Harnessing the healing power of snark
“Hey”, said my sister-in-law to her eighteen-month old daughter as she raced across the living room of our rented beach house, “get your hands out of your hind end! Diapers stay on.” She laughed and turned to me.
“You know, since becoming a mom, I say all kinds of things I never thought I’d say.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Yep. And do you know what I have to say the most?”
“No, what?”
“Stop french-kissing the dog!”
Last weekend my parents came down to visit, and after dinner we decided to introduce them to a new game we’ve been playing this year. It’s called Dominion, and is one of those deck-building games where everyone starts off with like 7 coins and 3 pieces of property, and then has to figure out the best strategy for leveraging them into helpful action cards, more money, and more property.
My mom was really getting into it but I could tell my dad wasn’t so sure what he thought. Finally he said, “You know, I have to say that as an accountant, normally when you buy something you don’t then get to take back the money you used to make your purchase.”
We tried to explain things in a different way, to help give him a different perspective. “Just think of it as getting a really quick return on your investment,” offered my husband.
Mom and I chimed in with various other suggestions, but finally he said, “Or, we could just use the phrase we have for it in my profession, which would be ‘stealing’.”
I’m currently taking this amazing writing class, and since I’m (finally!) generating new material, I thought I’d post some of these pieces here on my blog. This first piece takes place back when my husband and I were newly engaged.
I stepped into the sanctuary, pausing to dip my finger in the holy water, and breathing in the familiar mix of incense, wood polish, and flowers. Taking a deep breath and exhaling hard through my mouth, I scanned the crowd and then headed toward the pew where my future in-laws were sitting.
I slid easily onto the pew, polished smooth by many years and many backsides, and leaned forward to pull down the kneeler. With the knuckle of my folded hands pressing painfully into my forehead, I only had one prayer in mind: Dear God, please let the bishop say yes.
My prayers were interrupted by the cantor announcing the opening hymn, and as I stood to sing I turned to watch the familiar procession. Altar servers, deacon, priest, and lector all strode slowly and purposefully down the center aisle, stopping to genuflect before they climbed up onto the altar.
I clenched my jaw tight and tried to control my nervous leg-shaking as those on the altar plodded through the opening rituals. Please, let this just be over, I prayed, knowing full well that this prayer would not be answered. Because not only were we there for mass, but we were also there to watch the bishop administer the Rite of Confirmation to my future sister-in-law’s confirmation class.
I really don’t remember any of that service. I just remember my surging adrenaline, racing heart, and continuous waves of anxiety as I waited to see if my fiancé and I would be granted an audience with the bishop.
You see, we were engaged to be married, and deep into wedding plans, but we had run into a pretty large snag in that his family is Catholic, and my family is not. Like, in the sense of, “If you get married in a Catholic church, then we’re not coming,” kind of way. So we had jumped through a million official hoops and petitioned the bishop for permission to be married “in the church”, priest and all, just not in a Catholic church. And this was our moment of truth.
I remember a blur of sensations as Father Bill, the head priest of the parish, came to collect us. I thought I heard him say that the bishop had granted us the permission we sought, but I was afraid I’d just imagined it. We had had to go through so much that I was afraid to believe it was finally over.
Father Bill led us behind the altar into the sacristy, and then suddenly, there we were, in front of the man himself.
As we huddled together in that dark, cramped hallway, the bishop closed his eyes, held his hands over our heads, and gave us a quick blessing.
We bowed our heads and murmured our thanks, quietly soaking in the reverence of the moment. “Congratulations,” the bishop announced, “you are now officially betrothed.”
We smiled gently and turned to leave, but the bishop stopped us, having one last message to impart to me.
“What this means now,” he said, grinning from ear to ear, “is that if he breaks off your engagement, then you can sue him for breach of contract. Just wanted you to know.”
So we’ve just passed through what some people claim is The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year. However, I prefer to refer to it as, The Time When All The Crazy Comes Out To Play.
You know what I mean. It’s the time when you’re sitting at your sister-in-law’s house opening gifts with your husband’s family, and your brother-in-law is struggling to open a gift from his wife that is covered in tape, and then your sister-in-law says, “Don’t worry, it’s only a three-way,” and then, because you apparently spend all day hanging out with 12-year old boys, you start snorting uncontrollably, which just proves once and for all that you are a terrible example for anyone to follow, most especially the baby that your sister-in-law is due to have any second now.
It’s also the time when people have gathered around the kitchen table admiring something that someone is crocheting for the baby, and then someone pipes up and declares, “I’d be afraid to have a baby these days.” And you wait for them to say something like, oh, the world was much better when I was growing up, and there wasn’t as much violence, or a comment of that nature. But instead they say, “Because I just saw a report on the news where there was one baby born with two heads.” And they are not drunk. Or kidding. And then you wait for them to elaborate on this commentary, but they never do. It’s just, “Hey, two-headed babies are being born. AND YOU MIGHT HAVE ONE.”
Needless to say, this is a FANTASTIC time for me, as someone who has dedicated themselves to The Pursuit Of Crazy. And happily, this year’s Christmas dinner conversation did not disappoint.
But before we go any farther, I need to give you a bit of background.
My dad’s family is from New England, specifically a place that requires getting on the highway and then going north, and then a little bit more north, aaaaaand, oh wait, MORE NORTH!, until there is no more North left in the entire world, and then hanging a quick left. But be careful, and make sure not to hit the moose whose head is sticking through the kitchen window.
It’s a really nice place-lots of clean, open country, clear blue skies, and tight communities. But it is also a really small town, which means that if you were born there, then you’re “in”forever . But if not, then you will never really have any idea of what’s actually going on. Because what this means, of course, is that the “in crowd” has an efficient form of verbal shorthand which makes it easy for them to have conversations, but is kind of a problem for everyone else, as then there is no need for the stories to include such vital information as the names of the people involved, the location where the story took place, the date the story happened, or any other kind of specific, identifiable facts.
So we were all sitting around the table letting dinner settle, and someone started talking about the last time they were up visiting in that neck of the woods. And at first I could follow along because they mentioned their hotel by name, as well as some of the restaurants they’d eaten at while up there. And then things got a little bit more interesting.
“Well,” said my grandfather, “now this is a little bit gory for Christmas,” and we all laughed, thinking that he’d caught himself and was going to change the subject. But no-he went on.
“But you know there was that 30-year old murder up there that never got solved.” (Um, no, but ok.) “Well, the man that worked there up at the place that was on the hill before they built that restaurant, he died a couple years back. And when they went to clean out his house they found a big freezer, and when they opened it, they found her body inside.” (Yep, he was right. GO.RY.)
“Well,” said my grandmother, turning to face my dad, “now didn’t you have a friend who did the same thing?”
The entire left side of the table then contracted simultaneous neck injuries as my aunt (his sister), my uncle, and I whipped our heads around and fixed him the expression of, “Dude-WTF?!”
“Um, no, mum,” my dad replied, “that was squirrels. He kept squirrels in his freezer.” And clearly, this was a story requiring further in-depth investigation, but I didn’t have the chance to ask anything else because the conversation then took yet another interesting turn.
“Oh, well speaking of squirrels,” said my aunt, “you know [family friend, who has starred in other of my family’s crazy adventures, such as this one] hurt his back a while ago and couldn’t get out of bed. But he had squirrels that were eating through part of his house. So every time he heard one of them, he sat up in bed, reached for his shotgun, and started shooting at them.”
“Now that,” she continued, “is one of the reasons that it’s so good to be married. Because then you have someone who will turn to you and say, ‘Why in the world would you think that’s a good idea?’ ”
(As you know, if you’ve followed this blog for any length of time, that is a role that my husband is frequently forced to play in our marriage, the most recent example of which took place a couple of days before Christmas.
We had been out doing some last-minute errands, and when we got back I was dying for a soda. My husband went into another room, and I went to the frig to get a drink. We’d just put in a new frig pack, and no matter how hard I tried I just couldn’t get it to open. So naturally I reached for a steak knife (as would you,) and began to jab away at the perforated end of the carton.
Well, the only problem with jabbing a sharp knife into a can of pressurized sodas is the fact that you are jabbing a sharp knife into a can of pressurized sodas. But apparently I am somewhat unfamiliar with the laws governing the physical universe, and so I was completely unprepared for the volcano of Diet Code Red Mountain Dew that erupted all over me, the refrigerator, and the kitchen floor.
Naturally I started to yell, and naturally my husband ran into the kitchen to find me stunned, soaking wet, and clutching a dripping steak knife.
Now, I have known this man for 22 years-or I should more properly say that he has known me for 22 years. So my feeling is that really, he shouldn’t have been all that surprised. But apparently his feeling was more along the lines of, “YOU ARE 39 YEARS OLD. It never occurred to me that I would have to specifically forbid you to stab a can of soda with a knife, but apparently I do. NEVER DO THIS AGAIN.” So, OK-now I know.)
“Oh,” I said, surprised. “I thought you were going to say that it would be good to be married at a time like that, because then you could poke your spouse up in the middle of the night and say, ‘Honey, it’s those damn squirrels again. Get the gun’.”
Unfortunately, we couldn’t go to my parents’ house for Thanksgiving this year thanks to my unexpected tooth surgery. But because of the magic of Skype, we were able to visit with my family that afternoon.
My little, 18-month old nephew was there, and having recently gotten steady enough on his feet to RUUUUUUUNNNNNNN! everywhere, I mostly just saw the top of his little blond head whiz by from time to time.
His parents were eventually able to get him to sit on Grandma’s lap for a few minutes so they could show off his latest tricks.
“Hey, buddy,” prompted my brother, “can you show us your teeth? Where are you teeth?”
And the baby clicked his teeth together for us.
“Good job, buddy! And where’s your tongue?”
And the baby stuck out his tongue.
And then, in the middle of our mad cheering and clapping, I heard my brother say, “Hey, buddy-where’s your peepster?”
“Yes,” said my sister-in-law as we all fell on the floor laughing, “we’re part of the new wave of parenting. We don’t teach him things like arms and feet-just the really important parts.”
“Well,” said my dad, summing things up in his position as family patriarch, “that one’s definitely a keepster.”
So this year my husband and I spent Thanksgiving with his family. And one night, as usually happens when families gather, we all ended up in the kitchen together, and after flowing across a wide variety of topics, the conversation eventually turned to music.
First up was my sister-in-law, whose musical tastes range from hip hop, to country, to rock. But apparently when she and her husband ride in the car together, their musical tastes collide.
“He claims that listening to country music makes him physically ill,” she said. “But I told him, ‘Stephen-you cannot get a headache from a specific genre of music!’ ”
So then that was the perfect segue into a never ending struggle conversation that my husband and I frequently have about some of the songs in his music collection. Specifically, the song, “What The World Needs Now Are A Few More Rednecks.” Which is CLEARLY a country song, although not according to my husband, as I discovered the first time I heard him play it.
“I thought you didn’t like country music,” I said, confused.
“It’s not country. It’s SOUTHERN. ROCK.”, he replied.
I’d gotten tired of rolling my eyes at him all by myself, so I decided to win everyone else over to my side get a few second opinions as long as we had some other people around. So I told them about my husband’s misguided classification of that particular song.
“Well, who sings it?” asked my mother-in-law.
“The Charlie Daniels Band”, said my husband, grudgingly.
And then the kitchen erupted in disbelief, which made the part of me that likes being “Right!” so very, very happy.
“So what about Johnny Cash?” asked my sister-in-law, knowing that he was also a favorite of my husband, and curious to see what my husband had to say about this UNDISPUTED star of the country music world.
“He’s ‘bluegrass‘,” clearly losing this argument, but refusing to abandon his staunchly-held beliefs.
“Wow,” I said, stunned, looking at my husband as if I were seeing him for the first time. “I had no idea just how much you were lying to yourself about this!”
He was not amused.
So my brother and his wife are having a baby in a couple of months-YAY!
But I wonder if they’ve really considered the long-term ramifications of this decisions, in that they are bringing an innocent, defenseless child into the world who will have no choice but to be related to me. And I really think we all just need to stop and take a minute to discuss exactly Why I Should Never Be Allowed To Be Anyone’s Aunt, as evidenced by the following data that I’ve been carefully collecting over the past 37 years.
1. My favorite word in the entire English language is “ass”.
2. When my husband goes out of town I stop eating, having judged the whole process to be “unnecessary” and “frivolous”.
3. My preferred method of dealing with recalcitrant electronics is to run them over with my car.
4. If it weren’t for my husband, I would totally forget the need to wear pants.
5. When faced with more than 3 choices of Ranch Dressing at the grocery store, I am immediately plunged into a full-blown, existential crisis.
[Read more…] about Um, I’m Not Sure They’ve Really Thought This Whole Thing Through
I was just talking with a friend of mine, comparing funny stories about our families, and she told me about her mother who, in the years before she died, apparently felt very insecure around money. She never thought she had enough, and she NEVER wanted to spend any of what she did have.
“Mama,” my friend and her siblings would say, “we are not putting any of that money into the casket with you, so you might as well spend it now. Because if you don’t, then eventually, we will.”
But apparently the worrying continued, along with the fretting about being “poor”, until finally, my friend was forced to respond.
“Mama,” she said, “I have a friend who just got back from a mission trip to Jamaica. There were 12 women, and only 4 pairs of underwear, so these women were forced to share panties. So when you have to share your underwear with twelve other women, then we can talk about your being poor.”
Back about eleven years ago, my husband and I took a trip to Spain. On our last day we took the overnight train from Granada to Madrid, where we were catching our flight home the following morning.
My husband and I were in our mid-twenties back then, just a couple of years out of grad school, so we were pretty much still in the “poor college student” mode when we took this trip, which meant that we booked ourselves into what I’m pretty sure was the eighty-seventh class compartment, which meant that we each had a bunk in a room that slept six people-and we were in the middle two bunks-which meant that we spent those eight hours in a space not unlike those prison cells they build where you can neither sit, stand, nor lie down.
But, I digress.
The two travellers sleeping above us were a guy and a girl from Ireland, and the two below us were from Columbia, and after I was able to calm down a little bit, because, OMG, CLAUSTROPHOBIA! AND STRANGERS! SLEEPING WITH ME! IN PRISON!, we all had a good time getting to know each other.
At what was apparently our officially designated bedtime, a railroad employee came by to turn out the lights in our cell compartment. And then, in one of those totally spontaneous, yet perfectly scripted moments, from the Europeans above us, and the Latin Americans below us came a chorus of, “Goodnight, John Boy.”
I bring this episode up now because I was reminded of it the other day by a conversation I overheard my husband having.
His cell phone rang, and when he answered it I heard a woman’s voice respond to his, “Hello?”
“Oh, hey,” he said, in the relaxed tone of someone speaking with a friend or a family member. “How are you doing?”
There was silence as he listened for a moment, and then I heard him retort, “Well, f*%# you!”
“Oh,” I said, as the light of realization dawned upon me. “It must be your sister.”
And it was. Just like it was up on Walton’s Mountain.
So the other weekend my husband and I were up visiting my parents. As it happened, my grandparents were there at the same time, so in honor of the mini-family reunion, we decided to grill hamburgers and hot dogs out on the porch.
As we were waiting for the food to finish cooking, we chatted about various bits of neighborhood gossip, and then talked turned towards the past, and how our memories of the past tend to be more idealized than realistic.
“I guess we all think there’s a time in our past that’s better than where we are today, and that we’d rather be living then than now,” said my dad.
“No, not me,” my husband disagreed. “There’s no time in the past that is better than right now.”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” interjected my grandmother. “There are a lot of times in the past that I’d like to go back to.”
“Yes,” agreed my grandfather. “For one thing, there was a lot less crime back then, and the world was a much safer place.”
“Excuse me,” my mom interrupted, “but I think you’re forgetting about The Shooting.”
“Oh yeah, ” I said. I forgot about that.”
“Yes,” she continued, “there was a murder. In your very own home.”
(Very Important Side Note, So As To Prevent A Deluge Of Phone Calls By Angry Family Members: this did not involve my grandparents in any way, and was many years before they even lived there)
“Well, now” replied my grandfather, straightening up in his chair and pointing his finger at us, “there was a good reason for that.” (I don’t actually remember what that reason was, because by this time I was convulsing on the floor with laughter, but I think it had something to do with a love triangle.)
“The bad thing was,” he continued, “that he only had the one bullet. So he had to walk all the way down to the next town to get another bullet so that he could shoot himself.”
“Hm,” said my grandmother, still lost in thoughts of the past and determined to prove her point. (And, incidentally, the only one of us who still retained the power of speech.) “Yes,” she announced, visibly brightening. “At least the air was much fresher back then!”
After the rest of us had picked ourselves up off of the floor the conversation turned to other things, including a local man who lives on a nearby golf course and who is apparently worth, conservatively speaking, infinity billion dollars. So now, no longer bothered by the pesky worry of having to earn a living, he is free to turn his attention toward other, more important matters, like wading around in his swimming pool, fishing out all of the errant golf balls that end up in there.
“I guess he’s got so much money now that he just does whatever he wants and doesn’t care what other people think,” commented my grandfather.
“Oh,” I replied. “Well, I’ve just gone ahead and jumped straight to the ‘doing whatever I want’ part, without worrying about all that money stuff. It’s much more efficient that way.”
“So what you’re saying is that, even if you had all that money, you’d still fish the golf balls out of the pool yourself?” asked my husband.
“Heck no!” I snorted. “I’d hire someone for that and then watch them do it.”
“Well, as long as ‘the someone’ isn’t named ‘Paolo’, or, ‘Jose’, or anything like that,” said my husband.
“Oh, so no hot pool boys for me?”
“No, I’m afraid not.”
I thought for a moment. “Well, what about hot, gay pool boys?”
I never got to hear my husband’s response to that question, because it was at that moment that the conversation reached my mother, apparently having had to travel across a distortion in the space-time continuum first, because she exclaimed, “Hey, [name of male relative] has a Paolo!”
….
(Silence, as my father, my husband, and I all experience simaltaneous brain aneurysms.)
“Um, WHAT?!” one of us managed to choke out, feebly, knowing that the man in question is a very heterosexual, strait-laced accountant. Who, incidentally, does not own a pool
“Oh, yeah,” she said, happy to be a part of the conversation, and then she, my grandmother, and my grandfather began chatting amongst themselves. And it doesn’t even matter what they were saying, because TRUST ME ON THIS ONE; everything that comes after an exchange like that sounds dirty.
When oxygen began to return to my brain, I managed to pick up a tiny thread of the conversation, which sounded like the person in question was hired to assist with various and sundry accounting duties.
“Um, and does he perform them shirtless, with his rippling muscles glistening with oil?” I asked my mother, still not entirely sure that I understood what was going on.
“No,” she replied, confused as to why I should ask such a question, and apparently not yet noticing the three members of her family who were currently bleeding from the eyes.
And then, slowly, s-l-o-w-l-y, the pieces clicked for me.
“Oh,” I said. “You mean that [our relative] hired someone to help him with his accounting business, and his name really is Paolo.”
“Yes,” replied my mother, not wanting to say anything, but really wondering why the three of us were being so dense on the subject.
I’m sure there’s probably a moral in here somewhere, but honestly, the only one I’ve been able to come up with is, ‘Dammit! Why do I never have my tape recorder when I need it?!”
