish i'd scanned the photo of her mom bcs she's straight out of mrs.bates material- think school marm? in the fullest sense of the word... and then the more i read, lots of siblings, some tragedies and a life consumed with dancing- so much so that my mother and i murmered that i could perhaps add inherently self-consumed to the list... but also exeedingly happy bcs that's what she loved.

so as the minutes wore on old people started to arrive. i don't think in recent memory i'd ever seen so many wander in, in various stages of health, stylish dress to possitively stone age and all for Carmel and of course for the dancing, which increased the matched couple outfits and the strange puffy skirts. and to have a community of people at that age was well, inspiring really. and not even the tacky plastic table cloths or the hideous centerpieces that didn't match, could detract from that fact.

my father and aunt were both slumped over with hunger and began to eye the buffet table with alarming regularity. i made a few WTF calls and when the food finally came out we were all politely underwhelmed. the bizarrity of the selection alone left one baffled, but as we later learned the orignal caterer died @64 just a few months ago. so they'd have to punt, and who knows where they found her... have any of you ever had church basement potlucks? midwest style? for most of us hip youngsters we might say this food was straight out of the 60's and definitely not out of the here and now informed voices of the health administration- to start there were some inocuous hand sandwiches with processed cheese on them! i mean processed cheese people- the horror! then the fake non-dill pickle spears and olives, followed by ambrosia- it was slightly tasty but i found the addition of marshmellows and unidentified fruit slightly disconserting (eat with caution), next was a seafood salad- which from what i gather contained possibly shrimp? unidentified foreign matter and a gallon of mayonaise, then there were the meatballs that went with nothing, slightly strange tasting, small and reheated... the beverages were those tasty punch and 7up concoctions and room temperature bottled water... which i must say we drank a lot of. after that, at the end of the night was a badly decorated white cake-with a white cream and strawberry filling...

now let that linger with you as i just for a moment touch on the undescrible art of round-house dancing. i was wordless as to why one would undertake this unless you were the caller, aka. puppet master. from what i observed the music plays, and the person with the mic "cues" the dancers... there can be quite a few, and it's almost as if he's piecing together his own spinning autmotons?... as they only move at his suggestion and don't necessarily know the cues themselves. the most creepy parts were when some of the women chose to dance by themselves- they were laughing and having a good time at it but it seemed at times sort of cold and lifeless as they concentrated on the next step... and they all seemed to be moving- very.very. very. v.e.r.y. slowly. round and round the room... static pictures do them no justice, so the following tries to convey in some instance the life of it. and well at the end of the night, carmel did her own special dance that she'd written and performed it nicely being glided or rather slowly halted around the room- she mentioned her #1 and #2 sons and how proud she was of them (forgetting to mention my aunt who's known her for over 30yrs...) and then they talked of how when her husband died they told her to keep on dancing, keep on dancing thru the pain of a pinched nerve and bum leg, keep on dancing and teaching over the phone, sitting down or on a tape recorder- as long as she kept dancing- to show what she still had and do what she loved most in the world. they never would have guessed she was 90. or how many more years she had to go. but cue by cue she would show them what all her life had been built upon.