Age

A Family Saga

Photo by JD Mason on Unsplash

*Note: If you’re looking for solid memoir writing and/or topics such as sobriety, fitness, community, look no further than Bowen Dwelle’s Substack, “DECIDE NOTHING.” His ongoing memoir, “Freedom, at All Costs” is mesmerizing. Trust me. Bowen and I may be collaborating and/or doing guest posts for each other soon. Stay tuned.

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A Family Saga

The idea of “family” has always been hard for me. Mostly because I’ve always had such complex feelings towards my own. Family is something you inherit. It is entirely out of your control, as so many things in life inherently are. With this inheritance comes a certain amount of responsibility. A certain amount of time spent, gifts given, understanding asked for, love proffered.

Because of my nuanced, mixed feelings around my own family I always hoped whoever I dated—hopefully one day married—would have a family that accepted me as I am. I never fully felt accepted by my own family. Whether it’s objectively true that my family as a whole never accepted me is a whole other discussion. Obviously there’s no easy black-n-white binary answer to this psychological, quasi-cosmic question. I am very close in many ways with both my parents now. At 40, much of the internal struggle has slowly eroded away over the years. My father’s late-stage cancer, too, has softened me on many fronts. I’m more mature now, more reflective, more able to see my own part in the historical dance that is family trauma.

My ex and I dated for four-and-a-half years, from June, 2013 to January 1^st (the day after my 35^th birthday), the first day of 2018. She was a nice, smart Jewish woman, San Francisco born and raised. Her family not only never accepted me…they flat-out never liked me. Well, ok, let me be a little more kind and nuanced here. Her mother didn’t like me but she tolerated me. To be fair she was basically always “nice” while keeping me at arm’s length and letting me know by silence, tone and expression that she didn’t care for me. Her brother was nice enough but saw him rarely. Her aunt and uncle were…pretty self-obsessed but they did acknowledge my existence. But her father was a whole other matter.

Her dad hated me with a fervor unknown by most. I had three strikes against me:

1.    I was not Jewish.

2.    I had tattoos.

3.    I was an alcoholic.

Number 3 deserves a sentence or three. To be clear, as anyone who’s read my work knows, I am a sober alcoholic. Twelve-point-four years sober, to be exact. But somehow her father only ever heard the “alcoholic” part. It was a clear experience of prejudice; frankly the only time in my life as a WSM (White Straight Male) that I felt judged based on immutable characteristics. Obviously I’m not referring here to my tattoos; good or bad, right or wrong, those were choices I made. I wasn’t born tattooed, although perhaps I was spiritually. (Here’s my recent essay about my tattoos for a more in-depth look at that.)

The point I’m trying to make is: I had no control over the fact that I’m not Jewish. And alcoholism runs in my family, as it does in many families; it’s largely genetic. For the first time in my life, I thought, This must be just the tiniest sliver of a taste of what it might have been like for many black people for generations, dating a white person, and for some probably even still today, depending on the family. But of course there are comparisons not to just to race. A couple hundred years ago it was religion; Protestants versus Catholics; etc. Or how about class-tension: A rich woman falling in love with a working-class man, or vice-versa.

In my case it was an upper middle-class man with a solidly middle-class Jewish woman, and I was being rejected by her father for things I had zero control over. What a strange world. From the beginning her father avoided eye contact, shook my hand very limply and briefly, was mostly silent towards me except to “correct” a word here or there when he felt it was incorrect (he was right a few times, wrong a few others) and generally acted as if I were a moist piece of poop he’d somehow stepped on outside. He was longtime criminal defense attorney. He and my ex’s mom had met at a private, prestigious East Coast university in the 1970s. They’d moved to San Francisco and settled.

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Fast-forward to 2023. I’m dating someone else. We’ve been together for six months. We’re living together. She is not Jewish. Has no tattoos. Her family are thoughtful, kind people who go back generations in Lompoc and other locations. She is a quarter Japanese. Her maternal grandmother came here from Okinawa. (She met her husband in the 1950s when he was stationed in the military at the U.S. base there.) I may stand out a little—rich boy from Ojai, former Bay Area and New York City resident, literary writer, sensitive artist—but they seem, so far, to be just fine with me. There seems to be no grand agenda, no requirement of exactitude in terms of how Britney is. They don’t need me to be just like her, or just like them. Instead, they so far seem to appreciate me for being who I am. That, or they simply smile and say hi and leave it at that. Live and let live.

On both sides Britney has family members who have lived and are currently living long, long lives. Her maternal grandmother is edging towards 90. Ditto her maternal grandpa. Her father’s father just turned 97. That’s right. Ninety-seven. He’s still mobile. Driving. Drinking here and there. Cracking jokes. Laughing. His birthday celebration was held in a hotel restaurant in Santa Maria the other day. I met Britney there; she came straight from work. I got there early. I parked and, nervous, waited for Britney to arrive. Five minutes later she did and we entered the hotel together.

There were about 25 or so people. Some family, many friends. Her grandfather—dressed dapperly in sports jacket and classy gray collared shirt—sat at the head of a thin, long table. There was another smaller table parallel to the long one. People were smiling, laughing, chitchatting. Britney led me over to her grandpa and introduced us. I shook the man’s hand, smiling dumbly at him. He had a classic face, tan and wrinkled, square-jawed. Rumor had it he’d been quite the catch in his day. Sitting down next to Britney and across from her father and his girlfriend and Britney’s 24-year-old brother, we began chatting with others, destroying the tasty warm bread rolls they brought us, and drinking ice water.

I thought about it for a moment. Her grandfather was born in 1926. She—Britney—was born in the same month (February) in 1986. Sixty years apart almost exactly. (Two weeks shy of exactly.) What a phenomenon! Think about being born in 1926. He experienced: The Great Depression; FDR’s unprecedented 12 years in office as president; World War II (her served in the Navy); the Korean War; the conformist 1950s and culturally explosive 1960s; Vietnam; the rise of computers; iPhones and the explosion in digital technology; Covid; the current mind-bending political polarization and breakdown. I thought of the vast swatch of time he’d been alive in this way: A half century ago, her grandfather was still seven years older than I am right now. (He’d have been 47 then; I’m 40.) Wow, right? A half century ago I was negative 10!

As we all ate our meals and continued to chat and stuff our faces with bread, Britney looked across the long table at her dapper grandpa and said, “So? How is it?”

Silence ensued. That kind of silence which feels pressurized, full of meaning somehow; awkward, full.

“What do you mean?” He said, serious, his mouth a tight line.

She shrugged. “I mean just that. How is it?”

“What is ‘it’”? he asked, seemingly genuinely confused.

“Life,” she said, clarifying.

“What?” he said, not hearing her statement.

She repeated it.

“How is my life?” he said.

By now everyone was beyond silent, breathless in anticipation.

Without missing a beat he comically sneered, “Almost over!”

Everyone burst out laughing, a raucous annihilation of the previous built-up silence.

It was funny, of course, but also with a small dose of realism and melancholy. This was a man who grasped that life was temporary, at least the physical part of life. We’re all heading to the same place. Jim Morrison famously sang, “The future’s uncertain and the end is always near.” Mostly we forget on the day by day basis that we’re just this side of death. It can happen in an instant. A wrong turn on a dangerous, twisting road. A gas station robbery. A heart attack. Getting hit by a drunk driver. Etc. Yet we live our lives as if time is all we have, loads of it, lasting for eternity. And here is this glorious man—36 months shy of being 100 years old—and he laughs, makes a joke, pokes death in the belly, taunts it, asks for it to make a move, if it dares. Why not?

At one point I was reminded joyfully of the silliness of taking life too seriously. (A major flaw/fault/sin of mine.) Britney’s grandfather’s girlfriend—a “younger woman” in her seventies—was cutting the cake and she suddenly hunched over, coughing, blowing her nose and loudly farting. Several people laughed, some trying to tame it down or hide it, others unabashedly. I myself smiled, finding it of course humorous. And yet I also thought, Fuck it. Why not? What does it matter? For a long time I’ve felt like there’s an old man inside me. He’s just waiting to come out and get comfortable in twenty years. The literal phrase “get off my lawn” has actually been mumbled several times by me to these “darn young Wokie kids nowadays, running around shitting on everything sacred.”

For once it was lovely to see the social masks slip from the faces of people. It felt like dipping into a cool, glorious pool in the summer heat. Whenever groups convene—perhaps family is the worst—the masks come on. Everyone wants to look good and sound smart and appear helpful and mature. Everyone wants the clan to know how great their career is going, how much money they’re making, how fantastic their new school or house or partner is, etc. In other words: It’s fucking boring. And fake. Skin-deep.

I’ve always been a savagely sincere, intense, deep person. There are pros and cons to this, just like almost everything else in life. (Trade-offs, right?) Perhaps one “con” is that I am basically always seeking depth, genuine connection, honest listening and reflection, and, the worst, most grotesque one, which affects narcissists and artists alike (isn’t that an oxymoron?) is this one: Wanting to be understood. Why is this a con? Because it’s not how real life works. Most people will never understand you. Half the time I feel I don’t understand myself. It’s a trap; a barbed wire fence behind which stand the dreaded “expectations.” Expecting people to understand you is like me trying to explain to my ex’s father why I’m a good person and he should give me a chance. No matter how hard I tried he’d always see those three flaws: Non-Jew; Alcoholic; Tattooed. (And I did try, by the way. That’s for another post.)

Sitting at that table, listening to kind, idle chitchat, and to her grandpa making light of death, and to her grandpa’s girlfriend farting so loud it sounded like the Empire State Building crashing down on West 33^rd Street, I felt simple joy. And ease. I felt comforted. I didn’t need anyone to “understand” me. I didn’t need to get into a serious conversation with anyone about anything. I didn’t need to discourse on politics and culture. I didn’t need to be the life of the party. I didn’t need anyone’s exclusive attention. For once, I was just there.

I doubt I’ll live to 97. But if I do, I hope to do two things before I go: Fart loudly at dinner, and laugh right into death’s lurid, cosmic, eternal, unforgettable, undeniable face.