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We’ve just received our first “greeting” card of the year.
Okay, it was from the family, ah, hair stylist and contained a couple coupons for ”holiday” visits, but still.
I recently happened to check up on my copy of the Curmudgeon’s Almanack. It predicts that we’re in for a very cranky season this year. I can readily believe this because I’m already beginning to feel in in my bones…..
I have meant to pass this on before, but perhaps it is especially apropos given the events of this week: If you’re looking for a pleasant, workaday red wine to get you through, might I suggest giving the D’Autrefois Pinot Noir a try?
It’s nothing special, but as I say, it’s rayther nice. Plus, at under ten bucks a bottle, it’ll be particularly good value if the economic sink hole keeps widening.
Here’s a little historickal note that tickled my fancy as I was sitting about in the waiting area down at the hospital yesterday: While I always knew that Rene-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle had explored the Texas coast around 1684, I never realized that he had, in fact, fetched up in Matagorda Bay and built a fort near the Lavaca River.
Why is this interesting to me? Because that’s where we used to go fishing when I was a kid. Granted, we were based at Port O’Connor, which is about fifteen miles down the bay from where La Salle built Fort St. Louis, but still, we spent a lot of time in Pass Cavallo – the entrance to the bay and the site of the wreck of one of La Salle’s ships.
It’s probably just as well that I didn’t realize this nugget of history at the time, because I probably would have been an even more insufferable dork than I was already.
BTW, in case you were interested, after all kinds of problems including the loss of all his ships and most of his supplies, La Salle decided to strike out from Fort St. Louis for the Mississippi on foot, with the plan of eventually getting back up to the Great Lakes and on to New France for help. He left some 40-odd colonists there. When a Spanish strike force showed up a few months later to wipe the place out, they found that someone – probably Indians – had beat them to it. In the meanwhile, La Salle was murdered by some of his own men near the Trinity River in East Texas.
Last evening the 10 year old said, “Daddy, some day I hope I marry someone just like you.”
I’d been wondering when the gel was going to say something like that, given that her attachment to me is perfectly obvious to even the most casual observer. Nonetheless, it still took my breath away just a bit to hear it.
Now despite the title of this post, the Jungian concept of an “Electra Complex” – indeed, most psychoanalytic theory - doesn’t cut much ice with me. (While the behavioral patterns are obvious, I thik all that stuff about “penis envy” and resentment of one’s mother over “being born castrated” is a load of codswallop.) And far from thinking this kind of thing to be a behavioral issue or problem (which seems to be the popular conception), I instead see it as quite positive: I am absolutely convinced that the best protection a girl sailing into the stormy sea of adolescence can have in order to avoid running aground on its lee shore is a strong bond with ol’ Dad – all the love and trust and safety she needs without (to be blunt) the sex. Of course, it’s no guarantee of anything, but it will certainly better her chances of staying on course and emerging from the tempest intact.
Or to flip the concept around, “Oedipus-Shmoedipus. So long as he loves his mother!”
I single the eldest gel out here, btw, because she is definitely into the pre-adolescent stage now, but I fully expect that her younger sisters will head down the same path. Indeed, I have noticed an escalating tug-of-war over Who Gets Daddy of late. (How to allocate time fairly is something I worry about more and more.) It may sound just a bit hokey, but I am increasingly of the opinion that this is exactly why I was put on Earth.
Getting the gels up and out the door in the morning is much easier than it used to be, even when ol’ Dad is operating on his own. However, I must say that I still find making cream-cheese and jelly sandwiches at six-thirty in the morning a thoroughly revolting task.
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