the baroque resolutions, part 2: Pru's frock

On Christmas I spoke to my dad, le Comte de Baroque (pictured above, on a Christmas some years back). I think we can call him that. We hardly ever call him anything much, in fact, because we don't speak to him very much at all: maybe a couple of times a year. This is the pace at which he himself set our relationship back in the day when I myself was little Mlle B, and with a few rantings and ravings thrown in from time to time I have respected that pace.

Anyway, I asked him how he was, and he said: "Well - I'm wearing my trousers rolled."

The great thing about my dad, aside from the fact that he is the reason I knew what he meant, is that he knew I would know, and never felt the need to explain his allusion, which is a conversational tic that destroys conversations.

Also, it's true. Thanks to his emphysema, the payback from 50 years as a politically agressive smoker (like, he started a smoking club at work when they banned it in the staff room), the last time I saw him he was sitting in a chair, with his feet encased in black support socks and propped up on another chair. That was in summer; he wore shorts. If it were winter, you might need to roll your trousers. Still, it was better to see him looking like that than the way he'd looked before he started getting the treatment. Then, he used to fall asleep all the time and everyone was saying: "dad's getting old..." Scary. And not that old in the scheme of things.

So it's nice being able to talk to him again, and it's also nice - when on site, that is - not to have to breathe the fumes. He used to have these parties where he'd invite all his friends from work. Well, his friends from work were the smoking club. Three weeks later you'd meet some guy in the mall, and Daddy would say, "You remember Dan? You met him at the party." You'd be going, "Dad, I couldn't SEE him at the party."

Le Comte was also the one who set the impossibly high standards for Christmas (read: everything) which have practically destroyed my relationship with my kids (hold on: that's not right! Well, whatever). He's the one who made me Baroque. He was the one who reassured me when I was four (flying in the face of anything you ever heard in the Catskills) that, yes, pink and red could go together - if you were in Mexico... It was his amateur dramatics company that gave me my chance to be a little Siamese Princess (no lines) (or was it the Crown Prince, and I had one line? Yes, I think that's it: a line to make up for being a boy), and ruined my childhood (read: strengthened my character) with seemingly endless productions of "Kiss Me, Kate!" I know all the Cole Porter songs. He gave me Klemperer's 1964 recording of the Magic Flute (still the best, if you don't count the Beecham of 1937) for my fifteenth birthday (and I still have it), and he's the reason I care about which recording. Oh, and he taught me to make meat loaf. He said he had no idea how he made it, he just did it, and if I wanted to learn I had to watch him do it. So I did.

He also, some years ago now, gave me his facsimile manuscript edition of The Waste Land, showing Pound's edits - handed me the baton, as it were (I loved twirling a baton when I was six; I could make it go pretty damn fast). So, with my necklace rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin, with my pink pashmina and my red shawl-collared cardigan with its glittery brooch, I shall enter 2007 modestly with resolutions sticking out of every pocket.

In a minute there is time
for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.