In the Houston airport I go to the bathroom. I’m in there, doing my business, when I hear a woman’s voice asking for “Lily.” Finally a little tiny voice pipes up from another stall. Apparently Lily is a 4-year-old, traveling with her grandpa, and she has now been in the bathroom for so long that he’s sent a total stranger in to check on her.
“Lily? Do you need help? Can I come in?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you going #1 or #2?”
“#2.”
“Do you need me to hold you up while you go?”
“I did it already!”
“Oh! Do you need me to wipe you?”
“Yeah.”
When I came out they were at the sinks. “I think that’s enough soap, Lily,” the lady was saying. She was barely containing her laughter at the weird situation she’d gotten herself into. When I left there was a worried old man standing by the door. Amazing!
Also, would this happen anywhere but Texas? I like to think it would…but maybe it wouldn’t. People in Texas are quite frankly nicer than anywhere else I’ve ever been. And I say that with a healthy dose of total disgust for Texas also, believe me. And don’t sass on me about Texas. I grew up there, and my entire family lives there, and I know from Texas, okay??
One thing we realized is that the kind of friendliness the South is known for actually feels nice and friendly and fun to us, whereas the kind of friendliness the Midwest is known for feels obnoxious and false and irritating. And in New Orleans, I realized that this is because of the element of “sass” that is present in Southern friendliness. In the South, somebody generally expresses friendliness by sassing or playfully insulting you, or at least there is always a TOUCH of sass going on in there, and it makes you feel this warm bond of human kinship with them. There’s also a lot of physical touching involved. Like a waiter will make fun of a question you ask him, while gently bumping you with his hip to show you he’s just playing around because he likes you. It’s so nice! Whereas in the Midwest I would just prefer no one ever talk to me. If there’s no sass, you don’t pass. Or something. “Give me some sass or you’re out on your ass.”
In Texas we had an awesome time. It was so nice to be with my parents, in their little beach apartment they rent when they go to visit my grandparents. It’s great, it takes the pressure off everybody–us AND my grandparents–if we have our own zone to go to. My parents and my grandparents have extremely different vibes, as I’m sure you have gathered if you have been reading this blog for any length of time. Luckily, Gary and I share my parents’ vibe. So there is lots of yoga and eating steel-cut oats and talking about antioxidants. Then we take little day trips to my grandparents’ house, and we drink Folger’s and eat heavy shrimp dinners (not me, I’m just saying) and drink shitloads of tequila. And then that also becomes more fun when you know you get to go home and walk on the beach and eat some kale.
My grandparents’ town has many shark-shaped buildings and shark-based things in general. It is perhaps the most sharky beach town I have ever been to, which has always both thrilled and confused me…if you are a small town whose economy is based totally on beach tourism, why do you want to constantly remind people of the huge sharks that are in the water? Still, it doesn’t seem to bother anyone.
There are also these guys:
Well, it’s not letting me load more pictures right now. Also my pictures look shitty–I swear in iPhoto they look awesome. I don’t know why they are all gruff and poor on here. I don’t know from computer.
So, this is the beach I grew up going to. On the Gulf of Mexico, it is weird brown water with lots of seaweed. However, it is so much cleaner now than it was when I was growing up, and I don’t know why, or if it bodes well or ill. Is it just that the technology of at-sea oil drilling has improved, or have federal regulations put limits on pollution, or what? But when I was a child, you had to literally scrub your feet with turpentine and an old rag before you were allowed to go back inside the condos–there were little bottles of turpentine and buckets of rags at the foot of every staircase. And every year you would buy a cheap pair of flip-flops, knowing they would get totally ruined by tar. Now there is no more tar, no more turpentine. And far fewer dead fish, I have to say. Hmmm.
At this beach there is also this incredible jetty that goes out so far into the water. So you can climb these rocks and tread carefully along the slimy, algae-covered paths out to the very end, and you’re standing on these huge boulders of granite that were hauled and dumped there forever ago to make a channel for the massive ships that sail into this harbor. And you’re standing there, looking out at these epic seas, realizing that if you jumped off you’d be in the actual deep ocean, no bullshit ocean. People catch sharks out there, at the end of the jetty–manta rays, enormous fish. Pelicans go paddling by like it’s no big deal.
So, I was very excited to take my husband on this classic journey to the end of the jetty for his first time. He, my dad, and I went–my mom says she’s gotten “too old and chicken” to negotiate the incredibly slippery rocks. So, we start going, and it’s like the waves are actually crashing OVER the rocks, washing over our feet, which I have never seen happen out there more than once or twice. And it was way more slippery than I remembered. My dad and I were marveling about it. I got worried my husband would fall and break his back, but he is pretty sure-footed, like a little mountain goat. And my dad is legendarily steady on slippery surfaces so I just tried to put it out of my mind and worry about myself, who is neither sure-footed nor graceful nor good at falling down without screaming and wildly pinwheeling her arms around. My dad, knowing this, kept grabbing my elbow really tightly. On the one hand it made me feel nice, my 67 year old father still helping his 32 year old daughter not fall down on her face and start crying because she knocked all her teeth out. On the other hand I was like “why is everyone so much better at walking on slippery surfaces than I am???”
But I digress. So anyway, as you walk out on the jetty, the water to either side of you is getting deeper and deeper, greener and greener, the waves taller and taller. The waves started really crashing and like SWEEPING across the jetty. We had to stop and brace ourselves each time. I asked my dad if he’d ever seen it like this and he said no. It wasn’t stormy or anything! It was so crazy!
So usually you go all the way out to the very end–and it’s awesome, there’s no path or railing or sign or anything, it’s really just a pile of rocks dumped into the ocean and you go at your own risk–but this time, we got about 100 yards from the end, and then a HUGE WAVE, probably 15 feet high, CRASHED over the end of the jetty, totally obscuring it, and as we (okay, just I) screamed and screamed, the water washed all the way up to us, totally obscuring the entire jetty in front of and to either side of us, and we just happened to be standing on a taller outcropping of rock, so the water just barely came up to our feet before receding, but for that one moment–maybe a 2 second moment–we were standing in the middle of a vast ocean with no rocks to be seen on any side of us. It was so extreme.
“I don’t think we’ll go to the end today,” my dad said.
So then we had to turn around and come all the way back, across the slippery black algae’d rocks, with the waves crashing over our feet again, but it was like the sight of that 15 foot wave obscuring the end of the jetty was in our minds, and the journey back felt so much wilder and more potentially dangerous than the journey out. My dad never let go of my elbow, and I kept obsessively picturing my husband, who was 10 feet ahead of us, being swept majestically off the rocks and out into the sea. And none of us can swim to save our lives, that’s for sure. I can’t even really tread water.
So we’re going along, all of us soaked to the waist, bracing ourselves against these crazy waves, with me slipping backwards down rock faces and my dad grabbing the back of my coat to stop me, etc., and suddenly the old man yells, “Look, a RAT!”
We didn’t believe him, because how could there be a rat out there? But then an especially large wave broke over us, and I turned just in time to see my dad, who, in leaping across the wave onto another rock, also leaped OVER a large black rat, who was himself trying to leap over the water. I screamed and pointed and everyone was laughing with such joyful amazement. How could that rat live out there??? “Very carefully,” my dad said. It was so amazing, to think of that rat living a mile out to sea on this jumble of rocks, with his home totally submerged in water every 10 seconds. How is it possible?? He did look wet, that’s for sure.
For the rest of the visit, we were very preoccupied with Jetty Rat. We started thinking of a novel called “Jetty Rat.” I thought it would be like a James Clavell World War II novel (but I may only think that because Clavell actually did write a novel called “King Rat”), while the old man thought it would be more of a metaphorical philosophical journey. My dad thought it should be a gangster story. We made up a lot of reviews for it. “Jetty Rat allegorizes the human condition, scrambling valiantly betwixt the waves of destiny,” etc. Or maybe Jetty Rat is kind of like a more Romantic Ratatouille–he left his family in the sewers of New York because he wanted to see the sea and compose odes to it.
I really can’t believe Jetty Rat. I wonder if he is still out there?
My shoes were so wet that the next day they were still squishing and I had to put them in the dryer.
Then we had Christmas Day, which was so great this year! Usually it’s the whole cooking-a-turkey thing, which always bums me out….Obviously I am around a lot of meat-eating, but there’s something so extreme about a turkey. You walk into the kitchen and there is just unavoidably a huge dead creature on the counter, with your mom’s hand up its butt. It’s so gross. Then how everyone is pulling the flesh off this huge body’s bones, and the bones are sticking up out of the shredded meat and skin, and it always makes me think of the deer carcasses that would slowly rot along the highways of my youth after being hit by semi trucks. And it stresses my parents out, too, who normally don’t eat meat either except just to be polite when they are at my grandparents’ house. So basically nobody really wants to cook a turkey but my grandma. And this year my mom and my aunt finally implemented a new family vibe of which I wholeheartedly approve, and which I call “Bossing.” They just took over. And instead of turkey, we had a 7-course vegetarian meal, served by my mom and my aunt pretending to be servants. We had demitasse cups of carrot soup! It was wild.
The total weirdness of it led to the most amazing joke my family has ever embarked upon–amazing because it was spontaneous, shared by all, very long-lived, and, for the first time in history, my grandmother got the joke and contributed awesomely to it! The joke was that we were living in the (fantasy-based) 18th century. So we sat there for two hours, while my mom and aunt scurried around calling everyone “mum” and “sir,” and we play-acted this totally surreal version of “the 18th century” that was a lot like that Monty Python skit where the joke is that everyone in the skit knows how history actually turned out (“Louis the XVI is dead already??” and “But I’m not supposed to go mad until 1786!” etc. ).
We made up names for each other. My husband’s name was “Lord Dutchington.” I told a long story about how Lord Dutchington had found me walking atop the cliffs at Dover, at which point he had plighted his troth and taken me to the wifery post-haste. We were also quoting Benjamin Franklin as though he were still alive. “As Dr. Franklin says, ‘practice makes perfect.'” Then my aunt would say, “But that is CLEVER!”
Lord Dutchington kept complimenting people on their “punnery.” My dad asked, of some character, “how did he come to be departed?” There was a long weird subplot about how my cousin, who we called “Hannah,” had had an unfortunate affair with a stable boy named “Ham,” and how now she wasn’t to be let out of our sight for a moment. My aunt said “Hannah has been reading WOLLSTONECRAFT!” and everyone shrieked.
Periodically someone would say, “are we French or English?” or “wait, now I think it’s the nineteenth century.”
My aunt kept bringing up “the Sorrows of Young Werther,” and I would say, “I don’t think that Goethe has yet been born.” Or else my grandmother would say, “Cecille, you are not to speak at table, I do not know where you get these ideas into your head.”
Whenever my grandmother commented on how weird the meal was, like “why are we eating soup out of these little tiny cups?” or she’d say, getting into the spirit, “they are serving from the right and that is really not proper,” someone would say, “Well, it is how things are done in America.” At one point my aunt said, “It is how they taught us to serve at servant school, mum.”
My grandma kept changing the names of the serving girls (i.e. my mom/aunt). She called them “Isabell” and “Mary” and “Cecille.” She also kept calling the asparagus “asparagi,” which I found hilarious. There was also a weird part where my aunt (the serving girl) implied she was the daughter of my grandfather, which is true in real life but in the fantasy we were enacting was most scandalous.
“My husband can take no salt nor sugar nor things of orange nor those things which come from beast or fowl.”
“What, they ride atop the camels as though horse or ox? What nonsense!”
My grandfather is largely deaf, and was just sort of quiet and confused for the whole meal, but everyone kept asking him how did his hounds, and if he planned to go a’foxing after evensong (“Wait, so we’re Anglican now? We must be British.”).
It was really fun. Also we had champagne, which I insisted was not called champagne but rather “German bubbling wine.”
My mom just sent me a picture of Lord Dutchington which I shall cherish for all the remaining days of my life.
I will continue describing our epic vacation later, but I just also wanted to say that “Elizabeth: the Golden Age” is one of the worst movies I have ever seen. Also, before the previews on the DVD, there was a commercial for how great HD-DVD is, and it was this commercial that we had first encountered a year ago and which we laugh about all the time, but we had never seen it again since. Here it was! So we paused it and I carefully wrote down exactly what the voiceover says. It’s so inane and bizarre. To think someone was actually paid money to write this copy! This sums up the modern era so nicely for me. Say it out loud in a really noble voiceover voice:
“Any HD-DVD disc will play on your HD-DVD player, X-Box 360 HD-DVD player, or any Toshiba or HP Notebook PCs with built in HD-DVD drives. HD-DVD!”
The way he says that single, affirmative, “HD-DVD!” at the end kills me.
When we originally saw this commercial it led to a whole new element being added on to our ongoing comedy skit we’ve been writing for about five years (“Tootie Top-Pops”), where a voiceover says, “If you call now, you can win a Tootie Top-Pops Pop-top Party for your Tootie Top-Pops Pop-top Posse! That’s the Tootie Top-Pops “Pop-Top Posse” promise! Call 1-800-TOPPPOPP now!”
Anyway, I need to get back to work.
Awesome dinner joke.