Tag Archives: Family

Phone writing

Leave a reply

I have been unbelievablely not writing. Part lazy, sheer, ugly bone lazy. Part ennui or something like it. Any thought to write has dribbled into lack of action then nothing.

But, I was reading Tony’s Blog Emporium. He’s writing more or trying and so should I. He’s like a champion role model, only of the comedic variety.

Meanwhile, WordPress.org released software for the old Droid telephone I be using. So there’s that.

On the creative brightside, I haven’t totally given up or killed my soul. After taking 36 million pictures or so on our last trip I felt crafty inspired. Awhile back on an impulse buying whim, M. had thrown a giant frame with a mat full of windows suitable for throwing up a collage of memories into our shopping cart. It has haunted me.

Haunting became the right word, when I finally felt resolve to do something with it. Back in the way, way east (or the east that white cartographers decided was east) there’s a nifty little tradition based in Taoism. Because ancestral spirits like to keep an eye on things, and venerating the dead is an important pasttime, you’re likely to find some great old family pictures on a Chinese family’s wall. I don’t know from burnt offerings or lighting joss sticks next to a homemade altar heavy with tangerines and whatnot, but I like cool photos. M.’s mom has great ones. I’ve taken a few pictures of her pictures.

Stepping back, one thing M. and I have in common is families that have clocked some years each generation. I think his grandfather on his mom’s side would have been about 10 years younger than my mom’s dad. This grandfather is the adventurer who headed off of China’s Hainan Islands and found his fortune in Malaysia.

We each grew up with images from early last century, sepia and gray-toned history. Like my grandfather’s wide-brimmed hat and gaiters, a young doughboy headed out to fight the Kaiser’s army.

That and our tremendous egos and equally tremendous cache of photos of each other and ourselves and ourselves together provide the nugget and the expansion if the craft project. A collage of us and of family.

When all is settled, I’ll probably figure out a web version or maybe just post something here with the rejects. A little bit of honoring the ancestors and a little bit of self worship.

Rashomon without the subtitles

3 Replies

A while back in the glorious 1950s, when America was perfect, women wore aprons and life was just a goddamn pleasure every turn, Akira Kurosawa did up a little masterpiece about truth and how subjective it can be. And, right about in the middle of the murder or the rape, you’d be thinking what the fuck does my life have to do with 12th century Japan?

Everybody’s living has a little bit of the subjective truth in it.

Which brings me to my week. Amid some serious work of the kind for which I get paid (and which is being as buffeted by the fuckedupness of Wall Street and markets as any for-profit gig), running around making plans for the new place and hanging curtains and blinds (Damn you all to hell, Ikea!), I slipped in a dinner with someone I literally see at weddings and funerals.

We are spawn of the same family tree, matriarchally speaking, but with me as one of the younger branches of our generation’s section of tree, and her as an elder, our twigs never intersected must. It was one of those long, rambling My Dinner with Andre dinners, where you talk about everything and nothing. (As a note from the internet, apparently there’s a My Dinner with Andre the Giant. Note to self, must see.)

As a known blogger and a known comedian and a known person with a tendency to say shit publicly and unrepentantly, I was cajoled (actually threatened) into not writing about or referring to specifics of the conversation lest there is collateral damage and hurt to others. As nothing I was told actually was factual or had a notion on which you could hang your hat, it’s easy enough to honor and I ain’t going to go there.

But, and you bloody well knew there would be a but, nothing can stop me from writing out what I know. Or what I feel.

Here’s what I know. I probably loved my mother, meaning I had all of the normal, appropriate synaptic flashes and associates with the woman from whose womb I bounced. Love, like truth is subjective, and I hate talking in Hallmark cliched absolutes.

So, I loved Pat. So the fuck what? The key thing is I LIKED PAT. As an adult, when I became one, I saw ways in which she and I could talk, relate “as a person,” a phrase she would use. She taught me to bake and a lot about simple meal cooking. I can roast a turkey thanks to her. We both like(d) crafts and crossword puzzles, seldom keeping our hands free from some kind of busywork.

Her sharp mind and sharper tongue made it interesting to hear her interpretations of the news of the day, politics, religion and occasional forays into sex (of the “what’s on the TV” kind, certainly not mine or hers). I remember so many odd little conversations that were just straight out funny or interesting.

Like the phone call, where not introducing herself beyond hello, and not needing an introduction, she launched directly into “Explain to me, how if you’re a man trapped in a woman’s body and you get a sex change, you would now want to be a lesbian.”

“Um, ah, Hi, Ma. How are you?”

I also respect Pat and all of the ways in which her sacrifices, some crazy and some necessary, made me and my siblings all what we are today, and we are all pretty stable and successful, thanks for asking. We never fucking knew what it was like to think you were poor or that you couldn’t afford more than mac and cheese to go with a stretched pound of hamburger for a family of six. We were clean, well-dressed and fed enough, and we fancied ourselves just as good as the other kids with intact families. Because we were.

Being a school teacher meant she was around more than not. Being a school teacher meant that she could push us in ways that matched our aptitudes and brought us to teachers who she knew and respected. Being a teacher meant not only could she and did she help her five children, but she helped a WHOLE fucking damn lot of kids in our town, some of whom showed up at her wake in quiet, posthumous thanks.

And, being a teacher, meant she gave up some of her dreams and the reasons that she had originally, as a young woman, gone to college. Personally, I’m not sure that if she ever went back into business, management or accounting or some one of the things she clearly could have handled, she ever would have gotten some of the spikes of happiness she had getting a learning disabled kid on a path to being able or making friends with some other great teachers.

I know she wouldn’t have gone on stupid adventures in the late afternoon with those teachers or my teacherly uncle. And, as a kid, I wouldn’t have been witness to some fun hi jinks and goofiness and learn that adulthood wasn’t all somber.

I can know these things, because I was there. I can feel them, because I was there. And, even if my truth is as flawed as anyone else’s truth, I’m comfortable in my reality.

So, when someone from the past comes into my present to teach me about the truths I don’t know, they should realize that it is they who may best be needing to step back. I’ve reviewed, tested, thunk about and wrestled many of my demons, thanks, so the light you’re shedding is 10 volt at best.

Why tell me about my family and how my life could have been or was? It ain’t like I wasn’t there in the thick of things.

I have to wrap this particular incoherent muse up quickly, because my present is knocking. Today our one goal is an appropriate dining room table for my new house in my new state (of the Union and of mind), and your ghosts do nothing in my present.

All I can say is, I fucking know now what my uncle the judge means about begrudgery. I also know now that my destiny always was and always will be a forward-thinking one. It will be one in which I make decisions and find my own truths.

Also, if my dad was in fact a social climber who over-insured himself and chased money and success, THANK FUCKING GOD. I owe him my imagination to see beyond Boston or any four walls.

And, goddamnit if I don’t love wearing myself, my heart and my politics on my sleeve. Vote Obama, even if you’re a redneck Republican deep down.

Last day on the ancestral island

Leave a reply

Last night had us sitting in the living room of M.’s old partner in crime from high school days. They reminisced about the old neighborhood and old friends, while he plied us with booze and Dunhill Lights.

Out of politeness, I found myself sipping Jack Daniels on the rocks with a splash of Coke.

Yup, so far here in Asia, I’ve danced along with “Achey Breaky Heart,” and I’ve sipped Kentucky bourbon. To say that U.S. cultcha is pervasive is a fucking understatement.

Today’s the last day for a lot of the family in visiting their hometown. We’re caravaning back to Kuala Lumpur, following an aunt and uncle and probably carrying a couple of cousins in the car. We’re the old cousins, almost the ages of the aunts and uncles, but hanging out with the young adults of the generation in which M. is the eldest.

We decided going to the national rainforest in Tamar Negara was a bit too far. Somehow, hiking with two pieces of luggage and the prospect of dubious pleasantries (such as a toilet) seems less fun than it did before we left home.

So, we’re hanging in the big city of KL for a couple of days, before spending our last day(s) in Singapore, at a four-star hotel with WiFi everywhere. Expect many photo uploads!

Better than monkeys?

2 Replies

So far, I have seen the paltry, slight vision of one monkey, off in the distance ambling near the highway ditch, from a speeding, “almost as good as first class” coach.

However, last night was the New Year’s Eve reunion dinner. The first event of a series of eating events, as the family home-for-the-holidays gathering commences. The crowd is indeed a crowd, although it is slightly reduced from what was anticipated because of some sick kids in a family branch.

Dinner was amazing, a huge variety of different dishes for which I don’t know what the names, except for curry chicken, because I know those two words. There was homemade sausage, vegetables, various bowls of Asian-y stew-type things, oh, fried prawns, I recognized those too. There are great cooks in M.’s family.

His uncle joked with me that it was Thanksgiving.

After dinner, as I cradled an icy cold can of Tiger beer, in the combined living room/dining room where all of the furniture had been pushed back and card tables set up to accommodate all of the clan and the huge amount of food, out came the karaoke.

I cannot adequately set the scene. First, imagine any large gathering of family. Now, because a huge percentage of the tiny number of readers of this sad little blog are of the caucasian pallet, imagine that same family gathering with Chinese faces with all the same differences in age from babies to 90+ year olds. And, then there was me, as M.’s aunt called me, Gwailo, essentially “whitey.”

And then, karaoke. I did not sing, despite the admonitions and calls for “American Idol,” which would be me, the American. Singing, I cannot do.

(As a total aside, M.’s family has a spectrum of skin tones from the warmer side of the pallet. Lovely tones suited to the neighborhood and the climate, light browns and tans and such.

I am fair-skinned. When it is hot as a mother-fucker, which it certainly was last night, steamy, fucking hot, and I’ve spent the day in the sun, and I’m eating curries, and I’m drinking beer, I become the classic red-faced and splotchy tones of my potato-eating people. I am Ted Kennedy on a bender with tones of pink, white and red. It is my natural state.

It was hard to convince the folks that I wasn’t about to succumb to tropical heat and perish. Alas. Poor gwailo.)

Perhaps the highlight of the evening just for pure surreal — Was I really thousands of miles from home? — had to be M.’s cousin’s rendition of that Billy Ray Cyrus classic, Achey Breaky Heart. In the background, two of the aunts provided backup with an impromptu Electric Slide. I fear I will not leave this island until Aunt #6 successfully teaches me to line dance.