Sometimes I share a show with one of my kids. During September, aka The Ailing Month (colds, then my first and rather brutal round of still-lingering covid), Frances and I watched Better Things. Okay, after I tested positive and kept getting sicker, I left her in the dust and finished it on my own. But it was still fun to share.
She and Beatrice return again and again to Gilmore Girls, which I sometimes dip into with them. Beatrice and I loved watching Ghosts. We all watched Never Have I Ever together. And for years Gabriel and I have been watching The Last Kingdom.
It's about Saxons and Danes in late 9th century England. The Last Kingdom has its immediate pleasures, like the sexy cast covered in leather and furs and tattoos and aerial views of warriors on horseback hurtling towards each other on green hillsides. But there are other pleasures in it for me that ripple out, like remembering watching this show with Mike after the children were in bed when it first came out. And how Mike enjoyed my historical curiosity and, while sick, discovered a mostly-forgotten titan of historical fiction from the 1950s, Alfred Duggan, who wrote a novel about the life of Alfred the Great. He found me a copy and I gobbled it up, telling Mike about Wessex for days (and I happened to have just read a Thomas Hardy novel set much later in a fictional Wessex; synchronicity!).
There's the pleasures of sharing that historical curiosity with Gabriel now, and looking up real figures from the show like Aethelfled, Lady of Mercia and just the other night, Hwyel Dda, a king of Wales who is, we are convinced - based in no small part on my grandfather's stories - our ancestor. King Howell the Good! Yes! That's our guy.
On this general history kick, last night Gabriel told us about the lead up to World War 1, which he is studying in school. He made sense of the tensions and allegiances that developed following the Franco-Prussian War for Beatrice and explained to me, a wizened old woman of 45, that Prussians are simply Germans. Holy shit. I always wondered who those Prussians were. I mean, they rhyme with Russians. Yet...no. My mind was blown.
His storytelling skills are considerable, honed over hundreds of hours as dungeon master. In time we pulled out the enormous atlas for some visual aids. A sheaf of charming imaginary maps in Frances and Gabriel's childish hands from years ago fell out of it. We moved them and the forgotten dinner plates aside to spread the maps of Europe out on the kitchen table and trace old boundaries on top of new ones. Gabriel explained that Tsar Nicholas, King George, and Kaiser Wilhelm were cousins, yet even intimate family connections couldn't stop the war.
I got distracted and began studying the pages of the atlas that showed European UNESCO world heritage sites, dreaming of our vacation next summer. I found a gorgeous photograph of craggy Skellig Michael and its impossible monastic settlement founded by Saint Finan in the 9th century.
Mike, check this out. It's Finan!
Poring over another map, Gabriel didn't hear me clearly. Neither did Beatrice. But I did. A little shock registered, then a momentary grasping of my heart. It just came out in the excitement of the moment. I called Gabriel Mike. That never happened before.
He looked up at me, a question on his face. I felt very still.
I just called you Mike by accident.
I could see him bracing quietly for some unknown big emotion to escape from me as I stood there looking back at him, still leaning on my hands, flat against the photographs on the table. A big feeling from Mama could upend the pleasurable momentum, moving through stories and maps and summer plans.
It's okay, I said, wanting to reassure us both. That was just...strange.
Finan is our favorite character on The Last Kingdom and we are gripped by fear for his life during every battle scene. Obviously Mike would feel the same way about charming Finan. And Skellig Michael's name comes from the archangel, just like Mike's. And sometimes we teasingly call Gabriel Dad when he is being very Papa-like and giving Beatrice a hard time for wasting food or reasonably suggesting consequences for wayward sisters and pets. And, you know, perimenopausal or covid- or age- related brain fogginess naturally leads one to screw up loved one's names all the time.
But still. I said it like I expected Mike to come into the kitchen and look over my shoulder.
Because a part of me did. And in the end, after the disorientation subsided, I decided I treasure that part of me, formed over twenty years, that hasn't gotten the memo. That still lives connected to my old way of being, a part whose first thought after encountering something cool, beautiful, exciting, tied to our shared interests is: I can't wait to show Mike.
And how very tender, how very lucky, that we hold so many of those shared interests in common with our children, fellow lovers of this mysterious, precious world, glorious descendants of Hwyel Dda. I can't wait to show them, too.
