Saturday, November 27. Acme. Christmas Tree. Pizza Man. Off To See The Wizard. I was hoping that the new generation of our family would have breakfast with us like in the old days, but no such luck. They both slept until almost noon. Only hunger got them moving at about one-thirty. Even Mary Ann was ready to turn her back on her precious leftovers.
There was another incentive for her to go out. Jude and Mary Leigh will both leave for their away-from-home homes early tomorrow morning. Jude will not be back until just before Christmas. This happened every year since Katrina, and gave birth to a new tradition: buying the Christmas tree the Saturday after Thanksgiving.
But food comes first. To the Fitzmorris family's default café: the Acme Oyster House. Busy. We ordered two dozen grilled oysters, which came out seriously overcooked, shriveling the oysters and leaving very little herb-parmesan butter sauce for Mary Leigh to enrich her French bread crescents. I thought about sending them back, but we did so much damage to the collection so quickly that our complaint would not be credible.
The rest of the menu stuck with favorites. Two wedge salads, each with about a pint of blue cheese dressing dumped over it, for me and ML. Jude had his second bowl of seafood gumbo in four days. MA, making some sort of protest against eating in a restaurant when there were two refrigerators full of perfectly good leftovers, ordered nothing. She did help Jude dispatch his draft beer. I had one of those, too. The Acme serves generous drafts in frozen schooners, and they have a few kinds of Abita and some other oddities on tap.
This repast cost almost a hundred dollars. The price of oysters is murderous these days. Still cheaper than in the rest of the country, though, where $3-$4-each oysters are common.
To Red's Christmas Trees on Claiborne Hill. None of us can remember how many years we've purchased our tannenbaum here, but it's been at least ten. Red, who is getting on in years, wasn't there, ailing as he was with a joint problem or something like that.
The crew at Red's is just beginning to set up its trees. Few of them were upright long enough to spread their limbs. We ran through this forest in a tent for a few minutes, waiting for Mary Leigh to find one she liked. Years ago we granted our daughter dictatorial powers in the selection of Christmas trees. This year, a new consideration entered her criteria. The tree she decided upon was seriously unbalanced, with a large gap on one side and not an especially good shape to begin with. The bottom had a double curve, and the top was irregular. She said she felt sorry for this tree, which didn't have the good looks of most of its companions.
That's the one we bought, all right. No discount was offered from the $65 price. Nor did we ask for one. That would have sullied the purity of ML's compassion.
We brought the tree home and threw it, still wrapped, onto the patio. We would set it up and decorate it another day. Everybody had something else to do. The kids went off on a joyride for the remainder of the afternoon. I got down to autographing and mailing the rising tide of cookbooks and Hungry Towns that have been ordered for the holidays. Mary Ann continued to clean up the kitchen, which was still not quite back to normal after Thanksgiving.
MA came into my room gravely. She said she couldn't stand the idea of having the Christmas tree just sitting out there, waiting till next weekend for the two of us to decorate it. "We have to do it while the kids are here," she said, "even if they don't want to do it."
I groaned. Setting the tree up tonight meant remedying a major mess. During the past year, in an irony too astonishing to think about for long, a quart of motor oil had tipped over and emptied itself into the Christmas tree stand. We wiped it as clean as we could, mounted the tree in it, and then put two layers of trash bags around the base to keep the remnant oil (Pennzoil, not BP) off the floors.
Getting this tree to look straight in the stand was easy. It had no straight lines to begin with, so even a major variation in the angle of the trunk neither helped nor hurt.
I got to work on stringing up my precious and dwindling supply of bubble lights. Mary Ann is in charge of the ornament department. Where were the kids? They didn't seem interested at all. Neither of us dwelled on the meaning of that.
Jude was hungry. He and I went to Pizza Man and picked up a big pie and an Italian salad. One of the waitresses there was a friend of Ben Bragg, one of Jude's primary friends and fellow Scouts during the middle decade of his life. Ben's accidental death last year keeps haunting us from any directions.
Mary Ann was nearly finished with the ornaments. Mary Leigh came downstairs to help with the pizza. Then we all sat down in the living room and looked for something to watch on television. We chanced on The Wizard Of Oz, just as Dorothy and her house fell out of the sky and killed the Wicked Witch of the East.
It has been a very long time since I last saw this movie, but it and its music are so familiar that seeing it and hearing it again brought wave after wave of nostalgia. The kids hadn't seen it in awhile, either. Their grown-up perspectives on it made it entertaining in a new way, on many levels. Jude in particular analyzed the filmmaking technique from his experience of making movies himself. We all remarked that it seemed shorter than we remember. And we laughed uproariously at the good scenes--notably the one where the Cowardly Lion jumps out of a window.
The movie kept us awake until one in the morning. My last thought before falling asleep was that we had just lived a day that we will never forget, even though all the activities were ordinary enough. "Remember the time when we got dried-up oysters at the Acme, bought the ugliest Christmas tree from Red's, had to clean up the oil mess in the stand, went to get a pizza, then watched The Wizard of Oz?" That's permanent as a tombstone, and a lot more fun.
