did you wake up new this morning?

The birthday party was a brunch. After the Norwegian prayer, we commenced to eat: egg-tomato-onion-spinach-asiago quiche, bacon, waffles, extravagantly ripe fruit, OJ and coffee. Hours before arrival I was pondering various collisions between people I know and people whose craft I admire or just between people whose craft I admire who come from idiosyncratic perspectives that intersect somewhere here, inside me. At some point I learned you can survive on cheese sandwiches, Camel cigarettes, the arc of the postmodern post-WWII novel (Gaddis/Pynchon/Hawkes/Brautigan/etc), and consecratory gestures, but it's not that much fun. I think about this before being called back to the actual birthday party conversation, which revolves around how my grandparents never thought they'd live this long and the degree to which CNN's representation of geopoliticial situations is or is not prescient. I like cantaloupe and go to town on it. the 90 year old opines that it's not quite as humid as the untrustworthy weather guy said it'd be. The table is really big and sort of boardroom-slash-domestic elegant, and every time I suggest that the wood might possibly be teak the groans from across the room contest the plausibility of this, but anyway it takes a certain degree of orchestrated choreography to get all the dishes going clockwise because sometimes someone abandons the group effort idea and digs into whatever edible delight catches his/her attention (cf. "cantaloupe" supra). We talk about absent family members and the unnaturally tall corn ("I suppose even the folks around here are growing that genetically modified stuff," grunts the 89 year old) and I fade out for awhile until I hear the Uncle bring up the moral quandary that surrounds the diamond trade and everyone kind of blanches at this from him, as horses bricklaying and the everyday exigencies of bachelorhood in SW MN are more typically subjects of his monologues. Plus he's all thin and sprightly today, so I think it's possible he's getting laid. Three cheers! And then the sounds of mandibular crunching and lip slurping resume and it's Sunday so I wonder about the over/under on time allotted to television before naps begin. We've all been here before and it's getting to the point where it's hard not to be conscious of the long odds on this going on ten years from now, but there's dessert and coffee in about an hour and then we'll probably talk a bit about the Blitz and life on the sea before settling into that silence that foreshadows late afternoon departures.