Brisket! Brisket! Brisket!

If I've been spending hours in an glassy-eyed catatonic state lately, I have Drew to thank. A couple of weeks ago he burned me a lecture series he'd been listening to. So Heidegger ended up narrating my drive to Minneapolis. That turned out to be pretty prescient.

Best part was the CD folder he rigged up, constructed from an old calendar, with James Dean peaking out from the most amusing places. Crafty! Now with Martha unable to smuggle even nutmeg into Alderson, it's up to us on the outside to keep the flame alive.

Minnesota was relentlessly Minnesotan. For the first half of the week, Pre-Cambrian retro was in, with high temps barely reaching zero. The weather made the streets look eerily post-apocalyptic: silent buildings casting long shadows across empty roads. No pedestrians, or traffic even. Tuesday's family activity was maintaning core body temperature.

Minnesotans were relentlessly Minnesotan. On Christmas Eve day Byerly's was choked with people picking up orders. A woman, wide as she was tall--about four feet--and ancient as a coelacanth, was wielding her shopping cart like a Buick Roadmaster. As she clipped every shin and kneecap in her path, it was the victims that apologized effusively to her. Sorry! Sorry! Ooh, sorry there, then!

And grandma was even more grandma than she's ever been. She defeated my efforts at defensive eating by day three with weapons-grade food that should've been declared to the IAEA.

So taken was she with the idea of cooking a brisket that it seemed to find a relevance to every conversation within her earshot for a day. Brisket, brisket, brisket. She said the word four times in less than a minute, and I only began to count after the comedy of her mentioning it so often became unavoidable. Such was her enthusiasm that she began to cook the thing at 1:30 that morning. The smell woke me up in the middle of the night and sent me to the bathroom, where I threw up for the first time since Mac gave me a case of the nasties after a trip to Philadelphia during freshman year.

The depressing part wasn't that I spent Christmas Eve sleeping in the upstairs bathroom--the farthest possible room from the kitchen in the house--after releasing epic poems of vomit. The depressing part was that this made me feel better than I had felt all year. From anything. And 2004 was not without its moments. So I bear no malice to Grandma's brisket. In fact it reminds me of a line from the gnostic gospel of St. Thomas: "If you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save you." See! I can do biblical literalism!

But the second coming of my Swedish meatball dinner was not the only Christmas miracle. That I was able to follow grandma's "conversations" was another. They are sort of unilateral, with her doing most of the talking while I'm just along for the ride. Disjointed, abrupt, at times seemingly diagnosable, her conversations can sound like someone calling out answers to a Rorschach test. She looks cheap, oh they used to know how to dress. This was all before They broke the unions. I think all that turkey gave me a case of the gout. "Do what you love"? That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. Clarence Thomas? He's a patsy. Norm Coleman? He's a patsy too.

These sessions can be like listening to a police scanner, with non-sequiturs and static occasionally interrupted by something really interesting. As when she retold the story of V-E day in Minneapolis, with Louis Prima leading a conga line down Hennepin Avenue. Or her trip to Chicago a year earlier, at age sixteen, drinking highballs and flirting salaciously with sailors on the train. "We were all going to die tomorrow back then, you know" she said.

Oh grandma, like you, or any of us girls in the family, have ever needed an excuse to flirt with sailors.