Question and Answer

The first thing you need to know about my father is: If you have a question, he has an answer. The man does not know the words "I don't know." He's pretty famous for this among friends and family, which is why a few days ago as we were all in the car on the way back from my sister's girlfriend's concert, my aunt asked him why the Pigeon Hills were called the Pigeon Hills.

He immediately launched into an answer, and this is the second thing you need to know about my father: About 50% of the time, he is full of shit. If he doesn't know, he'll make it up, and he is good. On a long ago family trip, we passed a sign for a fort. Someone said "I wonder what happened at that fort." Dad launched into a five-minute lecture on the role of the fort in the Civil War and the definitive battle that was fought there, etc., etc., etc. When he was finished my mom asked "Did you see that on the History Channel?"

Dad's answer? "Nah, I just made it up."

That is the good thing-if you call him on it, he'll always admit when he's made something up. The problem is, you have to recognize that you need to call him on it-and when he's giving one of his bullshit answers, he's fairly indistinguishable from a history professor.

Years ago, when I had first started driving, I asked him why some traffic lights have those flashing lights inside the red light. He told me that it was to draw your attention, so you'd always see that the light was red. Years later, we were sitting in the car together, and Dad mused, "I wonder what those flashing lights are for." I stared at him for a moment, then gave him the same answer he'd given me. His response? "Oh, I must have been making that up. But it sounds plausible, doesn't it?" I still don't know if he was right.

So as we were in the car and Dad was giving his response to the Pigeon Hills question, I immediately challenged him. What possible reason could he have for knowing that piece of information? I was absolutely sure he was making it up. But that brings me to the final thing you need to know about my father, which is that if there is a sign or a plaque to be read, he has read it. Going to a museum with him is completely maddening, because he will read every single word that is posted anywhere. And he remembers it all. So on the one hand, when he gives an incredibly detailed answer to an obscure question, you want to think that he's making it up. Yet there's that other 50% of the time that he knows exactly what he's talking about...and he can almost always cite his source.

In this case, it was a historical plaque in Codorus State Park. Apparently passenger pigeons used to roost in the Pigeon Hills, and there were so many of them they'd block the sun when they all flew. Who knew?

My dad, apparently.

Family Ties

A few weekends ago, I spent Saturday night hanging out with my aunts M & K and my cousins A & E. E was in town checking out grad schools, and since I usually see her once a year or less, I ran up to Baltimore for dinner. I'm glad I did, because the evening led me to a couple of conclusions.

First, A has got be the most laid back person I've ever met. He left to go hang out with some friends, and M (his mom) wanted to show us some old family movies. We couldn't get the DVD player to work, so we called A, who tried (unsuccessfully) to talk me through it over the phone. Highlight:

A: Look, is the DVD player turned on?
Me: ...no.

That was not, thankfully, the only problem. So the following sequence of events occurred.

1. A left his friends to come back and fix the problem.
2. He fiddled (unsuccessfully) with the DVD player.
3. He brought his Playstation up from his bedroom and hooked that up to the TV. No luck.
4. He brought his TV upstairs (not a small TV, and not a flat panel) and hooked the Playstation up to it.
5. Sat with us while we watched home movies of the variety that are adorable if they're not of you and embarrassing if they ARE of you (they were of him) and only protested once.
6. Did not kill anyone when M said "Maybe it was on VHS?"
7. Brought in a THIRD TV so that we could watch VHS tapes.

When I was 19, I would have gotten no further than step 2 before I shrugged, said "Fix it yourself" and slammed the door on the way out. More likely, I wouldn't have even gotten to step 2, because I would have hung up the phone in frustration. (When I talked to my Mom about this, she said "Yeah, no kidding.")

My second conclusion was not a new one: My family is completely nuts, in a completely endearing way. As proof, I offer the following anecdotes:

Easter
For a large portion of my young life, I thought it was totally normal to hunt for liquor on Easter. Each Easter, the kids would do the traditional Easter egg hunt, searching for plastic eggs containing chocolate, $1 bills and the like. Then the kids would hide miniature liquor bottles for the adults. Seriously, I thought that all families did this.

Rope the Dogie
This involved us kids, my uncle P and a lasso. Enough said. For what it's worth, I think that we'd all vote P the most normal member of the family by a fairly wide margin.

Christmas Eve
Christmas Eve is always spent with my Dad's side of the family. This tradition goes back to when they were kids, and opened all of their presents on Christmas Eve so they could go to early Mass on Christmas morning. It made scheduling easy, because we'd always spend Christmas Eve at my Dad's parents' house, go home to our house for Christmas morning, then go to my Mom's parents' house for breakfast.

I have a lot of great memories of Christmas Eve, but two stand out in particular. Grandma had a tradition of always buying the seven girl cousins matching nightgowns. It made for a lot of really cute pictures when we were little, but the tradition kind of went off the rails by the time I was sixteen and K was six. I had a collection of absolutely hideous nightgowns that Grandma picked (I assume) based on her ability to find such a wide selection of sizes.

And then there was Santa Claus. I stopped believing in Santa at a pretty early age, which was probably for the best because every year, my uncle D would tell us that he had a trap on his roof to catch Santa, and we could all come over the next morning to play with his new toys. Somewhere in there was (I think) the implication that Santa wouldn't live through the experience. He did the same thing with the Easter Bunny.

My cousin J was going to see Santa at the mall, and at this particular mall they had an animatronic reindeer. Kids could talk to the reindeer, and some teenager hidden out of sight would talk back. I wasn't there, but I'm told that J went rushing up to the reindeer and spilled the whole plot. I guarantee you that wherever that kid on the other end of the mic is today, he's still telling that story.

The S. Sisters
Remember this dress?



Now picture your grandmother's head up there instead of J.Lo. I don't have to picture it. Thanks to some really evil Photoshopping, I can picture not only my grandmother but also my aunts M, S and K. About the time that she wore that dress down the red carpet, my cousin M got married. The joke was that he could save money on the entertainment and hire my aunts (The S. Sisters) to sing at the wedding. The reason it's such a joke is that we can't sing. None of us. I have one cousin who's a musician, and he clearly got every ounce of musical talent from our family. Happy Birthday is painful. So, before cousin M's wedding, aunt M mocked up a concert poster using the infamous green dress. This joke, by the way? Will. Not. Die.

Cousin's Sleepovers
Before M had A, she would have the oldest girls over once a year for a cousin's sleepover. We did stereotypical sleepover activities: we watched the Miss America pageant, we gorged ourselves on pizza, M made us all look like we should have been working the corner on Baltimore Street... Somewhere around here, I have pictures of our "makeovers" and I briefly considered looking for them, but between the five of us we have three teachers, a lawyer and a dietician and I don't think any of us want those pictures coming up the next time a boss Googles us.

Seriously, though, M put a ton of work into making sure that we all had a blast. And that's what I love about my family. We're odd, there's no doubt, but put all of us into a room together and we have a lot of fun. I have this huge network of people who I know I could call out of the blue and could depend on. We talk, periodically, about trying to write down all of these crazy family stories, but inevitably whoever tries realizes that it's not that simple. The beauty in these stories comes from all of us sitting around a table, and someone starts the story, and someone else jumps in and adds details, and a third person says, no, what really happened was this... Putting it down on paper makes it flat.

We're nuts, but we're not flat.

In which I make my family sound like either idiots or monsters, but we're neither, I swear.

This afternoon, my aunt emailed me a link to my great-aunt's obituary. That led to the following conversation:

Me: Did you know that Aunt Vera died?

Dad: Oh, did I forget to tell you that?

This sounds awful, really it does, but it's not like it's the first time. Several years ago I had this conversation with my mother:

Mom: Well, you know, when your [Great] Aunt Nina was alive...

Me: Aunt Nina's dead?

And to be fair, it's not just my parents. My dad once had this conversation with his father (now deceased.)

Grandpa: Well, we just got back from Iowa.

Dad: Why were you in Iowa?

Grandpa: The funeral was very nice.

Dad: Funeral?

Grandpa: The flowers you sent were lovely.

Dad: ...

My aunt had sent flowers in the name of all the "kids" and had forgotten to tell a few people...

Worst daughter ever.

I called my Mom today to wish her a happy birthday, making this the twelfth straight year that I've forgotten my Dad's birthday then felt so guilty about it that I remember my Mom's six days later.

I suck.

It's not as if I didn't know it was coming. On November 11, I thought to myself, "Hmm--I need to remember to call Dad tomorrow." On November 13, I was on the phone with my Mom when she said "Did you call your father yesterday?"

#$%@!

In other news, today was the first Reading Is Fundamental book distribution of the year. The students had a blast, and I am now so tired I can hardly hold my head up.

Dream trauma

Twice in the past week, I have dreamed that my father was dead. The first was very upsetting, but explicable--my father has had heart problems; my uncle died just over two months ago of a heart attack. Dreaming that my father died of a heart attack freaked me out to the point that I called him when I woke up, just to be sure--but it's not shocking that I would dream this.

Last night...well, I can think of no earthly reason why I would dream that my father was "disappeared" by a Central American dictator.

But dream it I did. It was one of those weird dreams where the details slipped away within minutes of my waking, leaving me with only the overarching theme of the dream. But my father...he is certainly a principled man, and he is not afraid to speak up when he feels strongly about something, but a revolutionary, he aint.

O. pointed out, quite reasonably, that I was most likely influenced by the rescue of the hostages from FARC, which is no doubt true. But it was still very weird.

I really wish I'd quit dreaming that my father had died. It's unsettling.