There was a rare but embarrassing tech glitch here on Saturday night. What started as a McCheese entry became “A House and Its Head,” at which time I unstickied this thread and deleted the (incomplete) 1/4/25 entry. But then there was a cache error and the previous McCheese draft remained stickied and was served instead of the revision. Apologies if anyone caught that and was confused.
Incidentally, that post’s title was taken from an Ivy Compton-Burnett novel, and in a funny twist of timing I received a charming letter today from someone who read an old Cranky post about Compton-Burnett and wanted to discuss it. She signed off with “Keep up the great work!”, which made me smile: I wrote that post in the summer of 2014, after reading several tomes about grief as I tried to make it through the darkest period of my life. Ivy’s demeanor could be as cold and disapproving of as her books, but here I’ll quote Julian Barnes, who quoted the source herself:
Ivy Compton-Burnett missed Margaret Jourdain with “palpable, angry vehemence.” To one friend she wrote, “I wish you had met her, and so met more of me.” After being made a Dame of the British Empire, she wrote: “The one I miss most, Margaret Jourdain, has now been dead sixteen years, and I still have to tell her things… I am not fully a Dame, as she does not know about it.”
She had beautifully captured how I felt about my former partner, who wasn’t dead but was, I suspected, lost to me forever because of her belligerent pride. A year ago today, in “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” I wrote about that here, so there’s no need to do it again, and in that post I mentioned the copy of C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed that was visible in a 2021 New Year’s Eve photo I’d sent my oldest and closest friend. Now I also miss him with a “palpable, angry vehemence,” and he is “the one I miss most.”
One of the earliest posts I wrote here, about my late grandfather, quoted a Rosanne Cash lyric about her father’s death: “I’m the list of everyone I have to lose.” My list, which was modest to begin with, feels awfully short these days. Will I ever love more people than I love today? It seems unlikely, especially if Crankenstein and I remain childless. Yes, I can make new friends, but they’re no substitute for old ones. Maybe that’s my cue to do more to strengthen those ties. Or maybe a rereading of Compton-Burnett’s biography is in order; it might contain an acidic bon mot or two that makes one reconsider interacting with others at all.*
* That’s a joke, mostly. Everyone needs someone who pretends to listen when they talk.