Dad ordering at Feby's Fish Restaurant on Maryland Avenue. He could not think of the name of the fish just prior to us ordering at Feby's Restaurant, a favorite place of my dad and mom's when they dined our regular, after we'd added me to his checking account at Wells Fargo in Greenville through the help of Ghanaian personal banker Kwaku Boateng, who actually studied building engineering science in school and has been in the U.S. for about 2 years. He plans to go back to school and possibly return to Ghana where they speak about 32 languages but English is the official one. But back to the important issue: Dad EATING. He couldn't remember the fish and when he looked at the menu, it turned out to be Crab Imperial, which he ordered. Crabs are not fish I said after having gone through a litany of species only to be rejected at each mention. Well, at least he ate the crab and some veggies and applesauce. Nice to see him with a little appetite. Our waitress, didn't get her name, in the pic played basketball in HS and was 6'2" tall and could easily reach the glasses above her. Another waitress stretched to reach a glass and claimed that she needed platform shoes.
Dad eating his crab imperial at Feby's.
It happened again, only dad was in the car and he did not see my tears, but they came streaming as WRTI had listener request and the music of Wagner played, the immolation scene of Brünnhilde in the 3rd Act of Götterdämmerung (Der Ring des Nibelungen, a famous production from Bayreuth 1976, recorded 1980. Gwyneth Jones as Brünnhilde, Fritz Hübner as Hagen. Conducted by Pierre Boulez, directed by Patrice Chéreau. Finale of Wagner's tetralogy.)
(?) ... will search YouTube for a clip and audio. Just unbelievably moving music, so varied across the orchestral spectrum and the mourning theme is just heartrending, that's what brought out the tears. (As I type this, dad is downstairs listening to a record of Heifetz and Brooks Smith playing a Mozart sonata and drinking a cup of tea that I heaped with three teaspoons of sugar, damn the diabetes, and which he feebly held as he brought it to his mouth, leaning forward from the couch). It's the strings that just come out of nowhere (7:08 of video) that jerk the heart strings and then the brass but those violins, what a sound, heavenly as the body moves to another plane.
Hildegard Behrens: Brunhilde's Immolation
Boy, in his suffering, dad tests me. I put on an old, well played record of the Franck Sonata with Heifetz and Rubinstein, the album worn and tattered (one of his oldest records, where did you find that, he asks. In the TV room on the shelf, the first record, I respond), and then I notice all the pills, Alprazolam and Vicodin, a total of about 8 pills. Why so many, I ask, and he goes to the store in the extra room and takes out another Alprazolam adds it to the group and takes them upstairs with shaky step to mom. It his focus and he comments that I leave the records running on the turntable. So critical, no thanks for playing the beautiful Mozart sonatas or the Franck at the present time, only the fact that I don't change the record after it completes playing (the record does not end playing but keeps rotating on the turntable and needs to have the needle moved up and over to its resting spot, the turntable turned off and the record lifted up and placed back into the album cover, that will make him happy. I know it's the pain and the suffering he's going through that clouds his judgment. All he can do is what he has done for all these years, those routines that bring him solace and meaning to his life. He can't break out and I can't blame him for this. I need to love him and give him a break and just try to understand his motivation.
The Rubinstein Collection, Vol. 7: Franck: Violin Sonata / Fauré / Poulenc / Albéniz
(Arthur Rubinstein; Jascha Heifetz)
