On the Licit Use of Jacuzzis

It constituted absolutely fraudulent—and possibly criminal—use of a Jacuzzi, and if my own level of stress hadn’t long past crossed—OK, limped across—the finishing line of impending insanity and death, I would have complained to the manager of the hotel about it.

We were in St. Thomas, where we had fled to escape a street festival—which was actually an invasion of 500,000 youngsters who were getting drunker by the hour. Since two years ago Mr. Fernández had been the target of a rum bottle flung by a group of these youths—I was still retrieving bits of it the following December, on those rare occasions when I decided to clean—it became clear: Retreat was the sensible alternative. And however expensive taking a forced vacation might be, the alternative was worse.

So we were in a Jacuzzi in St. Thomas, soaking the year 2014 away: We had lost a beloved cat, we had both been ill for a quarter of the year with the chikungunya, and we seemingly had settled into the lowest part of the U of happiness—our fifties, when worries about aging parents, about impending retirement, about errant children, make this the least happy decade of life. We had, in short, utterly earned a life pass to the Jacuzzi, even if we never again faced an unpleasant moment for the rest of our lives. And so the hot water was blasting away at muscles that made the cables of the Golden Gate Bridge look limp, when a very nice couple from Minnesota—Mary Jane and Allen—joined us in the Jacuzzi.

Joan Didion once wrote that hotels were social constructs, by which she meant that anybody who was staying at the hotel—and who could be paying to do so—would be perfectly fine to watch your stuff—or even your kids—on the beach as you threw yourself in the water. True, the gentleman in the red t-shirt with the news in white: “Mr. President, I built my business?” I didn’t have to, and certainly didn’t want to, spend time with him, but that wasn’t the point. And that was? That however much he wasn’t, there was a way that he was, one of us.

So hotels offer the possibility, or rather, the function like a kind of debutante ball for potential friends: Everybody there was eligible and we got to choose. And so the couple who joined us very quickly climbed onto the A list, since all of a sudden, and with no coordination, we have begun to present ourselves as husband and husband, and correct diplomatically those who call us “friends,” or “partners,” or whatever is less offensive to more conservative ideologies.

Has anyone ever written about the dayliness of discrimination? Probably not, since my computer had to be taught “dayliness,” and since it doesn’t know that discrimination is seldom a gale, but too often a leaking faucet. Which means that the first time we stayed in a country inn in Puerto Rico, over twenty years ago, we were both nervous: Would they let us in? Would it be a problem, two gay men in a room? Would other guests stare, whisper, leave the room? We breathed a sigh of relief  when no eyebrows were raised.

Right—so that weekend a month ago in St. Thomas? Well, we wrote down “husband,” as each other’s relation to the other, and never imagined that it would be a problem. And there’s something more: People are more clued in, and don’t jump in to impose friendship or any other relationship on us. So we spent the weekend gently cluing in the world, and guess what? Nobody had a panic attack.

Least of all the couple from Minnesota, mentioned above, who remarked that they had gotten married in Minnesota after nine years of living together, since weddings? Well, who could take seriously a 23-year kid in a rented tuxedo who was making the ludicrous promise to love and obey to an equally clueless—and ridiculously clad—girl? But in Minnesota, after the marriage ban was lifted, an amazing diversity of ages, races, families came out and were desperate finally to legalize their relationships. And so, said Mary Jane, the very thing that was supposed to decimate the institution of marriage had actually strengthened it. And they had gotten married, and their relationship was different, and better, somehow. And was that the case with us?

The morning of our arrival to St. Thomas, I had awoken in San Juan tense, irritable, anxious about not having a printed boarding pass, worried about the cats, and utterly exhausted, since the sheer effort of getting away seemed enormous. So my reaction to Raf, when he enquired why there were never enough white socks? It was entirely unspoken, and for those of you married, you can skip the next paragraph:

There are never enough white socks—and thanks ever so much for pointing out this appalling if not horrific situation, since I will definitely add that to the urgent list of matters that I alone attend to—since there is only one person who washes white socks, and that is the person who overlooks the white socks that you take off and throw all over the place and that person washes only those which are in the hamper with the whites. So if you would like, I can take time away from cutting the weed trees with a hand saw in the back balcony, thereby offending a woman with considerable resources and clout, and go running around the apartment in search of little errant white socks!

Full disclosure—I am the one who throws my socks around.

Which isn’t the point. And the point is that, while I savored my response greatly, I also savored it privately. And so when Mary Jane asked: Had marriage changed our relationship, and for the better? Both of us looked at the other—one of those long looks that you have in relationships, in which you know your answer, and wonder about the others.

“Yes,” we said in unison.

And so we talked: Mary Jane is a writer and activist, and they both had travelled to Wisconsin, to protest with thousands of others the Walker administration’s attack on unions. Nor was Mary Jane limited to just activism, she also knew immediately about the totally bizarre things that immigrants or the sons thereof got up to, presumably to whittle away the endless Wisconsin winters.

“Oh, you mean like the Dickeyville Grotto?”

How could I have forgotten?

“Why didn’t you ever take me there?” cried Mr. Fernández, appalled at my treason. Why not—who could not want to see this:

Even better, this, with its almost Victorian zeal for self-and-other-improvement:

Yes, under the Papal flag and the American Flag are embedded—according to the website…

…in stone, mortar and bright colored objects-collected materials from all over the world. These include colored glass, gems, antique heirlooms of pottery or porcelain, stalagmites and stalactites, sea shells, starfish, petrified sea urchins and fossils, and a variety of corals, amber glass, agate, quartz, ores, such as iron, copper and lead, fool's gold, rock crystals, onyx, amethyst and coal, petrified wood and moss…

…the telling and teaching words, “religion” and “patriotism,” the two concepts which the venerable Father Mathias Wernerus held dear.

And Wernerus would be? Well, in a letter quoted in the website, he signs off as “the Builder:” Here’s what he has to say:

It is about five years now that this work was started. Many reasons urged me to put up 'Religion in stone and Patriotism in Stone.' The main reason why it was done I could not reveal. The last day will tell you more about that. I can only say that Almighty God and his Blessed Mother, in whose honor we worked, blessed us in such a way that 'we built better than we knew.' Thanks to His almost visible blessing from Heaven, we made the formerly unknown village the point of attraction for countless thousands of people. God's wonderful material collected from all parts of the world has been piled up in such a way that it appeals to rich and poor, to educated and uneducated, to men, women and children alike. Future generations will still enjoy the fruit of our labor and will bless the man that conceived and built this thing. Thanks be to God."

Well, it was a not-so-subtle message to protestant Americans: Catholics can be just as patriotic as the rest of the country, and according to Wikipedia, the Grotto (always capitalizes in the official website, so it seems wrong not to here as well) attracts 40,000 to 60,000 people a year. Among which might have been Raf and I, but it was often a good idea to use a bit of judgment about where to take Mr. Fernández, since he had seriously been on the verge of social disaster at the informal musicale I had taken him to, at the gracious home of a friend.

It was an event I remember frequently, since I am on most days playing Bach suites in the Poet’s Passage, and what if I am playing at the level at which the lady—those decades ago—sang her Schubert lied? Because she “dressed” it, not for the opera, but rather in the way my uncle dressed turkeys. And here, flown directly in from the Internet, is a description of that process:

1 Cut the wings at the first joint. ...

2 Cut the tail right at the base but above the gland. ...

3 Cut the feet at the joint. ...

4 Remove the head at the neck. ...

5 Remove the insides. ...

6 Separate the liver, heart and gizzard from the innards. ...

7 Remove the crop. ...

Save the tail feathers.

All of this can be seen in glorious detail at the website of Georgia Pellegrini, and for anyone wondering why you should save the tail feathers? Georgina has the answer!

They are awfully purty. They make a nice headdress for cocktail parties.

See more at: http://georgiapellegrini.com/2011/04/19/blog/field-dress-turkey/#sthash.hmk2y9L3.dpuf  :

OK—so the singer at the musicale had removed the heart, gizzards, and liver from the innards of her Schubert song, and fortunately, we were at the back of the room—or maybe it had become the salon—since we had made the fatal mistake of looking at each, not in the way we had looked at each when Mary Jane had asked, had getting married changed our relationship? And had we wondered not at our own but the others answer?

No, we were young, we were in love, and it was apparent what was in our four eyes: rampaging and nearly-impossible-to-suppress hilarity. So the singer warbled and wobbled from one flat, shrill note to the next, and her accompanist was a model of solemnity as he stumbled his way through the score: At one point they became badly disengaged in the process, and glared at each with apparent annoyance.

It’s a kind of torture, wanting to laugh and not being able to, and the only other thing to be done about it was:

1.     NOT look at the other

2.     NOT breathe

3.     Pray for deliverance

So with that behind us, I was going to take Mr. Fernández to Dickeyville? To look at things like this, about which there is this description:

Visitors from far and near again and again told the builder that the flower pots that stand on either side of the Holy Ghost Church are some of the most beautiful they have ever seen.

So we sat, Mary Jane and Allen and my ungrottoed but anyway still-my-husband and I and were both in Wisconsin and in the Jacuzzi, where two or three of us had every right to be. Because I don’t know about Mary Jane, but Allen?

…stay tuned!