Walking by an antique shop, I spied a suit of armor. "I would love to have it in our living room when Llara, (my daughter) arrives next week," I said to my husband. As someone who came into my life 13 years ago, he didn't know the true story, but he had an idea by our faces that armor was part of our lives when my daughter arrived and I told her about the armor. We hadn't bought it.
Back in the 70s when we lived in Boston and Llara was in high school, I bought a Mexican tin suit of armor from a Harvard Square shop. I'm a lover of medieval history and literature. If my daughter looked at it with great doubt, that was nothing compared to when I sprayed it green and named it Bertilak de Hautdesert, after the green knight in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a 14th-century alliterative verse romance.
Picture it in my living room at the end of the couch.
Llara's reaction was to offer to pay whoever visited to take it away. No one took her up on it. At Christmas De Hautdesert had Christmas ornaments dangling from the eye holes in his head piece and garlands hampering any movement he would have wanted to make with his sword. The celebrations of Easter, Fourth of July, Halloween and Thanksgiving were also marked with a change of costume. The only reason she didn't turn him into a maypole was she didn't think of it.
De Hautdesert did not accompany me on my move to Europe, which I've regretted from time to time.
Rick said he would buy the armor from the antique store, but I'm not sure we have room for it. This more authentic armor I wouldn't paint green. I might reread the poem.
It's not so much the armor, but one of those family memories such as the time I ate my brother's last cupcake, that thread through decades of family life often being retold at family togethers. We could call the stories memory glue.
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