> We laugh and eat and I have such a good time. For I know. I know > I'll be leaving for the mountains soon. > > And I can feel the odds are growing that one of these years those > mountains are going to carry me away, just like the booze used to do. > So. This is it. Right here and now. Enjoy. Live. Love. Laugh. >
The first Christmas Dinner I enjoyed with the in-laws was where I learned about Christmas crackers, chestnut stuffing, brandy butter and mince pies, Trifle, Christmas cake, pickled onions, almond shortbread, Christmas Pudding with custard. All kinds of English dishes unfamiliar to a southern boy. Inter-mixing cultures can be so delightful and yet so dangerous, as I began to learn that first year when I went to her Auntie Anne's for Christmas. I like the English. Don't get me wrong. I love English humour, that dry understatement tickles my funny bone to perfection. If you have any experience with English sitcoms, and you've seen a show called "Keeping up Appearances", then you've got a picture of Lu's Auntie Anne. Even her own family calls her "Mrs. Bucket" as half aspersion, half homage. And believe me, she's got the frosty accent and the devotion to place-settings down to perfection. Which we forgive, since we so adore the devotion to the craft of putting really good food upon those fancy place settings. Auntie Anne and Uncle Gwynn are Lu's only living-in-America relatives, and when her folks lived in Mountain View (nearly the heart of the Silicon Valley) they'd regularly trade off Christmas's and Thanksgivings back and forth with the Rattenburys, Anne and Gwynn and their two boys, twins Jon and Tim, living in Novato, just north of San Francisco. Anyway, that first Christmas, Lu had gone down to visit her folks and I, because of work reasons, was meeting them for dinner at a specified time in Novato. I was driving our notorious Elsie, a 1965 VW Camper van and of course she had a name. All VW microbuses have a character and a name. A character that comes from breaking your heart, as happened repeatedly with us and that damn green van. On this particular occasion, Elsie broke our heart by breaking down in San Francisco with me on my way to Auntie Anne's Christmas dinner, which meant that I was going to be late. Which meant that somebody would have to come get me, which meant that Dinner would be about two hours later than scheduled. How embarrassing. New to the family as I was, I was pretty mortified at causing all this inconvenience, not to mention a little nervous at leaving my Van parked in a bad neighborhood in San Francisco and when I say bad, I basically mean black. Sorry for the implied racism, but there ya go. So when we finally arrived and sat down for dinner, I was a bit shy and subdued and nervous and Lu's brother Glenn took it upon himself to announce that if it ever happened again, he was taking me out back for a good thrashing. He said this to me in a joking manner which called for some appropriate response on my part, but I was so taken aback I hadn't any idea on how to respond. I'm not much into the macho posturing at the best of times and I was feeling pretty intimidated already since this was my first holiday with that clan and unsure of myself. The uneasy silence around the table at his remark only intensified my chagrin, and if I'd been a drinker back then I might have found the liquid courage to make some tension-dispelling comment but all I could think to do in the moment was soberly blush and eat. Mostly what stuck in my craw was the lack of a soothing response from Lu's mom, Joan. That went deep, I think, because there needs to be a certain assertive aggressiveness in the man who takes your daughter from your roof and I felt in that moment I was deemed lacking. What was going through my mind was, I'd rather be eating a cheese sandwich by myself than all this good food under a cloud of contempt. I don't need you people. Years later I came across an interesting piece of anthropological research conducted in either New York or New Jersey around these Welsh immigrants all ending up in the hospital from vicious fights on Saturday night, which cleared up some of the conflicting culture issue to my mind. What the researcher found was a pattern of behaviour back home wherein the combatants would face off against each other and bluster and threaten and sound real mean, shake their fists and just on the verge of actual combat, their friends and relations would grab them and keep them from going at each other. Now safely restrained they'd let go with real venom at each other, untill honor now being observed, everybody would go back into the pub for another round and soon the erstwhile combatants would be staggering out the doors looped arm in arm and singing drunkenly. The little dramas of life played out on a weekly basis. The whole village involved. What was further discovered by the anthropologist studying these cases, was that such cultural patterns don't happily translate in the new world. What was happening was, these men when engaging in the blustery threat stage of their little plays, were no longer doing so in front of an audience of caring loved ones who didn't want to see anybody get hurt. In American bars their audience consisted of a bunch of multi-cultural yahoos eager to see some blood on a saturday night. And a bit o' the boot to boot. Some eye-gouging perhaps. And guys were being seriously maimed on a regular basis. Now, my brother-in-law comes from that part of the world, northern England, his dad is Welsh and he grew up with different cultural programming than me. I came from the "speak softly but carry a big stick" school of thought. We don't threaten and we don't bluster. And when troubles come, our cars break down and we're late to family functions, our women folk soothe and ameliorate rather than frostily glare in silence. I call it southern hospitality, but it took Pirsig's explication of Indian mentality to see its roots in a different culture and people. My dad was born and raised in Tennessee. I was born in Tennessee, of mixed anglo-cherokee heritage and we look at that blustery kind of behaviour with some kind of contempt. But now I saw that my behaviour was seen with a certain contempt as well. Victorian's don't have much patience for "Indian Time" as it's called amongst those I run around with nowadays. So fast forward many years later and Glenville, after his remarriage and removal to Missoula, comes back home to help nurse Lu's and his mom Joan, who was dying, very quickly, of cancer just discovered at Christmas. Merry Christmas. In all those years, I've never gotten along with Glenville, and a lot of it has to do with these little cultural misunderstandings but a lot of it also has to do with the fact that he's kind of a jerk. Everybody says so. But I can see he also has his good points and his tireless nursing of his mother brings this out. I want to make amends somehow. I want to ease the tension. So I sit down with him one day and spill my story of breadowns, insults and culture clash and offer a proposal to him to heal the tensions. He loves fighting and violence, has graduated from Police Academy in Yuba City and moved to Missoula to be a cop. He also teaches Karate and is very into his appearance, so I figure he'll be glad to stomp me and get his ego satisfaction and then we can be friends. My basic postulation was, in my culture, when you make a threat you better be able to back it up or you're an asshole. He said he'd thrash me and I will never be completely comfortable till his proves to me that he actually can. Not that I think that's necessarily the way it'll go. I mean, he looks a lot better than me with his shirt off, with his washboard abs and all, but truth to tell I'm not fond of fighting but that doesn't mean I'm horrendous at it. He's six foot four and weighs 180, I'm five eleven and around 220 at this time and I'm working hard, swingin a hammer for a living and don't need show muscles to prove anything. Also I was the informal boxing champ of our dorm when in school and boxing with gloves is a far cry from real fighting. I actually expect to get some respect from this engagement and to my mind its most important to get this respect in my mother-in-law's eyes while she's still alive. To reassure this doubt I see in her eyes. That I feel around this family. Silly fantasies really. No more real than the blustering villagers on a saturday night, and that nasty bastard, Mr. Death intrudes and takes away Glennville's gumption, but I think it did do him some good because it gave him something to think about other than his mom's dying of cancer and it gave him something tangible to pound as he practiced up, whaling away at the punching bag for hours in preparation for our fight. when I saw the dilapidated condition of my old punching bag I'd loaned him to pound, I figured it was probably for the best I never did put my theory to the test. Lu's dad remarried and his new wife, while nice enough, doesn't quite get the minefield of emotions generated last year when I was late and she went all cold and snide on me. I mean, she's way overboard on the place settings and decorations, discussing her Spode in a reverent tone I reserve for deep spiritual insights and waxing all angsty over the fact of only having fourteen settings and fifteen guests. And I can feel the odds are growing that one of these years these emotions are going to carry me away, just like automotive breakdowns used to do. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
