Over winter break, I spent a few days playing hot potato at the homes of my New England-dwelling friends. Each house and family was different — Shih Tzu puppy versus ornery cat greeting me at the door, scrumptious Indian food versus decadent blueberry muffins made from scratch — but toward the end of the week, I began to realize it wasn’t so much that these families were all different, but that none of them were normal by my standards.
I mean, where were the dead cats in the refrigerator or the cousins singing drunken versions of “Silent Night” by the piano? Not a soul was inquiring about whose turn it was to shower with the dog. And by golly, there wasn’t a hoop skirt in sight.
As I looked up from dinners that had obviously never contained roadkill and tried to convey my family’s complex rituals to simpler folk, I knew they thought I was making all of this up. Trust me, I couldn’t.
Here’s a quick rundown of the family. My dad is from Chicago, which, in his voice, is pronounced shee-CAHHH-go. His mother still lives there. I should mention that she only eats one shrimp per day (or one melon on holidays), looks vaguely like a skinny gorilla and smokes like a chimney. Strangely, she puts no fewer than 12 sugar packets in her coffee each morning. She has two drawers full of them.
Let’s swing on down to Nashville, Tenn., where my mother and every one of her relatives was born and bred since the dawn of time, or at least since God anointed Dixie the most wonderful place on earth.
The flock wouldn’t be complete without a few choice Southern-to-the-core names. Meet Bubba, Rufus, Ruby May, Ella May, Horace, Ruby Joann, Mary Brugh, Mary Braden, Mary Anne, Mary Summers and me, Mary Liza. Whenever I lament having a double name, I send up a special thank you that it wasn’t any of the other ones. Yes, grandmother Ruby Joann does have the exact same accent as Vivien Leigh in “Gone with the Wind” (1939) — and many of the same political views. Rounding off the bunch is an uncle with a musical theater background, a cousin with a penchant for tattoo artistry and a cat whose daddy is also his uncle. In my family, you never have to wonder if the South will rise again. It will.
Most of the time, having a crazy family is great. I find myself the star of dinner party conversations and the winner of every crazy family debate. Oh, your dad sometimes sings in the shower? How cute. My dad goes jogging in bouncy moon boots, and he once smuggled a potato cannon through Canada. All I need do is allude to a good story (“...turns out it wasn’t his iguana after all!”) and people are hooked.
My sister has a phrase for this phenomenon — “on display.” Putting yourself “on display” is when you meet a new group of people and drop one of these impossible stories on them, and you can just that they already love you. It’s a powerful feeling.
Often, sensing you’re on display propels you deeper into the family vault until you’re sharing things that you’re sure the rest of the clan would want to keep under the raccoon-skin rug.
Did I forget to mention that my house has a whole room full of taxidermy? Like my relatives, these special friends have splendid names — Bucky the Buck, Ray the Raccoon, Bob the Bobcat, Lil’ Red the Fox. And we’re still looking for the right squirrel to add to the collection. Perhaps Carl or even Pearl the Squirrel.
Gazing about the quiet, warm homes of my friends this winter, I felt that familiar pang that comes with being just a little bit odd. These people could take their parents to a parent-teacher conference without worrying whether their father would start belting Beatles tunes while the teacher tried to talk about algebra. I felt certain they were the types of families who, on Thanksgiving, sat around and watched football instead of prying a cat out from under an exponentially lustier cat.
I doubt my friends had ever sat on their beds wishing just one family member would act normal, be it for a wedding, a funeral or just a regular day. I knew none of them had to live in fear that their sisters would sneak up on them as they watched TV, inch closer and forcibly pluck out their nose hairs.
I recently discovered a musical about a family quite similar to my own — “Next to Normal.” The show follows a bipolar, hallucinating mother and her family’s attempt to live normally in the face of its many abnormalities. Now here’s a feel-good musical for the whole Hartong family!
Listening to the songs, especially to the lyrics, “What doesn’t kill me doesn’t kill me,” makes me feel a little better in my times of woe. In the end, the family in the musical decides that being next to normal is enough. Perhaps I should strive for this state of being. I can’t stop expecting that there will be another family pet nestled beside the stack of frozen DiGiorno pizzas, or that my dad will stop wearing shoes that look like something from “Back to the Future” (1985).
I would honestly be saddened to come home to find our moose-themed tchotchkes replaced with black-and-white family photos and scented candles.
Oh, the horror I’d feel if my grandmother admitted that Obama and Democrats aren’t really all that bad. I’d slap the embroidered handkerchief right out of her hand and use it to fan the flames coming from the microwave she had just used to “warm up” her hearing aid, as she claimed the doctor told her to. No, wait, that already happened. But that’s another story.
I think Tolstoy put it best. “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Although I’d replace “happy” with normal and “unhappy” with weird, loving, horrible, wonderful and very, very funny.
