Visited my grandmother today. I secretly enjoy what I can liken only to teatime in Wonderland. If I don't concentrate too hard it makes good sense, but after an hour it starts to unstring itself into pigbabies.
She set me to pitting fruit under the gay merman while she slippered around the yellow table. We drank tea and ate fresh cherries and peaches and scoops of cottage cheese from tiny crystal bowls. We made poor harmony chattering in our own separate senseless strains. I rumbled about orange light on sidewalks, she mused that the robins were "calling for rain". Sometimes there'd be a chorus of comprehension. More often not.
We retired to the living room, and on passing the bust of young Octavian I resisted, once again, the Pygmalian urge to kiss it. She sat in her Red Queen chair, I picked an armless lounge covered with largeprint roses. We held court with the lifesized Buddha and the ceramic frogs and the iron rabbit bookends and the two Indic goddesses. She pretended to read her New Yorker, I pooh-poohed my uncle's Basquiat, but neither of us payed much attention to anything other than the seacolored walls. And when the colors began to run and our sometime-similarities became a little too glaring for comfort, I stood up, ignored her plea for a hug, dodged the hornet gaurd on the porch, and pelted out into realtime.
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