Personal Day

   I haven’t had the time to post in over a week…. not a very successful blog building strategy, I know. My apologies to the six or seven people who regularly check in. I’m finding it difficult to filter out the personal content I would have normally posted in my old blog. Incidentally I also find it hard not to provide a “we have moved to: ___” message on my old blog, in order to instantly attract an ample assembly. I may yet so do.

   Maybe it is so hard to avoid personal content because maybe personal content actually belongs here. I am a personable fellow, if I do say so myself. But seriously, I’m an ordinary private citizen, and I don’t have a lot more to offer than my personal experience. Maybe that’s all any of us can really do, compare notes honestly.

   I've had a personal week.

   In the troubled times ahead, I believe that people will revert back to their primary loyalties- clan, tribe, religion, neighborhood gang, etc. John Robb has an elaborate post about this idea, and you should be reading his work everyday if you want a glimpse of the future. With this in mind, for the past two years I've been trying to rebuild connections to my own family network, with rather mixed success.

   Before Saturday, it had been twelve years since I'd seen my mother. Shocking, I know, but she was quite unfair to my father, and much beyond that. I moved out shortly after I turned eighteen and never looked back (at her side of my family that is).

   Around summer of 2004, I realized why it is important to reestablish contact. It is better to strengthen familial bonds sooner rather than later. I started calling and visiting with my half-siblings and my aunt and grandmother. I soon understood that if I wanted a normal relationship with them, I needed to have some sort of minimal relationship with my mother.

   I felt I was emotionally prepared for the inevitable reunion at my Grandmother's surprise 90th birthday party. I was nervous, naturally, but when my girlfriend asked "What's the worst that can happen?” I knew the answer was "nothing!”

   Until my old roommate replied, "You could get drunk and make an ass out of your self!"

   I didn't, but I got my first jab in early. The event was just outside Brainerd, MN, in the private banquet room of a small but reasonably fancy resort restaurant. There were about forty attendees, mostly those anonymous distant relations that were probably at your last family event, and might have been at the one before, and "I haven't seen you since you were THIS tall" types.

    My girlfriend and I walked in after collecting my courage, in both psychological and liquid form. My brother, my mother, and her new fiancé intercepted us right away.

"How have you been? It's been positively ages! Hooby dooby doo!", she said, or very near.

  "I've been fine", I replied, mostly interested in the slideshow of my Grandmother's life projected on the wall. The conversation seemed terribly awkward; I suppose it couldn't have been any other way. "You work for the Catholic Church, I've heard?", I offered.

  "Oh yes, I'm Director of such-and-so, and it's soooo interesting. Hoobey Dooby Doo!!!", She said, if I remember accurately. Unfortunately for her, it was a deliberate ambush. You see, my mom spent decades as a “channeller”, thinking herself a medium of spirit guides. She had a side income for a while duping other housewives into paying for her sessions. She wrote a few unpublished manuscripts on the subject, and she put her B.A. in Asian immigration history to good use when she self-published a whole channeled book as a samurai warrior. Now as a bureaucrat in the Catholic Church, I hoped to force her hand and make her denounce and maybe even burn all her work.

   "I suppose you haven't been channelling much lately then?” It was a shot across the bow, but there is plenty of room in the Catholic Church for heresy these days. She made a weak joke and that was that. My girlfriend was shocked by the crudeness of it all, and I would have felt bad myself, if it hadn't have felt so good.

   We weren't seated at her table, so we didn't have much more interaction with her after that. On the way out her fiancé, an old Special Forces vet, shook my hand and said it was an honor to meet me. He seemed nice enough, but then they all do until they shoot your dad. I was sufficiently non-committal in my reply--"maybe we'll see each other again some time."

   My sisters weren't there, and getting their respective addresses was one of my biggest hopes for the evening. I've already re-established a good relationship with my brother.

   Most importantly, my grandmother had a great time, and so it was all well worthwhile.

Comments

[Jess]

I like that your Mom is Adam Sandler!

My Mom has less than six months to live, and I've only been to see her once since they decided it was cancer, and I couldn't be less moved by it.