There�s no bread like naan bread�
6:53 p.m.
Afterwards we adjourned to our house where the boys played on the electric guitars. Son even joined us for a while, showing what he could do on his. Sylvie read my stories in B1ack Cat Tales, and said all the right things. We treated them to absinthe, amarulla and Sheridan, and Sylvie gave us an advance copy of her latest CD. They left mid-afternoon to rescue Sylvie�s parents from their kids, one of whom is slightly autistic and could possibly be a problem. Good folks. Maybe we�ll make a trip to see them in Rachacha next summer.
While at the restaurant we saw Ian, a professor at the college and folklorist. We first got to know him about 15 years ago when Hubby was working on his clarinet quintet and wanted some regional folksong to use as a basis for one of the movements. Ian had gone around in the early 1970's recording �house singers� singing folk songs. These were men and women who went from party to party and knew all the songs. Most of them were quite old, and one of them, Willie Lavalee, recorded At Gary�s Rocks, a ballad about a young man who lost his life breaking up a log jam. This is the one Hubby eventually used in his quintet, and later on in a piece for soprano, clarinet and tape.
Anyway, Ian was at our house (this was the house we rented when we lived on campus) and Daughter was about three and Son was a tiny baby. He�s a huge man, corpulent to the max, with an enormous snowy-white beard. Daughter said to me in the kitchen, �That man is very fat,� and I said, �Yes, he is, but don�t say that in front of him.� So, she marched into the living room, where he was crushing the sofa, and said to him, �You have a very big beard!� It was precious.
Well, Ian has had terrible health problems. Many years ago he received a kidney transplant, and has had to take immunosuppressors ever since to lessen the risk of rejection. Just before Brumalia, Daughter and I met him at Java where he told us that he was awaiting heart-valve replacement surgery. Since there is a very good chance that he won�t survive the operation, he chose to wait until after the holidays since dying at Christmas-time would be a poor thing to do to his life partner. It would ruin Christmas for her forever. So today he told us that he didn�t have an operation date yet, but he should know in the next couple of weeks. Very sad to think about.
Supper was leftovers from last night, still delicious, especially the nacho sauce. This time we used store-bought tortillas. They didn�t taste as good as mine, but there was no aggravation involved. Tomorrow evening we have Ken, Marie, Lloyd and Joyce over for dinner, and the menu consists of squash soup with chestnut pur�e, Boston lettuce salad with grapefruit and avocado, spinach-ricotta pie, and chocolate mousse. Hubby will make the pie, I will do everything else. The house is still relatively clean, so tidying will be minimal. Yay!
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