26. A Triptych of Absence and Love

We did some more house-sitting this weekend past. A college buddy has a friend named Sid whose family has been in Paris for the last couple years, and she introduced us via ye olde interwebbes. They were heading off to Venice for a few days and needed someone to take care of their place. We were happy to do so, not so much because of their awesome apartment with its spacious kitchen and lavish living room and comfy bed, but because they have KITTIES! Two super cute cats that took right to us. Cuddly love sponges that think a good way to spend your day is to pet them. The whole day.

But that's not what I'm going to talk about this go-round. You don't want to hear about someone else's apartment two blog posts in a row, do you? No, today I'm going to tell three stories that circle a single theme, sort of like the end of Return of the Jedi's Death Star space battle/Endor bunker battle (with ewoks! Pbbt)/ lightsaber duel triple punch. Each of those scenes has a David/Goliath sort of Good vs. Evil thing tying them together (Lucas doesn't really play around with grey areas). My theme will be love, however, and to illustrate it I shall be telling stories about my grandparents, Data (from Star Trek: The Next Generation), and what happened after the end of our house-sitting stint.

Practice your awww face, ladies and gents.

I couldn't decide on cats or Star Wars for the "cover" picture, so you get both.

In “The Naked Now”, the third episode of the first season (1x03) of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the crew gets infected with a virus that makes them act drunk and horny. One of the results of all that is that when Data is ordered to Tasha Yar's quarters to take her to sick bay, she instead seduces him.

Later in the episode, once everyone has been cured and Data and Wesley manage to save the Enterprise from a chunk of star that was hurtling towards them, Tasha-- now sober-- tells Data, “It never happened.” While Data's emotionlessness saved her from getting dark broken-hearted poetry from him, you can tell he doesn't really understand.

My mother's parents are known to us as Mimaw and Dedad. The exact spelling of these titles is up for debate in our family. Dedad was a pilot during World War II and afterwards, and Mimaw was a nurse. Dedad's plane of choice was the Vought F4U Corsair. I mention this only because I thought it was a cool-looking plane and I built a model of one for Dedad for his birthday one year.

I think it's the jaunty wings. Plus, Dedad flew one, so that was cool.

As family legend tells it, during their courtship they didn't live close enough to see each other regularly, or maybe it had something to do with Dedad being stuck on base somewhere all the time. Something. But the way they kept in touch, or at least Dedad with Mimaw, was that while he was out flying- training or teaching others to fly, which was his main metier- he would fly over Oxford, the little town in North Carolina where Mimaw lived, and drop letters out of the cockpit of his plane into her backyard. I find this awesome.

Of course, at the time neither of them knew their names were Mimaw and Dedad. They had to go and get married and have three kids who then went on to have, in all, eight kids of their own, to find this out. Funny how that works.

Last minute cross-Atlantic scan-and-email. The future is awesome.

For the first several years of my life they lived in a big house on the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. Going there was always very exciting. Without going into too much detail, they had a pool table and cracked leather furniture and a swimming pool next door and a beach at the end of the yard and a toy aircraft carrier that launched foam Corsairs with a throttle-type lever. And I distinctly remember standing in their living room and seeing my first commercial for Star Wars there. Judging by the viewing angle of the TV (i.e. my height) in my memory it would have been for the '79 re-release.

I had not yet realized what a whiner this guy was.

Megan and I cat-sat from Thursday night to Monday evening. But Megan left early. She went with Nails to Brittany to welcome Spring in by wandering around in Merlin's wood, also known as the Broceliande. They had a great time, had adventures with lizards and wizards (but no blizzards or gizzards) and all the fantastical things you'd expect in an enchanted forest. They left on Sunday and would be returning Tuesday. So I'd have one night by myself with the cats, and then one night all alone in Petit Bateau.

My night with the cats consisted of some beer and a couple movies of the superhero/adventure/explosion variety. Man, I am a sucker for some visual spectacle. However, upon finally watching last year's Super 8 I have to say that this:

is no match for this:

despite the addition of this:

 The crashingest, explodingest train ever

Movies watched (I also rewatched Thor because I like the “god loses power/fish-out-of-water” genre), beers emptied, I collapsed into bed with the kitties. No probs.

The next night, returned to Bateau after seeing Sid and his family back home, I settled in for another evening of fun. I'd been exchanging texts with Megan off and on, so I knew she was fine and having a good time, so no worries there. While trying to figure out what to eat I discovered what Megan would later inadvertently tell her mother and brother I call my “special rice”-- rice cooked with a bouillon cube-- making me sound like someone who calls adding a bouillon cube to something a special dish. But after the feed and more movie watching (this time it was the fourth of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies) as I made ready for bed I was struck by a quandary: where was I going to sleep?

Tasha Yar didn't survive the first season of ST:NG. She was a killed by an animate oil spill critter called Armus (“Skin of Evil”,  1x23). A tearful funeral was held at the end of the episode, where a hologram of Tasha said a few words to each of her friends. She made no mention to Data of their time together, but you could tell it was implied. In a much later episode (“The Most Toys”, 3x22), when everyone thinks Data has been destroyed (spoiler: he hasn't) Geordie and Wes are going through his things and found that he kept a copy of that hologram, a reminder of her.

Tiny Tasha

In an episode where Data is forced to defend his right to have rights (“The Measure of a Man”, 2x09. Just keeping my sources clear), that he is more than just a machine, the fact that he had relations with Tasha is brought up and works for him to prove that he is a sentient being. (Spoiler: the trial goes in his favor.) Even though their love never had a chance to develop, even when Data went and tried to have a relationship with someone else, even when he had to struggle against a Romulan commander that was Tasha's daughter due to some alternate timeline shenanigans, he never forgot Tasha, and he never loved again.

This doesn't count.

Mimaw and Dedad had no sweethearts before each other. As far as I know. This was in the Long Ago, of course, back when “holding hands meant something, baby,” to quote John Cougar Mellencamp for some gods-know-why reason. And just as I don't want to think about who my mom or dad might have been involved with prior to meeting each other (or if there even were any maybe-mommies or coulda-been-daddies), I'm not interested in knowing if there were any contenders for the title of Mimaw or Dedad. Because only Mimaw is Mimaw. Only Dedad is Dedad.

When Mimaw died (this was years and years and years later, folks; lots of happy years), she remained present for Dedad. At family gatherings, when we sat down for Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner, all those kids and spouses and grandkids and spouses and great grandkids, he would talk about how happy he was to have us all there. “And I know SHE is happy, too...” When he sent out birthday cards (with as many dollars as years we were turning) he signed them Mimaw and Dedad.

Back at Bateau, I was ready for bed. But how to do this? As you may remember from my first blog post (or not:Click here for the description of Petit Bateau ), our beds are transformers, two small quarter-couches that fold out into single futons.

But not a cool Transformer-bed like this.

Megan sleeps in the one against the wall, I sleep in the other one. If I unfolded my bed, leaving Megan's put away...well, it'd just look wrong, all sticking out into the middle of things. In fact, the picture of our bed/couch in that first blog post has mine unfolded. Megan loves lounging, working, reading in bed, and often leaves hers in its bed configuration all day. I must refold mine every morning because it's impossible to move around with it unfolded (the phrase making the bed is more literal to me now).

Plus, it was starting to hit me that Megan was not here. At Sid's it hadn't been as big a deal because I stayed up until I was super tired, and it was a different place. But here I was at home, in our Little Boat, and I was realizing that Megan and I haven't been apart for more than a few hours in almost seven months. Those few hours are fine; I do my thing, Megan does hers, we meet back up and have some dinner. But this is days! It wasn't exactly withdrawal so much as, well...things were incomplete.

Our going to bed ritual is a bit of a dance, as one of us brushes their teeth and the other changes into PJ's and then we switch, and then once Megan's in her bed I can unfold mine and pull out our big blankets from the nooks where we store them. I couldn't do the dance tonight. And I pictured myself, lying in bed, no Megan to my left to touch, not even a bed there.

So I unfolded Megan's bed and slept in that. I got to have my feet up against the heater for once. And while there was still no Megan, I got to sleep with her pillow, and her blanket, and got to think things like, this is how Petit Bateau looks like from Megan's point of view when she's lying down. Hunh. Silly things like that, but they made me feel closer to her. Still, though, sleep eluded me. Megan was missing, and I missed her.

Dedad died a few years after Mimaw. As mom and Uncle Ra and Aunt Donna were going through the herculean task of...categorizing? Cataloging? Arranging? There should be a term for the process of determining what to do with the possessions of a loved one that has given up all need for that stuff. Remorializing? Whatever. As they went through their parents' bedroom, they came across a collection of cassettes by Dedad's side of the bed. I remember, back somewhere in the early 90's, Dedad complaining about CDs. He said he'd finally gone and transferred all his music from records to cassettes, and now they wanted him to do the whole thing over again? I don't think he did it.

I don't recall what his words about this were, but they probably weren't PG. 

When they listened to them, they found that it was just Dedad talking. The tapes weren't part of his music collection; they were letters to Mimaw. He would sit down in the evenings and record letters to her, telling her how his day had been, how the kids were, and what was going on. And he talked about how much he missed her and couldn't wait to see her again.

So, ladies and gentlemen. This is what I was thinking about as I lay in Megan's bed, staring at the ceiling from her angle. I thought about Data- because Star Trek is one of the idling-speed things I think about- and his one love. And I thought about my grandparents, and how being apart from Mimaw was hard for Dedad, but that he could comfort himself that it wouldn't be forever, and all he to do was be patient and he'd get to be with her once more.

And thinking that, I drifted off to sleep.

From left: Dedad, Uncle Ra, Aunt Donna (in the middle in front), Mom, Mimaw