Sunday, December 21, 2003
The Dark Party
Saturday night was the holiday party - the one that matters, the one we were throwing for our closest, oldest friends. We got up Saturday at a leisurely hour and dawdled in bed before embarking on pretty much a full day of both scurrying and tidying. We went to Seakor and got the killer kielbasi and the spicy polish mustard; we went to the grocery and got all the various necessities; we went to the fancy-ass grocery and got some rustic camembert and some monster cavern cheese, which I do so love. We got the dog out just before a cloudburst. It was a harbinger of good timing to come.
I was just finishing wrapping gifties for the munchkins when Dave and Kim showed up at about 4:20 with Daisy and little Kaleb. Partying began anon. Dave had brought like a dozen truly worthwhile wines for our delectation that evening. We put the ham in the oven and the cranberry jelly in the freezer. Jon and Lisa arrived, with Sophie and little Aaron and a big ol’ tub of really fine latkes. Latkes are not known for their ability to travel without adverse affect but these ones were cohesive and tasty and even sort of light, for latkes. And Andy and Heidi came with Aliyah and Jessicah Joy and a variety of deadly baked desserts and a big honking pot of bigos - Polish hunters’ stew. This one was made with smoked turkey, pressed dry-cured duck breast, pork tenderloin, some kind of proscuitto I think, and about twelve other kinds of carnal delicacies. As always, it was spectacular.
The apartment looked just festive enough not to turn my gorge, with a few mini-trees and the simple non-flashing white lights and a selection of disposable shiny-globe ornaments scattered around out of toddlers’ reach. The ham had just come out of the oven with its glistening crust of butter and sugar baked onto its spiral-cut bulk. The latkes were hot; the bigos was just starting to warm and I was ready to put the brussles sprouts on to braise.
(Just a note: you may have hit a bit of friction when you read “brussles sprouts.” They are, after all, foul nuggets of pre-compost, inedible under the best of circumstances. I’ve learned to eat almost everything but brussles sprouts, and that just goes to show that I have some discriminative capacity - I don’t just “like everything;” if something tastes like what urine would taste like if it were a vegetable, I am just as happy not to consume it. I’m with you on this. But a while ago I decided that I might not be giving the BS camp a fair shake so I tried my own recipe for them and what do you know, they completely rocked. It was an epochal moment when Kel leveled a steady gaze at me and told me, “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but you are SO going to make these brussles sprouts again.” A new day has dawned, and it has dawned on seasoned, pan-fried, broth-braised brussles sprouts. I had enough for eight adults pre-fried and braise-ready.) Kim was out on an emergency run to Rite-Aid when the lights went out.
At the time we didn’t know about any fires in any substations. The first moment of darkness is ten times darker than the tenth moment of darkness, and 100 times darker than the 100th moment… so naturally we were completely blind. The silence, too, was overwhelming, as the music and oven and fridge all shut off and conversations stopped and we all took a bit of a breath, wondering what we were experiencing - a blackout, or an earthquake (which are sometimes immediately preceded by a power outage, which outruns the temblor), or a terrorist attack… There was just nothing, dark quiet nothing, and we eventually calmed down to the recognition that we were just powerless, in the most obvious way possible for once.
But we’d been getting ready, inadvertently. Dave, Jon and Andy had all brought menorahs, and I had two more set up of my own, gleaming chrome and polished stainless steel. Even lighters had already been fished out and brought to the ready for the profound numenous moment of candlelighting. So we lit a few extra candles and Kel dug out the votives and tea lights and columns and tapers and all manner of wicked tallow that she’d have set out if we’d had enough time really to dress the house, but we’d left things a bit understated and that was nice too, but now we had a profusion of stubby little candles on squares of foil on saucers everywhere, and little groups of them on silver salvers, and all the candlesticks out, until I had to admit that we had one hell of a lot of flaming crap all over the place and the house was suffused with a gentle forgiving glow, more than adequate for the careful eye. The kids were awed and excited, asking in hushed tones, “what happened?” and “did you see, the lights went out!” We lit menorahs, singing the old blessings with rustic enthusiasm in the flickering candlelight of our “frontier channukah” - just like the pilgrims did it. The addition of fifteen more candles on the table helped brighten things even further, and then I lit the duraflame in the fireplace and light seemed to flood the room; the girls were entranced.
Next, as if they weren’t already swimming in toys, we gave them presents. I’d gone out friday night to a cool little toy store downtown and got them each one clever gift and one stupid gift. The clever gift was a battery-powered light-up plastic bracelet, which each of the four girls immediately treasured. These were also handy when one of them would run down a dark hallway; they couldn’t get away from us with our little photooptic tracking device strapped to their ankles. Daisy (who turns two in January) kept coming up to me to tell me she had a bracelet, and then she’d kiss it for me, and then wander away… The stupid gift I got them was a “dragon roar,” which is extremely simple: a four-inch plastic rod with a three-inch piece of nylon line tied around the top, which connects to a plastic cap that’s stuck on the end of a short piece of cardboard tube. When you twirl the rod, the tube spins around at the end of the line and makes a weird wailing growl. These turned out to be basically little baby-maces, which they weilded with furious enthusiasm anywhere they could find some wineglasses, a candle, or another child’s face. But they loved them. So I can see why the Dragon Roar was recommended for ages 3 and up. I don’t know why the bracelets were, though - they were pretty solid state. Also we got Kaleb a glittery transparent soft rubber bath duck (yeah you should be jealous), which is also recommended for ages three and up though it has no moving parts, is not electric, and could not possibly fit in a baby’s mouth. We gave Aaron a small bouncyball made of thick rubber filaments woven in a sort of atomic pattern, which I was able to bounce up to the ceiling and catch several times; it’s recommended for ages 5 and up. This seems to me to be an excess of caution, but what do I know, we were the only ones without kids there.
We ourselves scored a beautiful calendar, a phenomenal cookbook signed by the author, who is internationally renowned and takes Andy hunting for ingredients like duck and wild pork, and a really powerful and exciting piece of Heidi’s artwork. It’s got a tiny etching of an idealized fantasy house with its fantasy family inside waving to you, or maybe gesturing for help? - because above it swirls a maelstrom of churning dark colors and ambiguous letter-like shapes and psychotic scrawls and tragic washes of falling color… we are so excited finally to have a Heidi on our walls!
Dinner was huge and filling. Desserts included a fusillade of Godiva bonbons Jon and Lisa brought, which paired really well with the 1989 Duckhorn Cab Sauv/Merlot/Cab Franc. The Roderer Estates champagne had enthusiastically been drained before the lights even went out, but the ZD Chard (2000) had solid legs all night long, a perfect complement to the ham and ginger/allspice cranberry jelly. On the other hand, the Duckhorn and the Navarro Pinot (’98) both stood up admirably with the bigos, which had a brazen, rambling flavor reflecting the arkload of species of which it was constituted. And in the end, those bonbons were flanked by Heidi’s peppermint merengues, chocolate lumpcookies, and an enormous yet inadequate pile of the best molassas cookies ever to have been produced, with thick crusty icing and little silver sugar b-bs (made with real silver, no less!). Plus, there were little bowls of chocolate candy gelt coins all over the place.
People dawdled and Aliyah fell asleep on the brown couch still wearing her flashing anklet; Daisy insisted on three rounds of goodbyes before she would let her parents take her out the door. Jon and Lisa were the first to make it to the threshold and were reaching for the door handle to take their leave of us when the lights came back on in a garrish display of electrical excess, illuminating for all to see taht it was time to clear out. Within half an hour the place was our own again, with a few candles left flickering for atmosphere and a jumbled collection of glinting formal china, dozens of pieces from the deco silver service, most of our wine glasses and champagne flutes, and mounds of wrapping paper and empty seltzer bottles and serving pieces scattered around the living room, dining room and kitchen.... and then the lights went out again. We shrugged what was left of the mess which was our home into the category of “it’ll keep till morning,” tried to shut off as many lights as we could remember, and went to bed. At 2:30 we woke up to brilliant brightness from our nightstands and hallway and scrambled around in a hazy still-tipsy daze to shut things down again. We awoke this morning to a house in improbably decent condition, with some lovely new material additions and some very meaningful new history. The “Dark Party,” as Aliyah has dubbed it, will reverberate in my recollection for a very long time, I think.
Many years back, when Andy and Heidi lived just up the block from us, they hosted Thanksgiving. That year, the grand supper table they were using, borrowed from their upstairs neighbor who was keeping it in storage in the basement, snapped under the weight of the mindblowing mass of food that had been produced that year; I’d been sitting right at the center of the table when they’d placed a roast turkey down in front of me and I heard the whole huge board start to groan and give up the ghost; I thrust my knees upward to catch the two halves before they collapsed into my lap and we got the table cleared without the loss of a single piece of stemware. Later that night, one of Heidi’s old friends from her high school outside of Austin, whom she hadn’t seen in many years but who’d shown up out of the blue to share the holiday with us, drank himself into a new infancy, started howling like a wolf, and then barfed all over the place. That thanksgiving is still known as the year of the Texas Hurler, and its legend is sung even unto this very day for both its cautionary and comic value. But now we have the Dark Party in the chronicles of our exploits, and truly it was epic. If everything had gone as planned, it certainly would not have been nearly as much fun. Things were more intimate, more friendly, softer, somehow easier by candlelight. The pressure was off; the friendships lit the room. I wouldn’t try to repeat it but it was exactly what every one of us needed, and it is a blessing on our household that we were granted the opportunity to enable us all to experience it. I realize the miracle ostensibly at the center of the holiday was that the lamps burned for eight days. Last night we got a little sample of how precious that must have been. If it had been eight days worth of the kind of wonderful communion we had last night, that is a miracle verily worth commemorating, yea, even unto the generations!