A mantel of many Marys (with their many Mary mantles).
Wearing today:
My good old Sierra, with thrifted blue linen big shirt and thrifted Birks. And wet hair.
If this isn't the world's easiest outfit, I don't know what is. The pale blue shirt helps the gray be a little springier, too.
Lately I've been thinking about dyeing this dress, as I did Camellia last summer, but I can't decide on a color. I like gray well enough, and it's certainly basic and useful, but I keep thinking: what if it were teal? But then I'm about to have not one but two teal dresses, so I think a third would be overkill. And then I think: what if it were rose pink? But then . . . eh, I don't know. I mostly think about this because while I like wearing this dress year round, gray feels a bit drab and wintry for spring and summer. But then I like Audrey just as she is. And then, too, winter will come . . . though I'd probably pick a color that was intense enough to work in every season. BUT I'd also need to pick something that didn't play up the seams too much, since that thread won't take dye. That might be the dealbreaker in the end for this whole idea. Probably better simply to plan to buy, eventually, a dress in this fabric weight that is another color.
But not today. Today we're going to go walking and enjoy the springtime. I slept through the coronation, incidentally, though my daughter and son-in-law in Dallas hosted a wee-hours watch party, which she says was a great success. I figure: if I care enough, I'll watch it all on YouTube.
It would all matter to me a lot more if I were actually there, though I have a hard time ginning up that much interest in King Charles and Queen Camilla, with whose lives we have all been too drearily overfamiliar (in at least the illusory way that the media lets you feel you know everything) for too many years. There's just none of the mythic, tragic grandeur of a very young Queen thrust into a role she didn't want, but considered it her ironclad duty to accept. Instead, we have an old man who has wanted it, because otherwise his life hasn't been about anything . . . and that's just not very stirring, imaginatively. Still, it's a big day in England, and a new and different chapter for virtually everyone, since hardly anybody alive now can remember a monarch other than Elizabeth. And it's like the Pope --- one dies (or resigns), another ascends, and he might be good or bad or indifferent, but he's the Pope, and if you're a Catholic, you care when the white smoke goes up.
We simply have no analog in American polity for this kind of thing, which maybe is why we (culturally speaking) can't resist simultaneously romanticizing it and shrugging it off. Not only does it not affect us in any way, but nothing that does affect us in any way is anything like that. If anything, all the office-ascending that does affect us, and the roleplay associated with it, is drearier than even the dreariest monarchical caperings. At least it's generally a lot more boring. Do people on the other side of the world get up in the small hours to watch an American president sworn in? I kind of hope not. I love my country, but I don't see why anyone else would love it that way, that much.
(also, I realize that nobody here gets up to watch the British Prime Minister take office, either --- lately that would be a LOT of early mornings . . .)
(also, I realize that nobody here gets up to watch the British Prime Minister take office, either --- lately that would be a LOT of early mornings . . .)
But now I have to go walk the dog. She is out of patience with my lollygagging.
LATER:
I realize that what I wrote earlier about the coronation probably seems pretty ironic, given what's in the photograph at the top of this post. It does occur to me that in a whatever-this-is that we have here in America --- suffice it to say that what we have, governmentally speaking, is a thing without a king --- we maybe need to glom onto someone else's monarchy for some imagery to attach to our understanding of what God is to us. As we proclaimed at our Enthronement of the Sacred Heart, years ago, Jesus is King of our home. He's not the president. That little rite, to which we invited many friends as well as our favorite priest, was in itself a private coronation, and about the only thing we have, as an association, to attach in any real way to the idea of monarchy and ascensions to thrones.
Other than the simple human attraction to anything that's not what we do --- which is to say, the human attraction to novelty --- this is a reason to care about monarchies and their continuation. They are a figure for something more real and enduring, and maybe even when we don't want to admit to believing in that real, enduring something, our longing for it makes us, at least for a day, long to be subjects. Or at least be fascinated by the idea.
ALSO: Yesterday was Cinco de Mayo, and for dinner we had salmon with chili-lime-cilantro-mango sauce and drank Modela. This was frankly more a function of hey, it's Friday, what do I do with this fish, and also here's this beer which is the right combination of pretty-cheap and not-bad, than it was about Mexican independence or our feelings about the same. Over dinner my husband said, "So what is Cinco de Mayo? The Day of the Dead?" No no no no no, I said, it's like Mexican Fourth of July --- a response that was, like a lot of things I say, basically true but not that illuminating. And the Day of the Dead is All Souls, ever heard of it? It's our Day of the Dead, too. It's the same Day of the Dead . . . Anyway, I waxed a little eloquent on that theme for a few minutes, thanks to the pretty cheap/not-bad beer I was drinking at the time. I get that they do some culturally distinctive things on that day, but still.
ALSO ALSO: I think about how complicated life feels sometimes, and how everybody I know is reading about things like quantitative meter . . . and I just want to retreat into talking about clothes, because that's so safe and familiar and pleasant, so here we are, having a little clothing retreat, all the time, from all the hard questions we have to get dressed to answer.
PS: Making Coronation Chicken Mac and Cheese for dinner, because.
PS: Making Coronation Chicken Mac and Cheese for dinner, because.
And peas.