hogglestock

Until I finished rereading Excellent Women this past week, my records indicated that I had only read the novel once before. I find that a little hard to believe. I thought for sure that I had read it at least twice. Worse than my memory failing is the possibility that I haven’t kept up my records diligently. No matter, it was an absolute delight to read it again. I wish I had the ability to explain why I find Pym’s novels so delightful. They immediately transport me into a world I think I want to be a part of. I suspect I would probably find the Pym universe stultifyingly proper and far too suppressed for my personality. I think I appreciate the quiet simplicity. And they are such a joy to read. (Pity that Pym was a pre-war Nazi, but we’ll save the “love the art, hate the artist” discussion for another time.)

As I reread Excellent Women, I began to think of my own spinsterhood. I’m not sure if spinsters can be widows/widowers, and some women who have reclaimed the word may not appreciate it being appropriated by a man, but I’m afraid everyone is just going to have to accept (or ignore) my framing. Truth be told, I felt like a spinster-in-training at the age of 33 when I met John. Not having had a relationship for over eight years at that point, I thought I was bound to be an Anita Brookner character. On its face, John saved me from that fate, but then again more than a few of Brookner’s characters had been married and then found themselves alone at a time of life when personal worlds tend to diminish in scope and vitality. So I find myself approaching 55, alone, feeling fairly directionless, and beginning to worry that my tendency to introversion might skew toward depression and loneliness.

Besides Pym’s work being much lighter and more humorous in tone, the big difference between a Pym spinster and a Brookner spinster is that Pym’s characters have a degree of agency and, for the most part, appear to be fairly happy with their lives and prospects. In fact, I found myself inspired by Mildred Lathbury. As I sit here, I can’t think why, I think she puts up with too much bullshit from others, but I think what I appreciated were those qualities that make Mildred an excellent woman. Since John died the only things that have provided any structure in my life are my job and Lucy. And now with Lucy gone, I find that it is just work. One day it was 8:00 PM and I had only gotten in 414 steps and my house alarm hadn’t even been turned off that day.

I think found myself drawn to Mildred’s tidy routines. I don’t think I would appreciate all the little external obligations and expectations that Mildred puts up with, but I do feel like I could benefit from finding a few self-imposed obligations. I want to live a tidier, more deliberate life that trends toward a simple meal of bread, Camembert, and salad rather than a $60 DoorDash meal that has more fat and sodium than one should eat in a week. I think what I’m trying to say is that I am tired of being lazy. (Fixing that is easier said than done.)

Another aspect of Mildred’s life I can identify with is how often people consider her a non-entity. It’s kind of disturbing how I’ve become invisible to so many people since John died. It manifests itself in a couple of ways. First, there are very loving and supportive people who are fading out of my daily/weekly/monthly life as I time moves on. As their lives and grief over the loss of John have rightfully moved forward, they are returning to a type of relationship with me that is largely the same as what it was before he died. When John was alive it was enough, now that I don’t have him, it isn’t enough. It isn’t their fault, it’s just the way things go. Next month it will be two years, and I miss the frequency and intensity with which people checked in with me in the months after his death. It was even the case that the 21st century phobia of unscheduled phone calls was cast aside by nearly everyone I know, but now I feel silly calling people just to chat. It’s too high an emotional hill to climb to let people know that I still need their support.

The other aspect of this invisibility, and the one that is regularly imposed on Mildred, is that people seem to think that we have no standing and can be imposed upon. That our lives are fair game for discussion and interference. Being a very opinionated, non-shy person who has no problem telling people to get the fuck out of my face, I’ve been kind of surprised to see this creep into my life. This has only happened to me to a small degree, no doubt because of the ease with which I will clap back, but it happens nonetheless. On Easter Sunday I was in my family room ironing in front of the TV. It was a fairly warmish day so I had the French doors open, got a bit warm and took my pants off, leaving me in my underwear and a t-shirt. After about an hour I noticed out of the corner of my eye that my nextdoor neighbor was in my backyard seemingly giving another neighbor a tour. Now just to be clear, my backyard is enclosed with a seven-foot high fence and is accessible only through a latched gate that is sheltered in my side yard and is about five feet tall itself. When I confronted her (in my underwear), she said “Oh I thought you weren’t at home” as if that somehow made up for the trespass. Much to my credit I didn’t raise my voice or swear as I am prone to do, but I did make it abundantly clear that she was not welcome. This is the same woman who decided last summer that the existence of a mustache on my face made me fair game for grooming advice. I bit my tongue at the time, but all I could think was I don’t make comments about her overprocessed hair so why does she think she gets to comment on my appearance. And don’t get me started about the time she talked to me about how she always hears John’s voice and then went on to talk about John’s afterlife. Since I am off on a tangent, let me just offer some advice to the entire planet. For the most part, you shouldn’t worry about saying the wrong thing when someone dies, but keep it simple and don’t go deep. Trite phrases are nice to hear, certainly they are better than nothing. However, steer clear of anything that imposes your belief system on the other person unless you are one hundred percent sure they share your point of view. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve had to rise above my grief to humor someone’s superstitions.

But where was I? Oh yes. Mildred. I know that I am not an excellent woman because they are the ones that selflessly give of themselves for people who entirely take advantage of them. Although Mildred is aware of this, she doesn’t seem to want to upset that particular apple cart. Not only would I upset that apple cart, I would smash it to bits and whack people upside the head with the pieces. Two years out from John’s death, I have a hard time imagining being in another relationship. I think I need more friends, but John was such a soulmate that I can’t imagine that ever being replaced. As a result of that, like Mildred, I am happy with my independence, and thankfully appear to be getting closer to sharing her optimism for the future.

Reading Pym

I’ve been in the mood for Pym lately and thought I would reread the novels that I had read the least. I was a bit surprised with my Pym stats. Based on this list you would think my favorite Pym is A Glass of Blessing, but honestly, I think I’ve read it that many times simply because I have a mass market copy of it that travels well, and I seem to want to read Pym when I travel.

4 – A Glass of Blessing 1958 (2002/2012/2013/2022)
3 – Crampton Hodnet 1985 (2002/2013/2022)
2 – Some Tame Gazelle 1950 (2009/2019)
2 – Excellent Women 1952 (2010/2024)
2 – Jane and Prudence 1953 (2004/2013)
2 – No Fond Return of Love 1961 (2013/2020)
2 – Quartet in Autumn 1977 (2014/2023)
2 – The Sweet Dove Died 1978 (2012/2023)
2 – A Few Green Leaves 1980 (2016/2022)
2 – An Unsuitable Attachment 1982 (2013/2022)
2 – An Academic Question 1986 (2016/2022)
1 – Less Than Angels 1955 (2014)

While I was on Goodread checking my stats, I noticed the stats for how many ratings there were for each Pym novel. My ranking wouldn’t be exactly like this, but An Academic Question is indeed my least favorite.

17,610 – Excellent Women
5,270 – Jane and Prudence
5,175 – Quartet in Autumn
3,827 – Some Tame Gazelle
3,046 – A Glass of Blessing
2,996 – Less Than Angels
2,948 – No Fond Return of Love
2,750 – Crampton Hodnet
2,151 – An Unsuitable Attachment
1,779 – The Sweet Dove Died
1,531 – A Few Green Leaves
1,271 – An Academic Question

 

When I got back on Friday the 12th from about a week and half away from home, Lucy greeted me in typical fashion, like she was still a puppy, jumping up and being very excited. But that evening as she slept and rested in front of the TV, it became clear that she wasn’t feeling so well. She had been finicky about her food in recent weeks so I put it down to that. It had happened once before many years ago and once we changed her food she sprang back to normal. But this time she was 14 and the next morning she couldn’t be tempted to eat anything, not even peanut butter. Then when she tried to get up she was all wobbly and seemed disoriented. So I took her to the vet who determined that her stomach was full of blood and she had a tumor.

 

I’m grateful that the illness was short and the prognosis left no doubt that it was her time. And I’m really grateful that I got to see her act like a puppy one more time. It’s almost as if she waited for me to get back from my trip before letting go.

 

So now, here I am, alone. Of course there were many tears last weekend, but losing John just under two years ago puts the loss of Lucy in perspective. She lived a full, fantastic life. And while I am still getting used to not having her here to keep me company, I’m coping quite well.

 

  

 

We got her in 2010 just about five months after we bought our house with a big back yard. She loved that back yard. She was the opposite of an escape artist. If I let her off the leash in the front yard she would run around to the back gate so she could run around her backyard.

 

 

John adored Lucy. He would get so emotional at the prospect of her dying. For his sake, I dreaded the day that we would have to say goodbye. We had no idea she would outlive him.

 

 

Everyone thought she was a tall Corgi, but according to her DNA she had no Corgi in her and was 34% German Shepherd.

  

Besides her gorgeously big ears, Lucy had the softest fur–especially on her head and ears. When we first got her, I was afraid if I pet her too much the softness would wear out. But it never did. After getting caught in the rain it would be extra soft.

 

Lucy hated water and only had a bath about twice a year. Unless she actually rolled in something foul, she never smelled bad. Sometimes her paws would smell like basmati rice (or pawsmati as we called it) or corn chips.

  

 

She was a bit of an introvert. She loved everyone she met, but she only wanted affection on her terms and she needed lots of time alone. In recent months she spent more and more time in proximity to me. Hanging out with me near my desk, or in front of the TV, and she loved spending the night in her crate which was right next to the bed.

 

If you use the search feature on this blog you can find about 13 years worth of cute Lucy pictures. These are all more or less from the past few years.

  

  

 

Farewell sweet girl. I will never forget you.

In the 17 years that I’ve been blogging, never have I ever posted so little. Only one post so far in 2023. There were times this year when I felt like I really needed to get over here and write something, both because I was neglecting Hogglestock and because I felt I had something to say. I would have a spark of inspiration, begin to think about how to present the information, and then about 20 seconds later think about the mental and emotional energy a post would take. There were many times in 2023 when I thought that this might just be the natural end of my blogging life. God knows social media technology has made blogging a bit of an antiquarian activity. But, I’m not ready to go–yet.

The death of words

Pre-Musk Twitter sucked for many, many, reasons, but damn if it wasn’t a great place to find community. Reams have been written about post-Musk Twitter so I will spare you my take on that, but conditions did get to a point where I decided–a few weeks before he let the orange guy back on–that staying on the platform would be a moral failure on my part. I care less about losing 4,000 followers than I do the loss of my Twitter regulars who supported me, responded to my dumb jokes, and engaged with me about books, music, cute dogs, and other important matters. So although I am on BlueSky and Threads, the former is a bit clunky and the latter is just too much about stuff that gives me anxiety. Instagram is where I probably spend the most of my social media time, but it isn’t really conducive to words. So leaving Twitter–the very thing that killed the way we used to interact with each other on blogs–has rendered me without a place to share all my clever and not clever words. This is especially challenging now that John is no longer around to absorb my need to share my thoughts. Yeah I still do it on Threads, but engagement with my witty bon mots is so low that I might as well whisper them into a pillow.

My year in review

I’ve realized that if I’m ever going to get anything on paper as it were, I need to just do it in chunks and not try to come up with some overarching theme or even a logical sequence. The blog posts that follow below are loosely organized random thoughts about my year.

As part of our decorating plans, John and I had decided to go a little dramatic in the dining room with the wall color. With the exception of my library and our butler’s pantry, the whole house was painted in Benjamin Moore’s Moonlight White which was the perfect background for art and looked lovely in just about any light. But early in 2023, I was starting to understand that I could make unilateral decisions and contemplating what color I would use to make the bold statement in the dining room that John and I discussed, I realized I didn’t need to stop with just that one room, so I really leaned into my Farrow and Ball obsession.

I kept the Benjamin Moore Moonlight White in most of the house, but I did decide to punch up two bedrooms, three bathrooms, and the dining room. It was not all smooth sailing. Despite much sampling, mistakes were made. Expensive mistakes.

Like a kid in a candy store, I had trouble limiting my sample pot purchases. They had a three-for-two sale which made that part less expensive, but it is hard to be decisive when all the colors are interesting and you don’t have the knowledge to understand how they are going to work when they coat an entire room.

At the point I was choosing paint, the only object I knew was going to be in dining room was this burl wood sideboard I found on Chairish.

The winner was Cola from Farrow and Ball’s Archive Collection. It is definitely dramatic and turns the dining room into a bit of jewel box with all the surrounding rooms remaining in the Benjamin Moore Moonlight White.

The print above the sideboard is one that John had in his office at work when he died. I totally forgotten about it until after the room was painted. When I went up to the attic bedroom one day it was leaning against the wall and struck me as being absolutely perfect for this spot. The size, the contrast of the white background, and the similarity between the color of the wood of the frame with that of the sideboard really works.

Next up was a guest room on the second floor that is used a lot by a good friend who stays over frequently. She loves pink and Farrow and Ball have a lot to choose from on that front.

I ended up choosing Cinder Rose. The windows, French door, and ceiling are in Great White.

Unlike the windows and French Door, the interior doors and the baseboards were done in the Cinder Rose as well as the walls.

This is where the big expensive mistake happened. The person we hired to help us decorate had recommended something in the green family and chose this range of green. He said he wanted something “happy” in my room. I like all of these in concept and chose Green Ground, the one on the far right. When I first saw the room painted in the color, the contrasting white shutters, windows, doors, etc. made it look a bit too much like the 1990s. So, instead of questioning the choice of the green in the first place, I leaned into it and made a very expensive mistake, I had the painters do all of the woodwork including all of the shutters in the same green. The result was a green room that absolutely strobed. I tried to live with it for a few days and contemplated how I could decorate the room to tone down the effect.

Then Lucy walked into the room and her white fur was reflecting green. I had a green dog. So I bit the bullet and had the painters repaint everything, including all the shutters and woodwork. A very expensive mistake.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a picture of the few days that the room was green, but you can see here what I pivoted to. Farrow and Ball has so many sophisticated complex neutrals, I decided to go with Old White on the walls and Slipper Satin on the woodwork. It’s subtle and changes shade a lot during the day. I love it. I just wish I hadn’t had everything painted green first.

One paint idea the decorator had that was successful, was to paint the interior of my front door in Stiff Key blue. (He wanted it in high gloss, but I went with a satin finish instead.) I love it every time I walk by.

The reason we hired someone to help us to decorate our house was that it had been six years since our renovation and we hadn’t really made much progress filling in gaps and doing things like replacing our dining room table. Although John had a very good eye, we suffered from more than a little decorating inertia. Whenever we went to antique shops, there was much to admire, but we really didn’t know where to start.

A good friend of mine is an antiques hound and lives in Bucks County, Pennsylvania which is rich with, and adjacent to, lots of great antiques shops. This past summer I went to stay with him and his husband and we tooled around their neck of the woods and went up to the Catskills and Hudson River Valley as well. It took me a minute to figure out what direction I might want to go with my purchasing, but once I did, I really hit a groove and came back with a crap load of stuff.

An amazing vignette at Kabinett & Kammer in Franklin, New York. It is amazingly well curated and really reasonably priced. I ended up buying that wooden form behind St. Francis with his head blown off and my friend bought St. Francis.

The whole adventure was extremely bittersweet. One of the many facets of survivor guilt is its appearance when you start to have fun. Mine was exacerbated by the fact that John would have loved to have been on this kind of a trip. In fact, we had tried to do so the previous summer up in New England, but a combination of things including Hurricane Henri thwarted all our efforts. So as I ran around with my friend having a great time, it made me quite sad to think that once we made our decision to decorate in earnest, John never had the chance to get over his decorating inertia in real life. And here I was living it up doing all the stuff he never got to do. It sucks. And it makes me sad.

At first I stuck to buying art–it was what I felt most assured of. When it came to objects and furniture I was much more unsure of myself. But as the days went by, I got over that as well. It helps to have a friend who gives good advice, but it also just comes down to buying what you like. I was immediately drawn to the giant painting of the soldier but I was thinking I didn’t want something that militaristic. But then I realized it looked like England in WWII and I thought of all the great English fiction I love from that period and then I had to have it.

I should mention that I don’t “collect” antiques, or even art for that matter. I buy what I like. I don’t really care if it is a good example of something, or has a good provenance or any of those things collectors care about.

I wanted to find a painting that spoke to my officephilia, and this painting kind of did the trick. Especially with the little industrial desk I found to go in the corner of my bedroom.

Who hasn’t woken up and said “I think I’m going to buy a diorama today”?

When I was out running around antiquing I saw this odd diorama from the 1960s or 1970s and decided I needed it. I know next to nothing about it, but the figures appear to be on a TV soundstage.

During the orange guy’s administration I really retreated into older fiction. Although I have long leaned that direction, his anxiety-inducing tenure had me craving fiction that existed before him. The pandemic further pushed my anxiety buttons and had me seeking out older fiction. And then John’s death in 2022 really sent me to the metaphorical hills. My reading in 2023 was chock a block with old fiction and many re-reads of books by authors I love like Nevil Shute, Eric Ambler, D.E. Stevenson, and Barbara Pym.

Here are six of my favorites for the year. The Ambler and Wyndham were re-reads. Other highlights included The Red and the Green by Iris Murdoch and Anthony Powell’s epic 12-novel A Dance to the Music of Time. Really a brilliant work. Volumes 11 and 12 were less to my taste, but work in the context of the rest of them. I also decided after finally reading Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead that I was done trying to like Barbara Comyns. But those are fighting words around here, so I won’t say any more about that.

I also went to Hobart, NY which is sometimes referred to as the Hay-on-Wye of the US, but I’m guessing it isn’t.

My Hobart stack.

This wasn’t open when we passed through on a Sunday morning which was a disappointment.

I made some attempts to reorganize my library but was only partially successful.

I discovered in 2022 that travel didn’t interest me much. I was in Europe three times, went to different US cities, etc., but being with friends was the only thing that made it worthwhile. I didn’t care that I was in Sicily, the Netherlands, Germany, etc. I could have been anywhere. When I stayed with friends in the French countryside, I only left their property one day the whole week I was there.

I decided in 2023 I wasn’t going to plan much in the way of travel. I saw friends in Puerto Rico, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, but then on a planned trip to hear classical music and see friends in Minnesota, I didn’t want to get on the plane.

I had gotten up at 4:45 AM, got to the airport, hung out until about 15 minutes before my flight boarded and decided I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to fly. I didn’t want to pick-up my rental car, I didn’t want to make small talk, I didn’t even want to go to the concerts. So I went up to the counter, explained to the surprised agent that I wasn’t going to fly, left the airport, and went home. I didn’t even want to get back into an Uber, I took Metro and walked about 25 minutes to get home. Clearly this isn’t normal.

I did go to Maui in June with John’s family. It was nice being with them but it definitely had moments that were hard for me to handle. I lived in Hawaii in the 1990s and that time for me was one of feeling alone and unsure of my future. Here I was, almost 30 years later feeling the same way. One night as John’s older brother was grilling dinner, I felt the lovely Hawaiian trade winds and looked at the amazing sunset and I was transported back to my lonely 20s but with a big pile of grief on top of it. It was more than I could handle.

John’s family and me. Minus John.

I used to love to cook. Not so much since John died. I’ve gone through various food preparation stages since then, but low grade depression keeps me from finding my level as it relates to putting food in my face.

I started off the year strong with this lovely bowl of noodles inspired by a chef I follow on Instagram. But there weren’t many moments like this throughout the year. There was a lot of Doordash and ready made meals. And not enough fruits and vegetables.

My antiquing friend in Bucks County lives near a DQ so for two weeks a large vanilla cone was a regular thing for me.

I did manage to pull together a turkey for Thanksgiving with my parents and sister. It was kind of interesting, when I’ve done this in the past, I always swatted away people offering help. This year I was calling out orders (requests?) to everyone in hearing range. It actually made things so much more efficient and less stressful. Who’d a thunk?

There is no getting around it. After over a year and half, grief is something that is with me pretty much every hour. The intensity of it varies and shifts, and joy and contentment are still possible, but it’s always there somewhere.

Some of the things I’ve had trouble coming to terms with is how I keep John’s memory alive and what part of his life is my responsibility to keep alive. John had a pretty important position in his field and he was largely closeted, so his work world hasn’t really known how to deal with me. Even though his work was very much a part of my life for 20 years, I was not a part of his work world. This was the easiest to let go of. His work legacy will live on without my intervention, so that can just be what it is.

He also had 39 years of life before he met me, so I was faced with boxes of letters and photos and other things from people and parts of his life that are largely unknown to me. There are vacation snapshots of views I never saw or people I don’t recognize. We have no kids. There is no museum of John. All of our stuff is going to be landfill at some point.

I went through these mementos, kept the ones that made sense to me, and put the rest out in the trash. But the night I put the trash can out on the curb for collection the next morning, I was in bed and suddenly felt like I was throwing John’s memory away. I ran out in the middle of the night and dug the bag out of the garbage. After a few weeks I opened the bag and sorted all the correspondence out by sender. I had to ask his family who some people were, and for a few they didn’t know, I had to do some sleuthing online to figure out who people were. I ended up sending these stacks of letters and cards back to the people who sent them to John over the decades. Family, friends, old boyfriends. Hopefully they appreciated getting these mementoes of their own past, but it was also fitting reminder of John and their relationships with him. Now that he is gone, I can never know those 39 years before me, but returning those letters and photos gave me a some bit of closure, at least on that front.

One of the things I found was a postcard that John had purchased before he met me. It was one that I had also purchased before I met John and had hanging on the wall in my office.

When I had friends over for dinner who all knew John before they knew me, I pulled out these napkins that John had gotten at India Hicks’ shop on Harbour Island in the Bahamas. Both the island and shop had been on John’s bucket list for a long time and we finally got there in January 2022, just a few months before he died. Using these napkins that he never had the chance to use was heartbreaking.

With persistent low grade depression and higher level anxiety, I decided I could probably use some therapy. One of the things that has come out of those sessions is I came up with the notion (apparently not a unique one) that maybe the grief is a gift. Not in the sense of something that someone wants, but that it is an intense reminder of intense joy. Not that the grief brings joy, but that without it it would be too easy to forget the joy we shared. It is a pretty helpful notion. It doesn’t make the grief any less, but it does kind of help in coping with it.

Although Covid probably played a role in John’s death, the two years we had at home together because of it were an amazing for us. We were lucky enough to be safely working from home, John’s work travel went from 50% to 0%, and we loved every minute of it. Of course we had our moments of being stir crazy, but to spend all that time together, enjoying the seasons, and our garden, and Lucy, was truly a gift. We talked about how the experience had proven that we had nothing to fear about the togetherness that retirement would bring. He was four years short of that retirement when he died and now I am facing a retirement alone instead of with my soul mate.

In Mexico in 2019

I don’t want any of you to think I’m not okay. I’m doing pretty well. I know I’ll be okay in the long run. I just need to figure out anew what my life is and who I am.