The Seventh Impossible Thing.
Our friend Alice has been through the looking glass and is having adventures. This is exactly what she wanted in the first place, when she climbed up on the fireplace mantel and poked her head through the mirror: talking flowers, chess pieces that come to life, that sort of thing.
Speaking of chess, the White Queen boasts that she can remember things in the future, which is fine by Alice. She’d just been talking with Tweedledum and Tweedledee so hey, almost any thing is possible.
However, there are limits to her credulity, as when the White Queen tells her:
“I’m just one hundred and one, five months and a day.”
Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, was 101 years, seven months, and 26 days old when she died in 2002.
“I can’t believe that!” said Alice.
“Can’t you?” the Queen said in a pitying tone. “Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”
Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
Portrait of Marco, Queen Victoria’s beloved Pomeranian, on the Queen’s breakfast table, by Charles Burton Barber (1893). Victoria was amused.
I have a method for trying to believe impossible things, and I’ve found that it’s best to start with the easy stuff and from there, ease into the truly unfathomable. For me, that would be:
Atoms, and how they work.
The whole concept of infinity.
Another year’s worth of McArthur Genius Grants have been passed out and I STILL HAVEN’T GOT ONE.
That I’m not 29 any more.
Der Drumpf is [retch, shiver, break out in cold sweat] President.
It’s the sixth impossible thing that I have the most trouble with, which, in my house, goes by two words:
Leftover
Wine
In my house, it’s a rule: Once a bottle of wine is opened, we commit ourselves to guzzling in the name of all that is holy and regrettable. However, the other day, I found myself unable to commit to the last drops of a very nice vouvray:
Dear Readers, you know from Champagne-O-Meters in the past, that I have successfully produced icy wine slurpees with the help of Mother Nature . . .
But it’s still Coyote Summer here on Long Island (another week of 70 degree afternoons!) so I made do with the freezer and I am here to tell you that Yes . . .
. . . Wine Does Eventually Freeze Solid. Luckily, it only takes a half hour for it to thaw and then we have a rather delightful breakfast beverage that helps in believing the Fifth Impossible Thing.
Claude Monet (the French painter, which I feel compelled to explain since I heard someone at my library pronounce it “Mon/ette”), was 77 years old when he explained one of his impossible things to a visitor to his gardens in 1918:
“Ever since I turned 60 I had always in the back of my mind a plan to take each of the categories of motifs I have worked on over the years and to create a kind of synthesis, a kind of summing up, in one or perhaps two canvases, of all my former impressions and feelings.”
W. Somerset Maugham was 64 when he wrote his “summing up’, which he called “The Summing Up” and it’s totally wonderful.
Monet never did follow through on this summing up because, he said, it meant that he would have had to travel to northern and southern Europe, to the landscapes that he made famous with his paintings, and, he said, that was not possible because “…nowadays, traveling tires me.”
“And besides [he went on to say], I want to stay put here, where I’m happy. I’ve grown used to the flowers in my garden in the Spring and to the water lilies in my pond . . . they give flavor to my life every day.”
This week I have been imagining, What if Monet had gone through with this project? What would those canvases have looked like?
So I guess you can tell that, after letting it lay low for a couple of months, I’m back on the Monet project. Suddenly, it doesn’t seem like work to think about it any more, and I’m playing around with ideas that would never have occurred to me two or three weeks ago. Inspiration is a funny thing: or, maybe, I just don’t drink enough wine for breakfast.
Top Cat and I are heading to our favorite wilderness on Sunday (two days from now) so stay tuned: It may, or may not, be leaf-painting time.
Until then, here’s Taffy reminding me why I used to complain on long car rides about how impossible it was to share the back seat with my sister:
P.S. I am Bibs in this scenario and Taffy is my mortal enemy and he knows it but he still DOES THIS.
Have a great weekend, Dear Readers. May all your impossible things be made possible by belief.
