New Year’s Eve: Izzy’s song, Clarycat not gone from us altogether; the year’s memories

Here I am holding firmly to my sturdy fellow, Ian, Izzy taking the photo — greeting everyone on FB and twitter & bluesky & a literary mastodon

Dear friends and readers,

This has not been an easy year. As you know, we lost our beloved darling Clarycat. She is not gone from us because we remember her — not just the urn and the pawprints, but I’ve ordered four images to be blown up into framed prints (8 by 11) and I will have one in my workroom to sit behind me as she used to do, one in my bedroom near the one of Jim, and two more smaller ones (3 by 5) in the dining area and enclosed porch where I sit and read. I greeted friends and acquaintances on FB, twitter — and also BlueSky and a literary mastodon (which last place I don’t understand as a way to communicate with others at all, it being one of these Discords) with me holding onto Ian — quite a two-arms full.

I also as a match put onto FB and twitter a photo taken by Izzy and me holding poor Clarycat a month after she had her stroke. I had been told she probably had a brain tumor (because of the way she could not hold her head steady, stumbled to the left) but no hyperthyroidism. From her photo you can see she no longer had a natural expression on her face, nor is she holding her lower body up by herself any more. I am so worried. It matches the one just above

Izzy has commemorated the year with one of her music videos. I think Simon and Garfunkel’s “American” admirably suited to her low-throated soprano voice (with its mezzo contralto registers):

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So, 12/31/2023, 5:45 pm, we (Izzy and I) have just (45 minutes ago) returned from the Kennedy Center where we saw The Girl from North Country, book by Conor McPherson (the last couple of years the Booker Prize has gone to Irish writers’ books), music and lyrics by Bob Dylan. Upfront it has its problems: that often, especially the first half, the songs, music and lyric seem to have nothing to do with the lives of this group of people living in or renting for now in a boarding house _is a problem_. Audiences don’t invent parallel universes (see review). But the stories grow on you and it is such a relief to get away from the script of competitive success and boasting — the choice of 1934, a year deep in the depression as speaking to Americans today tells us a lot. Everyone trying to fail better. Many not succeeding. It reminded me of Our Town (the imagined backward thrust from later death), and Steinbeck at his best. I loved the truthfulness of the down-and-out despairing stories and characters as well as their occasional hopefulness

The doctor character as MC (Washington Post, Thomas Floyd)

By the second half I was deeply roused. Not a happy or triumphant way to bring in the New Year; something better than that — a remembering, a refusal to stop looking at what’s happening through the lens of historical fiction: two reviews from the New York Times: Ben Brantley; same writer‘ for The Guardian, much more critical, but recognizing something deeply from within American culture, Alexis Soloski; the Irish Times.

Ensemble moment

We remembered our last year at the Kennedy Center with Jim, which I find I described here on this blog in 2013: “Elvis has left the building.”

Home again — both taxi drivers were friendly to us! About two hours after we got in, we sat down to steak and spaghetti and I have drunk half of one of three bottles of champagne that have been sitting in a cupboard for 11 years — since Jim died. The bottle was not so hard to open up after all. Main force and a scissor completed the work.

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Cover illustration for the New Yorker for 2023 by Bianca Bangarelli — it’s how I bring in and out many days & nights of my life

In these New Year’s Eve blogs or postings/memories, one is expected to answer questions, like what was the best or your favorite book or movie or play. I just saw the question, What was my favorite moment of this year? I cannot answer such a question; it presupposes joy as some kind of regular recurrence. Joy is now twice gone from me: gone with Jim’s death, and now reinforced with Clarycat’s …
I do feel tired and admit this was the saddest Christmas and New Year’s I’ve had since the year Jim died. I have this feeling of wanting to do less, reach for less, but what I do do genuinely take real pleasure in. To slow down. I don’t want to stop traveling altogether but that the trips I take be genuinely meaningful. Now that I am so aware of Ian as a personality by my side, I am also very reluctant to leave him unless I feel for sure I’ll have a good time or need to go. He and I are getting closer.

But there is something else working its way through me — culminating this year in the loss of Clary. I want to think about why I do what I do. I want to get my priorities accurate. What shall I do about these blogs? I want to see some way to feel secure until my death. And, yes, recognize that my age will make me dependent on one or both of my daughters way down the line (I hope way down).

Thus to me this year was no transcendent book or movie or play, though I entered into (read, watched) some superlatively fine ones, which justified to me living on, experiences I felt on offer to live for and for trying to share them with others. I carried on trying to be a mother-friend to my younger daughter, Isobel. I am not going to make a listicle (as my older daughter ironically calls these, while she is paid very well for doing such). Going together (me and Izzy) to Somerville College, Oxford, and the experience there and some of what we knew in London was probably our highpoint; for me Clary’s death that which I cannot recover from, the year’s deep grief.

As to sheer enjoyment (sort of inexplicable except I do love literary allusive books to other books I’ve loved) I have been loving the Dorothy Sayers’ Wimsey/Harriet Vane books, and both TV series (Ian Carmichael and Edward Petheridge/Harriet Walter) — she is entertaining to me (literary deeply) and her life as told buy two biographies (I’m going to begin a third soon). I am so stimulated and feel so guilty that I did not begin to know and understand American literature, especially of the African-American type. I carry on my feminist literary studies, though I now realize my understanding of the word feminist is now not part of any public group …

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It’s nearly midnight just now. I fell asleep trying to watch another episode of the 6th season of The Crown but did finally manage, the 8th episode, The Ritz. This is the hour during which Margaret has three strokes; we trace her journey towards death while she remembers one night in 1945, the ending of World War Two, May 8th when she and Elizabeth went to the Ritz and Lilibet ended up in the basement doing some wild dancing with the people celebrating down there. The fireworks are starting and I hear the booming of the rockets. Another year gone, and a dangerous one to come.

My best friend, Ian, is on my lap pushing his body against mine, his head against my head

The Girl from the North ended on this song which I send along to you gentle reader, for all of us:

Ellen