Love, Weird, Weird Love

I grew up in an old family. As the youngest of six children, my parents were relatively old when I came along, at least by the standards of 1960--my father was 40, my mother was 36, and my father's relatives who surrounded me in my young years were ancient by the time I came along. They were at the house each holiday, the table groaning with buffet servings of meats and potato salad and deviled eggs and cherries jubilee (no flame though, this was Sixties Indiana). They were ponderous, tall, tree like creatures, rooted in their folding chairs, a smile across their faces as I raced past, inevitably eating. 

I remember so well how sorry I felt for them; their conversations were of doctors and pills and diagnoses and losses, how they could no longer stand to eat corn, which struck me funny--I grew up surrounded by corn fields, as did anyone in Northeast Indiana, Miles of it, the summer air lousy with its pollen, the smell of fertilizer spread to encourage it, the dust kicked up by the tillage for the reception of it. As my Aunt Helen delicately put it--"It binds me up!" But hey, if you were born in 1900, it might bind you up too. 

Their lives seemed to be lived in a specific point where there was no unnecessary motion, no surprises, everything managed to create a path of least resistance when forced to move.. As I ran on sugar and peanut butter and as much fat as I could stuff down my skinny throat, vibrating like a freak under a full moon at every possible moment, their life seemed as if no life to me. I loved them, I enjoyed them, but I certainly didn't understand them. 

I was, this weekend, one of the old people in my family. My niece's husband turned 40, and he's a lovely addition to our family, so I very much wanted to honor the party by attending. They live a few miles from where I grew up in Columbia City, as does my brother, his two sons, and their various friends, significant others, and children. My brother's wife comes from a large family, a troupe of girls I grew up around, who went through school at the same time I did and are now, too, old people at the party. But not quite like me.

This was the first time I have been to a family event since I became old--old as in, can't play volleyball anymore, content to sit in a chair in the shade, happy to smile at the kids who are silly with protein and obscene amounts of energy. A guy who, could he speak, would speak of doctors, and hospitals, and diagnoses and losses, but who would die to eat an earn of sweet corn, being sold roadside all over the county as I drove through. This was the first time the kids showed me to a chair when I showed up, and when my older brother came, he and his wife parked beside me for the duration. 

Sitting there, I pondered who the hell I was now. I used to be Uncle Mark, the foul mouthed, barely appropriate raconteur who wanted nothing more than to fuck shit up. I used to be the sarcastic, flip, up for fun sort, for many years out with the smokers in the garage--I was the guy who wasn't going to get old, wasn't going the way of those Price family dinosaurs, years before, A comet, that's what I intended to be. 

No, I am not a comet. I am holding onto old definitions and ghosts because my new life hasn't quite fully taken shape. I don't yet know how this story ends, because it does not: I create it each day I agree to live this way, to make the best of it, to relearn to love who I am through whom I can be, to celebrate what I can do rather more than what is impossible. I mowed the backyard today, but couldn't do the front--it's too hard for me to breathe this summer air with all this grass and pollen and dust and ragweed and god knows what else in the degraded atmosphere of this most polluted state. But I love the fact that I had my ass out there in my floppy hat, my skinny so-white legs in athletic shorts, the dent of a feeding tube clearly visible under my t-shirt. 

Weird love is what I felt sitting amongst my brother, his wife, their kids, her family; weird because I never recognized it before, weird because I felt like my dead old relatives, weird because this is now part of my life. Perhaps a medical breakthrough happens and some of my functions are restored--it hardly matters. This is now part of my expeience, I've looked over the edge, and I've seen it, and frankly, I liked what I saw. I used to love nothing more than to crack on my brother--he's one of my favorite people in the entire world, he always has been. He was the one person in my old family who actually seemed to either understand me or not care that I was a total freak. Now I just want to sit next to him and bullshit the hot afternoon away in the shade they tell us we need. 

Jim, my brother, has the Price gene for bad heart and gimpy lungs; I have the Price gene for cancer. All of those old relatives of ours, every one of them died of either a heart attack or cancer. There were no accidents, no banana peels, toys on the stairs in the dark of night, autmobiles cracked up. They left, some suffering, and some quickly, one of two predictable ways. And so we will, too--eventually. I'm not predicting early exits here, but I see the shape of the doorways we'll go through. 

I thought of weird love this weekend because that's what my relatives knew so well, the way to love the strangeness in each other, the otherness of the other, with no condition attached. Those little smiles, they now seem like their way of signaling just such a thing--just as I would if my mouth would move that way, were I not wearing a mask to cover it. Perhaps this is where Tyra Banks' smizing would come in handy, and not on an ersatz runway on an ersatz TV network. 

Weird love that I cannot believe my niece and nephews, my great nieces and nephews, they are all growing older and yet I cannot think of them as anything but kids. Weird that a place I hated so much as a child is now a bit of refuge, a place filled with people I love and miss. Weird that I can find such so much joy in the simple act of sitting with my brother; I would never have suspected it of myself.

I am becoming someone I don't know because these moments surprise me. I'm not my old relatives quite yet, because I've not developed their introspection. I'm still fighting, a bit, to be the person I was, afraid to lose him, afraid when he goes away I'll lose whatever made me unique, that I'll flatten out into an old relative who needs a chair in the shade, first thing, without anyone knowing that I used to run the joint. 

Weird love, though, I think it always wins in the end. The struggle is a matter of pride that eventually fades to softness, the need that one hates to admit to becomes a badge of honor to the heart. The landscape full of tall corn spewing pollen smelling of cow manure and dust, familiar through the window, Rally the Schnoodle riding shotgun, head out of the window, the very picture of the kind of joy I'd do best to imitate.