This summer, we all went to Dillon, Colorado for vacation, a place we’ve been going for almost a quarter of a century, as this photo shows. We had a great time then, but we had a really, really good time this year. It seems to me that things just get better for us. I love my family.
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When I was a kid our entire family, our large, loud, wriggly extended family on my mom’s side, used to always go to my grandmother’s sister’s house every Christmas. Betty and her husband Howard had a three-story house in Okmulgee. The top floor was one big play room and every Christmas Eve all the kids would sleep up there together. Then on Christmas morning we’d come blasting down the stairs to sit under the gigantic tree in Betty’s living room and open presents. Betty and Howard’s daughters, who were teenagers when I was a kid, had a KISS poster in the stairwell leading down from the play room, and it terrified the shit out of me so much that I always ran up and down the stairs as fast as possible. When I was in the 3rd grade I fell down the stairs behind where dad & I are standing in this photo, and I broke my collar bone on Christmas Day.
God, I love the holidays.
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It’s completely quiet here right now. My dad, who hadn’t been feeling well enough to join us, decided yesterday that he’d go ahead and drive up. He arrived this afternoon, and now he, my mom and John have all gone back to a lake high in the mountains to catch some more fish. Brian zonked out shortly before they left, so I told everyone to go on, we’ll stay here. Sam is sniffing around in the backyard; he’s completely delirious with all the new adventures. Today Brian and I hiked up the big hill behind the cabin, taking Sam along with us for the longest walk he’s been on since we adopted him.
Things are perfect. I’ve finished my first book and am almost completely done with The Complete Persepolis, which you must read, if you haven’t. (I haven’t seen the movie but would now like to). Sometimes the best thing about a vacation is the time you get to spend being totally quiet. This is one of those times.
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Meteorologically speaking, this week has been absolutely gorgeous, the kind of weather where you really want nothing more than to call in well to work and take off driving into the country with little more than your favorite music and perhaps a camera.
I don’t know what I’d ever do if the car I owned didn’t have a sunroof.
Sadly, I have too much to do to take off work all willy-nilly, and anyway, with gas prices where they are, driving aimlessly into the country is now an investment, something for which we have to budget. This is another example of the way in which George W. Bush has ruined the world.
Anyway, Brian’s been out of town since Saturday night, and while I generally do well on my own, this time it’s been much harder not having him around. Last night I called my mom to see how she was doing, and before I knew it I was telling her that I was lonesome, and could I come over for dinner? She had a better idea - "Why don’t I drive up there and we can go to Borders?"
The woman knows me.
So we went book shopping at Borders, which was lovely and just what I needed. She went with me to Target to get treats for Sam and offered to make dinner for me tonight if I’m feeling lonesome again. I still miss the hell out of Brian, and I can’t wait to get down to Dallas and order some blackberry mojitos from Bar Belmont, but at least in the meantime, it seems, I’m going to be all right.
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My father spent 30 years on the faculty of the Chemistry department of a small state university in western Oklahoma. This photo is of some of the remaining members of that faculty. My dad’s the guy on the first row, in the sweater I bought him in Ireland, holding his old, weathered Bible in his lap.
Last week one of these men lost his wife. She’d battled cancer for almost a decade and finally succumbed last Tuesday. This completely knocked the wind out of me, because when I was growing up we spent a lot of time with these people. Our families had a ton in common: both fathers were on the chemistry faculty, both mothers were pharmacists, and their son and I were in the same grade. I spent more time than I can count at their house, eating hot dogs wrapped not in neat little buns but in pieces of wheat bread, which, for some reason, I still remember vividly.
We all went camping together in Colorado almost every summer. This sweet, silly woman we lost last week would make bread from scratch and bake it in her Coleman camp oven, which sat atop a propane camp stove. Her husband and son would ride their motorcycles up to the ghost towns, and at night we’d listen to Monty Python and Weird Al albums. I once wrote a novel using their house as the setting.
This weekend we paid her tribute, all of these men and their families. This group of teachers are a bit legendary at this university, because each of them was an amazing lecturer, a man deeply invested in his students. I looked up to them as a child and have come to know them as an adult, and though I’m reeling from this loss, I want you to know that in this photo are a group of people who’ve changed the lives of a ton of students in the way that only teachers can really do. Last year we lost one of these men very suddenly, and three years ago another one of them. It’s precious and terrifying.
My heart’s been heavy with missing this woman, and her son, whom I saw on Saturday for the first time in over ten years and whom, despite the circumstances, it was good to see. There was a slide show presentation that included photos of all of us from those camping trips, now two decades ago. I feel like the older I get the less I know how to process all of these things, and the less I know what to say to people at things like this; I felt like such an asshole for telling my old friend that it was good to see him, but it really, really was good, and also bad, and also mind-numbingly terrible to see him because it took this awful thing for that to happen. I felt like an asshole for asking for his e-mail, and for snapping this picture.
What I wanted to tell my old friend was that last year, I ran into both of his parents at a birthday party for one of these men, who just so happens to attend my church now that he and his wife have moved to the city. My dad came up from Arkansas and we went, together, and when I saw her standing there I rushed up, hugged her, and we spent the whole party talking. She was so proud of him - he’s earning his Ph.D. in Chemistry, just like I knew he would when we were FIVE YEARS OLD - and talked excitedly about how well he’s doing. I wanted to say that I couldn’t possibly understand what he was feeling, but that I felt I’d been punched in the gut. I wanted to tell him that, but literally all I could do was shrug my shoulders and say, "My God, your mom, she …"
He nodded and looked me in the eye, and I hope he knew that she was great, and that I had nothing, absolutely nothing, because really, what is there to say, except, "It’s Good To See You?"
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These are some of my people. They came over this weekend and we ate delicious food, drank some wine, and talked on my front porch.
I won’t get too into it, but my family lost someone very dear to us today. In the wake of this loss - which has pretty much knocked the wind out of me - I keep looking at the photos from Saturday night, thinking about how we’re none of us safe, and hoping that I live the kind of life where when I’m gone, people miss me the way I’m missing the lovely, kind woman we’ve lost this week.
Who are your people?
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I’m older now than my mom was when this photo was taken, and almost older than she was when I was born. I love it, though, because we look alike. Last weekend we had a wonderful time driving back from Tulsa, singing harmony in the car. I like that we get to do things like that together. Here she is last weekend at the K.C. Clifford show, holding a Yeungling, her favorite beer:
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This is K., my dorko brother’s adorable girlfriend. Ain’t she the sweetest? I was going to launch an internet campaign to coerce him into marrying her, but there were two problems with that. One - I don’t think he’s going to need that much coercion, and Two, I already have a website! So here, for the second time, I’m using my own personal website to publicly BEG my brother to put a diamond the size of the Meteor Crater on this girl’s finger. She deserves it, and more.
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This is my dorko brother. He’s just about the silliest person I know. Now, every time he calls me, this is the photo that pops up on my phone. Also, he’s not going bald, despite how this photo makes him look. But even if he was going bald, I’d love him just the same.
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This is a photo from the game camera my dad has set up on his land in western Arkansas. He sends me a lot of these photos, and I enjoy looking at them, even the ones that show me that he has tons and tons of black bears wandering around in his woods and that he might someday end up like Timothy Treadwell. This one was especially entertaining to me, because it was the first time I realized that the deer feeder looks like a really huge bong.
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