And We're Back

After having been away from the blog for the better part of the summer and the entire start of fall, I am back to, naturally, complain. What has dragged me back into the blogosphere? Destination weddings. Fucking destination weddings. Specifically, a brother’s wedding I can’t miss, being held for some unfathomable reason not in the moderately difficult to access but cheap once you’re there small town both families are from, but rather on an island in the Gulf of Mexico about halfway down America’s Wang.

Oh, I’m sure it will be lovely, being on a beach and all, but—but—it will be in August. In Florida. In fucking August, in fucking Florida. My brother wants a bachelor party consisting of two days of fishing in the Everglades. Because nobody lives in the vicinity other than my other brother and their psychotic mother (they’re half brothers to me, actually, via Dad), the remaining family members are starting to hash out which $1,200-a-week beachfront cottages to rent. I’m looking around for the nearest defibrillator.

The upside? Since it will be August, in Florida, I will be at very little risk of freezing to death when I’m sleeping under a bridge. Besides, I hear manatees like to cuddle and are hardly ever rabid.

End Times

End of the year, that is. Despite the changes that rolled in, moving some people around the country and sending some people into eternity, the calendar relentlessly marches along. Christmas knocks on the door and dances inside, trailing familiar players and trappings in a cloud of new traditions and arrangements. I'm not sure who's in charge now that my grandparents are gone. I think it might be me. My parents and uncle and aunt spent a week here, sightseeing and helping prep for our annual holiday party. Now they are back home and I'm taking a breath before the next wave of relatives from my girlfriend's side of the family come to town and trying to remember that we're still waiting for Christmas Day to come.

My grandparents' bedroom was always off-limits in December, partly to shield scattered unwrapped presents from prying eyes, but mainly to shield my grandmother's dignity from relatives seeing the utter chaos that lurked behind the door during those 24 days, paper and ribbons and boxes covering every horizontal surface as if a Christmas bomb had gone off mere moments before, no matter when you looked in there. I went back into my own bedroom this morning to retrieve my shoes and realized that one more circle has come full. Jesus. The Christmas Bedroom Bomber has tracked my genetic code 1,600 miles from southern Illinois and detonated several megatons' worth of paper, ribbons, and boxes all over every horizontal surface. And so it goes.

And There You Have It

Grandma was the organist and music director at St. Joseph's Church in Olney, Illinois for... 30 years? 40? 50?--a very long time, in any event, before finally giving it up a few years ago--and was a stickler for precise performance. She insisted on playing the organ for one son's wedding and two grandchildren's weddings, for a great-grandchild's baptism, and for countless other weddings and funerals besides a million or so regular Sunday masses.

The choir sang at her funeral mass this past Monday, of course, but the current organist was out of town, leaving them without an accompanist. But--but!--back in 2004-2006, the current music director had spent many sessions making digital recordings of Grandma playing the choir's entire repertoire on an electronic clavinova in case they ever found themselves without a backup organist...

And that's how Grandma managed to pull off the exceptionally rare trick of playing at her own funeral. WIN.

Life Continues, Chapters 1 and 2

Thanksgiving week really throws a wrench into things like, say, funerals that require people to travel from a couple different states, so Grandma's wake and funeral has been put off until Monday, allowing us to spend just enough time dithering on Travelocity to watch ticket prices magically jump $200 in the 5 minutes it takes to confer on whether 44 minutes is enough time to change planes in Phoenix (it isn't) and then decide to take the flight that turns that layover into a whopping two hours and eighteen minutes, all the while gritting our teeth and trying not to think about the fact that it only takes ninety minutes to drive to Phoenix.

Whatever.

So if the first step in what is turning into Mary's Epic Funeral Week Extravaganza was booking flights and cars and hotels and wrangling family members who have decided to make the coming weekend the opening ceremonies for the Douchecadet Olympics, the second step was more of a side trip in the completely opposite direction. That being the road to Mesa and my (still very alive) maternal grandparents' house for Thanksgiving, where we were joined by some elderly second cousins and two neighbors from Calgary. Suffice it say that it was fairly pleasant until the inevitable spectre of politics popped in for pie, and the consensus around the table (with one abstention; I'll let you guess who) was that George W. Bush will be deemed by history to have been one of our greatest presidents, possibly the greatest ever. Also: if you voted for Obama to prove you're not racist, who are you going to vote for to prove you're not stupid? I almost think "Sarah Palin" is supposed to be the totally sincere answer to that one, but it was hard to tell.

It went ever so slightly downhill from there, so I graciously excused myself before I stabbed somebody in the face with a pie fork.

The grandma we're burying was a passionate Democrat. End of story.

Anyway, here's a preview of Chapter 3: get up insanely fucking early on Sunday, inconvenience a friend by getting her to give me a ride to the airport, fly on a goddamn airplane to Phoenix, sit around for 2 and change, fly on another goddamn airplane to St. Louis, take a shuttle to the rental car lot, drive two hours to the tiny ancestral Illinois hometown just in time for the wake, endure the wake for three hours, get carryout from an actual Mexican restaurant in the tiny hometown that's gotta be filled with guys wondering what cracker nightmare they wandered into, for fuck's sake, have a drink, go to bed, wake up the next morning, go to funeral mass, drive to the next town over for the burial, drive back, have a drink, hope that the moroseness devolves into bad singing rather than factionalism and gunplay, go to bed, wake up, kill a morning, drive to St. Louis, fly to Phoenix, sit around for another two and change, get back to Tucson at 11:30 pm.

So much to do, so little patience for doing it.

Grandma

Crazy. Everything has been crazy since Friday night. My beloved grandma had a stroke, and finally died early Sunday morning. I have been in a daze since then, trying to make travel arrangements back to Illinois (at the end of the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, LOLOLOLOLOL) and trying to sort through my feelings while texting with my brother nonstop. The consensus is that we want a time machine set for our childhood, equipped with a giant PAUSE button.

Grandma was a prodigiously talented musician and a gifted teacher who guided generations of students through Every Good Boy Does Fine and everything that flows therefrom. In 1988, the town where she and my equally talented grandpa lived and taught hosted a salute to them, inviting 40 years' worth of students back to sing, dance, and celebrate their touch on their lives.

Want a story? All you had to do was say Grandma, tell me a story and she'd say all right, give me a minute, and after 20 seconds or so of gazing intently at the far wall, would launch into a richly detailed and complex yarn--all from scratch!--populated by some of your favorite children's literature characters plus new ones of her own invention. Twenty minutes later, after hanging on the edge of your seat to find out what would happen, you marveled at the story. And she went back to whatever she was doing without skipping a beat.

Her house is gone now, sold to a younger guy in the small town she stayed in until the end. My childhood is now consigned to the realm of memory, my heart forever living in the yellow house on North Avenue, at the end of the long gravel driveway, where the screen door slapped shut and you walked across the porch and through the Dutch door into the kitchen. If it was winter, the heat blasted you in the face with a wave of coffee and whatever had most recently roasted in the oven, a pie or a cake on the counter, Grandma up to elbows in flour or soapsuds, always delighted to exclaim your name and put down her work to come hug you. If it was summer, the buzzing green floor fan carried the scent of lemons from the pedestal dish on the table to your nostrils, followed by the scent of the old wood in the walls.

Forever, if I want to be back in Grandma's kitchen, I only need to briefly hold a lemon to my nose, close my eyes, and breathe deep. And I am there. But she is gone.

Well now, she would say briskly. Well now, let's get on with it. Forthwith, Mary Elizabeth Collins (January 9, 1918-November 21, 2010).

1920, age 2, wearing the baptismal gown her brother George (left) had worn before her, subsequently worn by her sons, me, my brothers, and my son.




















1922, age 4, Lawrenceville, Illinois.
















Age 10, roughly, with her mother, Maude, and beloved father, George Sr. George was an Irishman who could do a mean jig.





















Age 12, more or less, on a pony whose name was not recorded for posterity.




















On a college trip to St. Louis (middle) with a friend and her beau and future husband, my grandpa Gus.





















Wartime mom with my oldest uncle. He was born while Grandpa was stationed in Blackpool, England, directing the US Army band.





















Flash forward to 1997. Tromping through mayapples while mushrooming in southern Illinois.

















On her 90th birthday.

















The last picture I took with her, July 2008, on her back patio, Olney, Illinois.

Geek Week Highlight

And now, a bit of sunshine. I will most likely never get on the Maddow show, but at least now I can say I know somebody who did, and he rocked it. Or pooped it, whatever.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Graduation Day

When I learn from my son the lesson I spent his lifetime to this point trying to teach, I know I did my job.

His team went into the state volleyball semifinals on Friday as the number two seed, riding a 24-match winning streak, and five sets later exited the gym as moderate upset victims. They took the first two sets reasonably handily, but in the third fell behind early and lost their momentum, started hitting serves wide and long, started letting balls fall in bounds, failed to cover on tips. The fifth set went back and forth, with neither team pulling out more than a two-point margin, and his team fought off match point three times before finally succumbing.

Great, I thought, he's going to be a mess for a week. This is a kid who was devastated as a freshman when he missed a must-convert penalty kick and his soccer team lost a tournament championship, a kid whose confidence took a kick in the gut when he didn't make varsity volleyball as a junior, a kid who spent his entire junior season grabbing his head when he missed a hit and fighting back tears when the missed hit came on match point. He made varsity this year but didn't expect to play, and I spent the first half of the season watching him ride the bench and holding my breath the few times he got into games because I knew a mistake would mean he was (1) back on the bench, (2) with his head in his hands.

But after the halfway point stuff started to change. He wasn't hanging his head, even if he messed up, and he worked his way into the starting lineup and stayed there.When the last ball on match point fell short of the kid who dove for it in vain, they left the floor and huddled under the bleachers with the coach for a long time, and when they started trickling back to their parents I took a deep breath. And was pleasantly surprised. Despite the red eyes and the long hug, he was okay. They were all okay.

They got on the bus and headed back to Tucson, and when he got home he told me everyone got over it on the ride. He wished things had gone differently, but he was happy about specific things that had been a problem for him in the past, that he had done well in this match. He hit every one of his serves in, and returned every serve hit to him the way he wanted to. His Facebook update just said guess you can't win them all.

Acknowledge the bad and leave it behind, take the good with you and move on. He's doing it now, finally  not letting small slips morph into capital-eff Failures that keep spiraling. Finally doing as I say instead of as I do.

And in doing so, he becomes the teacher. My work here is done.

Oh.

My son signed the official papers for his university of choice tonight, fresh out of the shower and smack dab in the middle of Lost, leaving me simultaneously insanely proud and profoundly sad and preemptively lonely.

This is what I raised him to do and who I raised him to be. Independent, inquisitive, confident, eager to go out into the world and give of himself to make it a better place.

Sixteen and a half years ago his father let him go from his hands and he stood there by himself for a moment before taking his first teetering steps toward my waiting arms. Tonight at seventeen and a half he hugged me for a longer moment than usual, playfully punched me in the head, and took his first firm stride toward the rest of forever.

I do not know what I will do without him.

Saw, Sand

Carpentry has been demanding most of my free time and attention the past couple weeks, with the result that the blog has been neglected in the corner, sniffling, for most of that. As is the case with many dykes of a certain age, my girlfriend was married once to a guy, and as is seemingly the case with many dykes of any age, family ties have transcended orientation and marital status, so the guy is like a brother or brother-in-law or something to both of us, and his parents remained as tight with my girlfriend as they had been when she was married.

Anyway. The parents got old, one passed away, and the other is in a nursing home, and the family house is in need of a lot of work before whatever happens next can happen. So the de facto brother-in-law hired me to build bookcases and tables and countertops in the guesthouse portion of the property in preparation for renting it out again. So we have been busy, me sawing and sanding, the girlfriend scraping and painting, the de facto brother-in-law's girlfriend painting and cleaning and wrangling electricians and plumbers. And some of de facto's sister's kids dropped by and variously pitched in and pitched a fit.

They don't want the house sold, or substantially changed, even when some of that change involves scrubbing years of grime from the kitchen cabinets or emptying drawers of decades' worth of sweepstakes entries, lunch menus, expired credit cards, expired medications. They don't live in town, of course, and have made minimal appearances here over the years, never--save this last visit, by one of the four--to help with the house, either physically or fiscally. They were a military familty growing up, so I understand their distress at seeing Grandma and Grandpa's house--the anchor of their childhood memories--fall into disrepair, and understand how painful it can be to think about a place that has always meant family to you more than any other pass into strangers' hands and be closed off to you forever.

It's unnerving when a place you thought was immutable proves itself vulnerable to time after all, when having to untether your memories from a house unmoors your sense of self along with them. But a house without the people is little better than a mausoleum, an empty stage with a set but no actors, a shell populated only by increasingly distant memories. My own anchor back in southern Illinois is slowly being cranked up too, my own grandparents' house set to sell on May 1, the yellow house with high ceilings and warm lights where my childhood self lives poised to move on into other hands, another family, ready for the next set of generations and memories. I don't want that house and everything in it to go away either, but I know it's not my call. I haven't been there and am too far away to help go through the drawers, the boxes, the closets crammed with stuff. Anything my uncle saves for me will be a gift.

It sucks. But it's also inevitable in our mobile reality. Here in my girlfriend's adopted family's home I sweep up as I go where I've moved the kitchen table away to make room for my saw and try to keep the sawdust intrusion to a minimum, putting things back as I found them, doing what I can to ease this transition as my own proceeds apace without me a thousand miles away. I hope they will like what I build for them.

Advent Time

My days of lighting the purple and pink candles in the Advent wreath are long past, and I haven't had a decent chocolate-filled calendar in years, but Chez Bolt is quietly preparing for Christmas. Oh, you'd barely notice it from the outside. Some lights are up, but we haven't gotten around to finding the extension cords yet, so they're strictly a daytime decoration so far, and the tree has yet to make an appearance, and the stuffed albino squirrel still awaits his Santa cap.

I have been killing the time between the ordinary calendar and the appearance of the aforementioned harbingers of the season by baking cookies and playing music, reaching back into the past with the muscle memory of rolling pins and puffs of flour and ancient harmonies on the vocal cords as the past reaches forward with bubbling memories of scents and reverberation, and we meet somewhere in a middle where my grandfather still hangs boughs in every room and my grandmother scurries about a warm kitchen.

The house is shuttered now, of course, my grandfather long the property of the stars and the saints and my grandmother fading in the haze of a nursing home, and a thousand miles away I cut her shapes into dough and play his chords and, for the briefest time, collapse the years and the distance and feel Christmas again.

Merrily, on high.

Thanksgiving

The multi-generational pie.

This year's Thanksgiving pie was cobbled (ha!) together from a filling recipe found in my maternal grandmother's 1953 Better Homes & Gardens cookbook, a pastry recipe from my paternal grandmother's mother, which Grandma taught me to make 20 years ago, and my tweaks of honeycrisp apples and the addition of apple cider in place of the water in the pastry.

Oh, and the pastry leaves on top were Martha Stewart's idea.

The pie made the trip up to the Land of Old Republican People with me and the boy, and while I have been grumbling about this business of (1) having to go to Mesa for Thanksgiving (2) with elderly relatives whose politics and religious fervor do not exactly mesh smoothly with my own (3) without my girlfriend, ultimately it was pretty okay. This may well be the last Thanksgiving my grandparents (90 and 87) see, and I am glad I was with them. My family is flung all across the country, and we have the same stupid shit going on that every family does from time to time, but I'm glad I have them. And pie. I hope your day brought things to be thankful for as well.

Oh, Facebook, You Pose Such Conundrums

Is it rude to de-friend a family member? How long would it take him to notice? I already hide him from my news feed, so in order to be aware of him at all I have to look him up, which I should not do, but sometimes curiosity gets the best of me and then I spend the next couple of hours with a knot in my stomach and the veins in my head playing that nasty kaBOOSH kaBOOSH cadence on a nonstop loop. You'd think I would have learned by now.

He's getting married in October. That should be a fun wedding; I'm hoping that instead of the usual bride-groom split on either side of the aisle the ushers ask Right-wing Conservative Evangelical Military Worshipping Obama Haters or Reality-based Community?

Roadblogging: Seattle, Again

I spent the last 20 minutes wrangling with a post of photos and captions that did not want to line up properly. And finally said fuck it and deleted the whole thing. Instead of photos, words.

This is probably the last epic road trip I will make with my son for a long time, and certainly the last one of this nature, when he's still a kid--an almost-17 kid, but kid nonetheless--and there are a few vestiges yet of him looking to me to show the way. After two weeks and the long drive home looming in just a few days, we have simultaneously been gone forever and only just left.

Planning this trip I thought it would be mostly camping and fishing, with college visits the official excuse for taking three weeks of vacation to traipse across the Pacific Northwest. It hasn't quite turned out that way, with far more hotels and sushi bars than tents and wriggling silver fins and scales on the end of a line, but that's okay. He's not the dirt-rolled camping critter he was when he was five, and my aching shoulder is probably better off for having spent more nights on a bed than on a Thermarest. We never had much luck catching fish anyway, and our tortillas got soaked, so...

So we drive from city to city, mostly me behind the wheel but sometimes him as I clutch the armrest and try to keep my voice modulated. We take scenic routes when we come across them, the slow meander through the redwoods and the waterfalls of the Columbia River Gorge making up for the scuttled plans of camping on the Oregon coast, his unmasked wonder at the giant trees and quiet, impossibly green moss-draped rocks and rushing streams bringing me a deep satisfaction and pride. I am glad he has seen these things and found them beautiful. I am glad it was with me. Even though the larger waterfalls themselves were crowded with other tourists, we somehow managed to be the only car on the roads between them, allowing a slow, solitary exploration unintruded by other people.

He plucks a long strand of grass from the rock and pokes it into my ear as we walk up the trail and says nature fight! and grins.

Magic moments are hard to come by. I'll take these.

Because It's My Day

I mulled a report on the dog of a match turned in by the Red Stars against Sky Blue this afternoon--seriously, Stars? Bring it down the flank and fling it to the middle where Sky Blue have five, six, seven players packed into the box, time after time after time, and still let Sky Blue run counterattacks with the two players up top going against and usually beating your three in the back line? And how many times were you offside in the first half? Ten? And not offside on a hair's breadth decision occasioned by a well-timed trap, but wings and strikers just wandering around and standing three or four steps behind the Sky Blue defense and then flinging their arms up in frustration at the AR? Jesus, Sky Blue put on a clinic when it came to perfectly timed five-yard through balls deftly touched through the line to players making clever runs behind the defense. Just stellar.

But! I am not going on and on and on about that because it was the only eh spot on an otherwise lovely day with my kid, who washed my car and went to the gym to lift with me and baked brownies and cooked up an enormous pot of jambalaya for dinner and shot hoops with me after. Now the iPod is charging and the swamp cooler has finally caught up after 100+ degrees in the afternoon and the dogs are asleep and life is good. I will fix the Red Stars later.

Recovery Package

Recovering? Yes I am. The family was here in various permutations for a week, and now that they've gone back home I have taken the deep breath I've been needing... and find myself wishing they were still here, or at least coming back sooner than they actually will. We did far less hiking this time around than in previous years, so I don't have many general-interest photos to share.

We did make it down to the Nature Conservancy's Patagonia-Sonoita Preserve on a horridly windy Friday to search for birds that, like us, weren't smart enough to stay hunkered down someplace sheltered. Sonoita Creek, fed by groundwater, flows perennially and is so clear and surrounded by greenery that it looks fake.






















Sonoita Creek burbling along.

Whimsy! Snakey decoration on handrail on Creek Trail.

The preserve has a few miles of interconnected trails, about half of which follow the creek before looping around through a partially burned mesquite bosque. The birdwatching was probably hampered by the wind, but we managed to spot a thick-billed kingbird (rare in Arizona), a Cassin's kingbird, several vermillion flycatchers or possibly a single, very energetic flycatcher, finches by the bucketload, a black phoebe, and a pair of gray hawks that we heard whistling for an hour and a half before we finally saw them wheeling in the updrafts.

The preserve is notable not only for the year-round stream and numerous bird species, but also for its stands of old-growth cottonwoods, some of which top out at 130 years old and about a million feet tall. These are the oldest and largest cottonwoods on the planet.

Giant cottonwood.

After a day well-spent, we retired to my back yard and watched my aunt grill up slabs and slabs of ribs, and then we worked off dinner in the best possible way.

The family gathers 'round the TV machine to watch Rachel.

Tonight I'm watching basketball and thinking I'm pretty damn lucky to have been born into this family. Good times, people!

A Sighting of the Rare and Elusive Boltgirl

It's the annual family confab in Tucson, which has left my calendar a bloody mess when viewed from a distance--gotta switch from red ink to a more soothing blue--and my blog neglected in the corner, sniffling. What can I fling at you as I sprint by the computer between rounds of cards, grilling, and backyard birdwatching fueled by high-quality merlot and shiraz?

Meat! Meaty meaty meat meat. I have been a vegetarian off and on for the past twenty years or so, but right now am definitely peaking in the meat quadrant of the graph. Costco sells lovely slabs of top round that grill to tender perfection, which you might not expect from something with "round" in the title, but damn. Damn. I like to cover one slab with a rub of equal parts brown sugar, black pepper, hot ground roasted red chili, and garlic powder, with a half part of kosher salt and let it think about it for a few hours before hitting the grill, and then do the other with simple salt and pepper. And then some lovely thick rounds of onion around the edges until they caramelize. Nom. The grill is getting a workout this week.

Economy! I'm sorry, but at this point I am utterly confused. US auto execs are getting fired by the White House on the same day banking execs are invited over for tea? Meanwhile, my friends and I are coordinating those Costco runs for days when Tucson is not being invaded by family members who gleefully pick up the tab. Recommended bargain of the week: giant clamshell pack of Cherubs grape tomatoes, $4.49. That gives you a week's worth of salads, pastas, omelettes, and lovely snacks. A little olive oil, some basil, salt, and pepper, and bam smacky, you're eating like the king of your very own tomato patch.

Gardening! I suck at it. I know people who very successfully grow tomatoes and peppers and thus avoid that portion of Costco, but I am not one of them. High and subsequently dashed hopes in the past have included tomatoes, jalapenos, anaheim chiles, squash, red bell peppers, lettuce, and snow peas. This season I stuck to herbs and have managed to keep sage and mint alive; the cilantro, to my great chagrin, collapsed and died within three days. Oh, wait--I have had marginal success with potatoes, and am currently sitting on a harvest store of four yukon golds ranging in size from small grape to golf ball with a thyroid problem.

Basketball! My brackets are dead in both men's and women's, although I still have the Heels alive for the men's championship and UConn for the well, duh category in the women's. And the Irish rolled over and died in the NIT semis. That is all.

Arizona! Our esteemed Governor Jan Brewer (R-Harpytown) appointed the illustrious and beloved-by-Shakesville Mr. Benjamin H. Grumbles as head of the state Department of Environmental Quality, which is something akin to appointing a hyena as head of kitten welfare. Grumbles is a Bush EPA hack whose major accomplishment at the EPA was being concerned about pharmaceuticals in groundwater. Well, he was actually only concerned about nitroglycerin, and then only because it's an explosive. Anti-depressants and anti-inflammatories are apparently okay because--let's be honest here--they're making you feel better, aren't they?

Baseball! Pima County wants to build another stadium in hopes that maybe they can lure like three teams back from Glendale to Save Spring Training in Tucson, which will only cost about $137 million in a state that is shuttering state parks and firing teachers as fast as it can in order to fill exactly two sandbags that can be stacked up in front of the 75-foot tsunami that is the current $3 BILLION budget deficit. But it is important to soak people with an increased sales tax so that they can build a stadium that may or may not be used for an entire month every year if the teams decide to relocate to the cotton fields of Marana before bolting to the next sweet deal being offered by a municipality someplace else. Arizona: 49th in education, 2nd in teen pregancy rates, numero uno in short-sighted stupidity.

More to come! Later!

In Solemn Stillness

Well, not exactly solemn or still, but waiting for Santa anyhow.

Christmas came for me over this past weekend when my parents showed up for our annual party and my dad, who seven years ago curtly instructed newly-out-to-him me not to bring my girlfriend to his house or mention anything about Teh Ghey to him, bounced into my house with Newsweek's pro-gay-marriage cover story, gleefully told me my Doc Marten knockoffs are so gay, hugged my partner, and generally played the role of father, grandfather, and father-in-law to perfection. He also cheerfully chatted up all 50+ party guests, including his favorite lesbian couple pals of ours. And he made us a birdfeeder for our gift.

We put a rainbow lightning bolt sticker in his stocking. He plans to proudly put it on his Harley and just hopes some punkass tries to give him a hard time.

And that, ladies and gents, is my hope for the future. The rest of it, including the 24-pound turkey and the ham cowering in the fridge until tomorrow and whatever's lurking under the tree are really just gravy. I got my Christmas wish. I hope you get the best of what your season of choice holds for you as well.

Thanksgiving: The Final Word

Ha!

Post-Turkey Deflation

That may have been the most full Thanksgiving I have had, and the least filling. I have discovered I do not like being on my own on the day I associate more with family/friend confabs even than Christmas, the magical technology of phone calls and the understandable need for the girlfriend to occasionally jet off to places that require, well, airplanes to reach notwithstanding. Given the lack of access to either the girlfriend or the side of the family I normally spend turkey day with, and a crisis of either imagination or shoddy enough ethics when the grandparents put me on the spot last month about my holiday plans, I ended up in Mesa with said grandparents and my 1st cousin once removed (grandmother's niece, genealogy courtesy of Homer) after a thrashing of a day that started in the gym and moved to the office until 2 in the afternoon, when it was time to head north.

Did I mention this was in Mesa? Yeah. Yee-fuckin'-hah. The once-removed cousin and her husband are pushing eighty and are perfectly pleasant until her husband opens the Thanksgiving table conversation with anecdotes from his job as a Wal-Mart greeter. Guns and ammo are flying off the shelves of the Mesa Wal-Mart because people are so worried about Barack Obama's million-man civilian security force which sounds just like the SS to him and after all that's how Hitler got his start and at this point the cousin shushes him. He shrugs. He's just worried, is all. In his gated (!) trailer park mobile home community situated off what passes for a quiet street in Mesa, I sit at my corner of the table and stare hard into my stuffing and potatoes and wonder what the odds are that through some miracle of mitochondrial biology I share zero DNA with these people.

Does that make me a snob? Do I give a rat's ass either way? Not really. The ongoing conundrum my grandmother and her relatives poses for me is how the sentence should be constructed, which side of the comma the relevant information lands on, how to decide what goes into the dependent clause. Do I say well, they're right-wing Evangelicals who repeat Limbaughisms like gospel, but they do care enough about my son to remember cute details of the last time they saw him nine years ago? Or do I say instead well, they might warmly welcome me into their home, but they also voted for the anti-gay-marriage amendment and their next-door neighbors have statues of little black kids with fishing poles in their yard? What cancels out what? Ah, they're uncritically, casually racist, nativist, and homophobic, but they're family. Ah, they're always nice to my face, but they don't hesitate to exhibit beliefs I find repulsive. A but B. B but A.

Homer says I'm far more civil than he is, since I didn't call cousin Harold a fucking cunt when he dropped his Obama-as-Fuhrer bullshit into my mashed potatoes. The mantra in my head is they're old, they're not going to live forever, so I usually choose to avoid confrontation one more time even as I glance at the clock. Don't offend your host (even when he doesn't hesitate to offend you), don't upset your grandmother whose niece and nephew the once-removed cousins are (even though Grandmother doesn't hesitate to upset you by asking for the five millionth time if you can tell a black person lives in the purple-trimmed pink trailer down the street from her own). Homer's through with being respectful to people who would just as soon shit on him and me as look at us. I tell myself I'm trying to find the balance when it's people who were good to me when I was a child and who I still need to see on a regular basis, but it's probably as much chickenshittery as anything else.

I did find a pamphlet from the cousins' church while digging through a basket in search of the DirectTV channel guide, a flyer that promised OUTRAGEOUS QUOTES FROM MORMONS on the cover. Hazarding a glance, I found what looks like a regular feature in the vein of "kids say the darndest things" except that it highlights things the Mormon leadership has said about stuff like parallels between Joseph Smith and Jesus Christ, which apparently don't go over too well with the Central Christian Church of the East Valley crowd. Of course this regular mockery and head-shaking didn't keep them from hopping on the LDS Whip Teh Gayz bandwagon. Talk about a sham marriage of convenience.

Anyway. The food was good, if salty salty salty--one plateful was plenty--but there was no wine or whiskey or Demerol or anything else that might have made the conversation more bearable. We left sorta hurriedly in order to beat a thunderstorm that erupted shortly after dinner was over, hustling out the door as the cousin flipped through her guestbook to confirm it really had been that long since she'd seen my son--who owes me hugely now for letting him blow this one off--and cousin Harold squeezed my hand, saying how good it was to visit again, so I left with a nice little dose of guilt for having such uncharitable feelings about such nice people... until I remembered exactly what had spurred the uncharitable feelings, which just left me unsuccessfully trying to suss out "nice" and "shitty" and the line between them and how much blurring family ties are allowed to cause, all while dodging really cold raindrops and trying to load the grandparents and the leftovers into the car, and explaining that yes, I really did need to take off for the two-hour drive back to Tucson that night. Which I did, arriving home exactly eight hours after I'd left to drive up for dinner, tired and conflicted.

This is usually my favorite holiday. This year, not so much.

Impact Weekend

Jim Burroway has a comprehensive rundown of the nationwide marriage equality protests that happened yesterday, and Jezebel has a photo gallery. I wonder if the Prop 8 voting would have turned out differently if the protests had happened in the weeks leading up to the election rather than the weeks following. I wonder if they'll make a difference now.

The protests made a difference for me on a very personal level. Saturday morning my phone rang while I was trudging through Costco, and it was my dad. Who had a huge problem when I came out, moreso than anyone else in my family, who behaved really shittily for a few years because of it, but who finally started coming around a couple of years ago.

Dad: Where are you?
Me: At Costco. Where are you?
Dad: What time's your march today?
Me, baffled: 11:30. Where the hell are you?
Dad: Still in California. If I was there I'd be marching right beside you. Raise hell, take names, and don't get hurt.
Me: Okay, will do. Uh, you still owe me a bail bond.
Dad: Ha! Kick ass!

I can't overstate the significance of this, and it made my day, despite an invisible protest that was pretty much over by the time I found it, tucked away in a secluded plaza behind the courthouse. Tucson, come on. If you want to be seen, you gotta wave your flags at Speedway and Campbell in front of the Taco Bell.

Dad finally gets it. I dearly hope the rest of the country isn't far behind.