Giving Thanks Our Way (Updated Version)

Apparently, Trish, my blog-prodder as I have just now dubbed her, needs a fix. And far be it from me to deprive her, the catalyst for this work of genius. I needed to purge anyway.
Stella Benson wrote, "Family jokes, though rightly cursed by strangers, are the bond that keeps most families alive." If only other families could swap insults with impunity the way mine does, there would be no petty or protracted estrangements & Jerry Springer would be out of a job.
While we looked forward to it, we all were a little apprehensive as well (because we've done it before). Before we got there, my sister Kelly emailed me & my brother Kenny (or "Ken" as he is known outside the family) to say, "I'm looking forward to y'all getting on my nerves this weekend." That was so sweet.
Picture this. Seven adults, 6 kids & 2 dogs cooped up in a 3-bedroom, 2-bath farmhouse the size of a double-wide. (Well, it may technically be a double-wide, but it's so well-disguised that my dad always joked a tornado could never find it.) It's probably the only 20-year-old pre-fab dwelling in Hico, Texas or anywhere else, with hardwood floors & ceramic tile. However, the Winnebago-style Fiberglas showers have yet to be upgraded to imported Venetian marble. I just realized what a spoiled, upper-middle-class brat I sound like. "Ooh, so many people in a 'tiny' 3-bedroom…" A lot of families in this world probably happily sleep that many in one room. In fact, my Russian sister-in-law, Anya, told me she felt right at home with so many people in what seemed like such a small space.
So when we get there late Wed. night, everyone else is way ahead of us in the celebrating department. They started the party without us. That's the way we roll. You'll be there when you get there, fend for yourself on the food & drink & snooze you lose. So the music is blaring, margaritas are flowing & Anya is dancing as my nieces & nephews run amok. Kenny is vegging on the couch; Kelly & Mom are hiding out in the kitchen probably making sure all the tequila is either gone or well-hidden before I arrive. Mom already looks pale & what my sister refers to as "beat down" while Kelly is in full party mode. Anya really wants to go with Kelly & me to a nearby dive bar frequented no doubt by truckers with more wheels than teeth, bikers (not the Lance Armstrong kind) & leathery tattooed barflies. Sure, it would be a BLAST, but we'd have been torn apart & eaten alive while the jukebox played the theme song from Dukes of Hazzard or maybe some ZZ-Top or 'Skynyrd. To top it off, for some reason, Anya really wanted to pretend to be a deaf mute when we got there. Just for fun. It would have provided some great material, but we wussed out.
Katy's & Mom's birthday was Friday & Luke's is this Friday, so we always celebrate them the day after Thanksgiving. We all also brought gifts for each other's kids. Not so much to keep them from feeling left out as to cover birthdays we forgot or to go ahead & get Christmas out of the way. That's just our way. We're slackers. We did hold off on the real birthday presents for the designated day, but the others were distributed at random when whichever kid or kids seemed to need a new distraction. Thank God one of the girls got the High School Musical soundtrack so we could be subjected to it at max volume while Katy, Lydia (my brother's daughter who is just a couple of weeks older than Katy--8), & Chloe (my sister's daughter who is 6, I think) danced & sang with such pure joy, watching them almost cancelled out the adults' collective desire to beat the stereo to death with a sledgehammer.
Luke & the boys went about their business oblivious to the chaos they were both surrounded by & supplementing. My brother's son Peter is 3 & Kelly's son Ben is 4. They played contently with lead-painted Chinese toys or tackled Luke as necessary. Peter is addicted to the Wiggles. (That's one of those sentences that sound inappropriate, but it's not.) He has discovered these Wiggles videos on YouTube. They're montages of Wiggles clips (sounds like a circumcision, but it's not) put to songs that make for incredibly hilarious & inappropriate videos. Look them up sometime. So Peter watches these having no clue that, for example, the Wiggles dancing to I'm too Sexy or driving their big red car as they are Ridin' Dirty is a RIOT to any adult who can appreciate ironic, sophomoric humor.
At some point, we all "bed down" (Kelly & I always use that phrase in the voice we use for such odd phrases & laugh. Not sure why.)

(I need to take a break here & shift gears back to writing a brief before I get an upset stomach from doing something ostensibly superfluous when I should be a more responsible adult. Clients will start calling, so I need to exercise the serious part of my brain. I'll be supplementing this entry soon as there is a lot more material to share.) Stay tuned.

But wait, there's more!
Kelly & I spent most of the weekend making puerile & vulgar references & gestures (one involving the raw turkey neck & some "giblets"). We were in tears laughing so hard at how funny we were. And we couldn't resist adding "so to speak" or "that's what s/he said" to any conceivably vulnerable word or phrase that popped up (so to speak). Mom & Kenny tried to look down their noses at us, but they couldn't help piping up with their own tasteless jokes at every opportunity.
I forgot to say that Kelly outdid me again on Mom's birthday gift. She probably found it on a clearance "As Is" shelf at the Dollar Store or Big Lots. She got her this fancy, tricked out, under the cabinet stereo, radio/CD player, with speakers & a clock & a remote. This is for the tiny kitchen in the glorified double-wide. The remote handily attaches to the nearby fridge with a magnet. Mom was all like, "Oooh, a remote. Just in case I'm at the fridge & can't move that extra three inches to reach the stereo itself." And the thing probably also has a built-in can opener, corkscrew & egg separator, too. Whatever. I got Mom some BeautiControl stuff (that I sell anyway & was probably free). She said, "Didn't you give me some foot cream last time? And what does this mean—'extreme repair'? What are you trying to say?" God she's funny. I also gave her a $50 Target gift card. Kelly was kind enough to point out, "Oh, like there's a Target in Hico." As IF Mom never leaves town. She's always speeding off in her Lexus "crossover" SUV to such hot spots as Waco or Fort Worth. (Btw, why are they called "crossovers"? Like, is it a car that feels like it should have been an SUV? Is it an SUV trapped in a car's body? I guess hermaphrodite was already taken.)
We had dinner later than usual, mainly because we are not planners & because we wanted to overcook everything & get the turkey nice & dry. We have this phrase we use, usually at Christmas, but often at other special occasions. Because we had decided to cut back on the gluttony a little, we only had like 4 starches instead of the usual 16. And we decided to break tradition & have just plain green beans (mistake). Anyway, as we surveyed the spread, Mom shook her head wistfully & said, "Just another disappointing Thanksgiving." And it really was when we tried to eat the chocolate pie. As Mom made the pie, Kenny told her to cut back on the sugar, so it would be more like dark chocolate (which is theoretically fine). He is normally a good cook. Well, she apparently sneaked in some Splenda which only made it worse. But I can't blame her for trying. Anyway, thanks to Kenny, the pie sucked. It tasted like, well, crap. Even Luke wouldn't eat it. That's how bad it was.
And of course Mike was kind enough to remind me that when he & Luke made an escape earlier that day for a Thanksgiving lunch visit to his aunt's house (about an hour away) they enjoyed pecan & coconut crème pies not cooked at my brother's direction. When Mike & Luke were leaving, it was a wet & windy 34 degrees. Luke needed a warmer coat. My brother-in-law, Tim (who coaches baseball at OU) offered up a Sooners hoodie. Luke goes, "I'm not that cold." Smart, that boy.
So one night, I think during Mike's other escape to Arlington to see his best friend & to watch UT get beat by A&M, Kelly, Kenny, Anya & I sat at the dinner table drinking wine & trying to top each other with "my kid is more messed up than yours" stories. Kenny decides to rank the kids mainly in order of cuteness. We were trying to determine the criteria & see if age was a factor (no it was not) & if intelligence played a role (to even the playing field, no). So we were pretending seriously to decide which of the 6 kids was the cutest or best-looking when Mom approached to see what we were discussing. She acted mortified & appalled, but I know she was mentally trying to put them in order. We all wanted our own kids to win, but I truly think my nephew Ben would have been the winner, had we really had to do like a pageant. Peter would have been first runner up only because he's a year younger & still has a shot next year.
So Kenny is a philosophy professor & I told Kelly I get nervous every time I talk to him about anything more important than the Wiggles. She reminded me that I'm smart too & that she's always been the outcast middle child who got her degree in Home Ec. She said, "Jill, Kenny is only like on a balcony above you as far as intelligence. He's a Mount Everest above me." So that made me feel pretty good.
We left Saturday morning so we were going to miss the parade of lights that night in downtown Hico where Mom was to judge some no doubt fabulous crepe paper floats & the highly-anticipated doggie fashion show. I was disappointed to miss that, only because of the great fodder I could have collected.

So it was the second Thanksgiving without Dad. If he had been there, it would not have been such a loud, wheels-off free-for-all. We would have had dinner on a schedule so we'd be done in time for the Cowboy game. The kids would've been a little better behaved & my sister, brother & I would've had even more wine & probably more civilized conversation. Things were not the same. Even sameness is temporary. We could see him rolling his eyes at our absolute lack of control & I think he was probably glad he wasn't in the middle of it. We filled the empty space with such deep gratitude for 6 healthy kids who rarely see each other & when they do, pick up where they left off just like old friends do. They were scattered like the clutter under our feet, then clicked together like perfect little puzzle pieces. Through all the rude & crude, under all the noises & voices, inside all the motion & emotion, over all the laughter & quiet after, we could hear Dad's voice (Kenny imitates it so well). We could feel his peaceful pleased presence & we knew he was glad to be (somehow literally) above the fray, smiling on our irreverent reverence. Approving & glad that, even so soon without him, the laughter will continue to be the bond that keeps our family alive.

One of my treasures: a Letter from David Sedaris

I have been preparing my 2007 holiday letter, so I was digging thru the golden box where I stash all my my writing paraphernalia and torn junk mail envelopes & crumpled coffee-stained Starbucks napkins with scribblings of my utter brilliance when I ran across something I need to keep in a fireproof lock-box. I never kept it under my pillow, but I did think about it. It is a letter from my favorite writer & the person I would most love to attend a carnival freakshow with.

When he came to San Antonio back in 2004, I stood in line to have him sign all my books and then hand-delivered I guess what you would call an (obsessed) fan letter. Non-Sedaris fans won't get a lot of it. Some references I like to consider personal jokes between the two of us. Here's what it said:

November 6, 2004

Dear Mr. Sedaris:

I thought of you several months ago when Cord Roberts returned to Llanview for a brief but pivotal scene at the hospital bedside of Flash (a/k/a Sarah—as you know, the daughter he had with Tina). And it was the real Cord Roberts, not some actor just playing the part of Cord Roberts. He was as dashing and debonair as ever, and now distinguished as well, I dare say. Yes, time has been good to our friend Cord Roberts. I hope you saw it, but I imagine One Life to Live isn’t easy to find on French TV. Back in 1988, when I went to the Sorbonne and flunked out (or as they put it: “Nous regrettons… [french gibberish]…vous avez echoue…”) the only American shows I could find were reruns of Charlie’s Angels and Dallas. When I told my host countryfolk I was “de Dallas,” they would gasp in that animated French way and ask, “Connaissez-vous ZhjeeAyhr?” I would say, “Bien sur, J.R. est mon voisin!” I wanted to say he was my lover, but they’d know it was a lie, seeing as how they were privy to the obnoxious alcoholic oilman’s dramatic televised love life.
Anyway, I haven’t written a fan letter since I fell in love with Ralph Macchio in the first Karate Kid movie. When I stare into your photograph’s eyes, I feel the yearning ache, the grasping pangs of unrequited love not unlike those I suffered as a pre-teen upon gazing at my Shaun Cassidy posters or Andy Gibb (God rest his soul) albums. That’s just the kind of passion you arouse in me, but in a much more mature and civilized way.
The love -- nay, ardor, I feel for you is so much more raw, more genuine, more transcendent than anything sexual or romantic or even gastronomic. It’s a sublime sense of “Oh-if-only-he-knew-that-I’m-his-female-hetero-suburban-counterpart…” Then I shudder at the shameless audacity to elevate myself to counterpart status. Of course I have a high but largely unmerited self-opinion. And still I blush at revealing my deepest secrets to you. I like to think you might nevertheless someday deign to acknowledge me.
When I found out you were coming to San Antonio, I hastily forked over the most well-spent hundred bucks of my life for two precious golden tickets. One for me, and one for whichever of my few literate friends loses a game of rock-paper-scissors and whose duty it will be to prevent me from surrendering to what will surely be an overwhelming, nigh Tourette-ish/OCD urge (no offense) to writhe in a sweat-slinging frenzy at the mere thought of breathing air in the same room as you, my Malison.
You have brought unparalleled tear-filled joy to my life, and I will cherish your words eternally in my soul.
Contrary to my standard personality, I am NOT being sarcastic. And don’t worry, I’m far too busy to stalk you.

All my devotion,

Jill Mitchell

Here is his rather prompt and courteous answer. I was a little nervous about copyright infringement, posting his words without permission, (hey, I marked out his address) but let him sue me. He came back to town just last month, so I got to share the theatre's oxygen with him again. I didn't stand in line or give him a letter this time. Don't want to appear too interested, you know. He has a new book coming out in June, so I will be trolling Amazon to place an advance order as soon as possible just in case I can't find the time & air miles to stalk him properly for an awkward encounter in which he is compelled to fork over personally a new signed copy or suffer humiliation the likes of which he has never seen before, & has he seen some humiliation.

Don't miss my updated profile. A real must-read.

Just more blatant self-promotion. (Or is it a cry for help??) This blog has unleashed quite an egomaniacal streak. I'll try harder to pepper it with snippets of humility if any have the courage to surface.

Hannah Montana's Cool, but the Jonas Brothers Rule!

I had SO much fun watching my 7-year-old daughter scream & sing along with an entire arena full of absolutely hysterical Hannah fans. It was well worth the exorbitant ticket price. Of course, I found myself singing along, too. The show was a Disney extravaganza with dancers, fireworks, confetti, streamers, & more costume changes than I could count. I thought I'd be miserable & bored, but the vicarious pleasure of seeing so many thrilled kids was impossible to resist. Of course, the big beer I paid about 12 dollars for helped, too.
The Jonas Brothers opened for her, then played again as Miley changed from her alter ego, Hannah, into herself for the second half of the show. Those boys are adorable. When I realized I kind of didn't mind watching the High School Musical movies b/c of Zac Efron & Corbin Bleu, I thought (sort of a la Jeff Foxworthy) "you might be a pedophile..... if you're 40 & you have inappropriate thoughts when you see cute boys less than half your age." Well, the Jonas Bros confirmed it. I'm afraid I might be. Good thing I'm too old to go back & be a high school teacher. I might be in prison & pregnant.
I really hope ol' BillyRay Cyrus can keep his sweet daughter in line so she doesn't end up one day baring her ragged out "tinkerbell" (as Katy calls it) as she drunkenly stumbles out of a limo with, say, a heroin-addicted Hilary Duff & a DUI-ankle-braceleted Raven-Symone.
Get this. Since Katy is a fan club member, we got special VIP treatment. All the "MileyWorld" members got to participate in raffles for meet & greets with Miley or tour bus visits or Hannah Montana toothbrushes. We didn't win anything, BUT, (here's the good news) all the fan club members got to stand in line for about an hour to have their picture taken with a life-size cardboard Miley cut-out & (drum roll)......Miley's real-life GRANDMOTHER! Yep, my daughter & her friend can now treasure (or sell on eBay) a real photo of Miley Cyrus' granny. And she's not even BillyRay's mom, as people kept asking. Like, "Oh, wow. Are you really the one whose loins spawned the Achy-Breaky Heart guy? Can I have your gnarled, arthritic hand scribble me an autograph?" She's just his mother-in-law, so I bet that prevented much threat of writer's cramp. Bless her heart. What a gig, huh? Wonder what he pays her. I bet she gets free Depends since she has to stand there & pose like frickin Santa for several hours at a time. Can you believe that? Let's put grandma to work. I bet she'd rather be back in Tennessee wearing her blue greeter's vest at the local Wal-Mart. Again, I just have to say, bless her poor little old heart. If my kid ever becomes a gajillionaire, I guarantee my mother & mother-in-law will be living on their own private islands with diamond-encrusted jets & well-coiffed servants & french chefs & dedicated personal shoppers & hot cabana boys giving them pedicures & massages & serving them maragaritas as they float on gold-leafed pools full of perfectly heated FIJI bottled water. Hear that, moms? I will not allow y'all to become geriatric sideshow attractions. I'm sure you'll hold me to it.

Some of My Theme Songs Have Been Added

I just went thru all kinds of computer triple round-off back flips while juggling flaming chainsaws and cartwheeling thru razorwired hoops to put these songs here for your listening pleasure. I hope you like them, and if you don't, change the channel and go listen to some mellow mainstream soft rock. I'll try to add other offbeat stuff as the mood strikes me. Btw, Where Was I isn't really a theme song, I just like it b/c it is really depressing. (Not Seasons in the Sun depressing, don't worry.) I also added the greatest Christmas song ever. Hilarious. A Texas classic. And I had to add an Eva Cassidy song b/c I think she had the most beautiful voice on Earth. Look up her story. It's a sad one. And then I had to throw in some Van Morrison. These are the Days just makes my heart ache. LOVE it. If you haven't noticed, music is huge for me. Especially stuff that gets me all hysterical one way or another. As if I need any help there. Speaking of hysteria, I'm taking Katy to see Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus tonight (Mon. 11/12/07). I'm sure you'll get a full report soon, but I won't be posting any of her songs.