substitute

Sometimes a series of things about us goes through my head and I just start giggling. This morning very early, lying awake and looking at the bookshelf of books signed by their authors, it was:

My father wrote a novel about an opera singer in the 1900s who could switch genders. Gender reversal or sudden gender-related surprises occur in two other novels of his.

When I was a kid, my brother made improbably huge kites out of PVC pipe and trash bags. They flew.

Because of my dad's weird job my associations for literary figures are things like: I had to jump-start that guy's car twice! Oh yeah, his wife called us at 3 am sobbing in Arabic about the water heater! That dude fed us lobster and played too much Eubie Blake at us! It's not like name-dropping exactly because with a few exceptions the general public hasn't heard of these people. But it makes me feel weird looking at book spines.

Our front door knocker is a bronze woman's hand.

My father wrote a novel in which the love interest is a blowup doll.

My great aunt Zelda didn't marry until retirement and was a doctor instead. She may well have been the first person to administer penicillin in Los Angeles.

My father wrote a novel in which someone is trying to complete the unfinished tenth symphony of the character in someone else's novel.

Okay that's enough for now. We're weird.

I scanned in some of my parents' 1950s jazz record covers. My favorite so far is the back page of a flexi-disc magazine called Sonorama from 1959. It's an ad for a perfume called "Rock 'n' Roll" and the artist is Salvador Dali!



Others are ( under the cut )

Pouss rolled herself up in the comforter for +10 cute points.

My greatsomething grandfather Jacob arrived in the American colonies from Darmstadt-Hesse, Germany in about 1750 as an indentured servant. His brother Sebastian apparently bugged out and headed home at the end of his service, but Jacob liked it enough to stay in "Pennsylvanian Dutch" country with the other Germans. My family has had a presence in Lancaster County since, and in Ohio.

Family legend was that Jacob served in the Revolutionary War. My brother confirmed this a few years ago doing genealogy. I decided to take it a step further and contacted the National Archives' Military Records Department. If you're the relative of a U.S. veteran you can get anything they have, as far back as they have it, at a reasonable price. So, for $17 I requested and got Jacob's records: the index card in his file and two pay stubs indicating his service and what he got for it. It looks like the pay was a bit late, but he got interest on it. There may have been a land donation, too. And of course, citizenship, since that's not an issue when you're on the startup team. Scans are below the cut, or in this flickr set.

( cut for size )

This year I am once again grateful for my family's behavior at holiday times. I grew up agnostic, so there was never any religious pressure. Christmas was a gift exchange and a couple of nice meals, and it still is. The most frequent verb I see this week is "survive", as in "surviving the holidays" or "survived my family again". There's tremendous stress about food, gifts, the presence of difficult relatives, and every kind of parent/child conflict. People don't eat the food their parents eat any more, or the gifts are too much or not enough money, or the gifts have been a form of warfare for 20 years, or Uncle Ted is a racist, or Dad always asks the boyfriend if he's going to be anybody ever, or or or.

And more seriously some people I know go into a major PTSD mode during the "holidays" because their childhoods were so gothically horrible that memories of family togetherness are a symptom rather than a pleasant reverie.

It's a big joke in our culture that holidays are a stressful mess and that everyone is miserable and drunk, etc. "Surviving the holidays" in every way is the goal. It's linked in my mind with the "Safe" thing, e.g. "Have a safe holiday!". It's sort of assumed that you'll hate the whole thing, drink like a fish and pop pills, and die in a 7-car pileup on some snowy turnpike, thereby causing what the newspapers inaccurately call a "tragedy".

My family's troubles are constant, ongoing, and subtle. We don't have screaming matches or drunken rampages, no one hits anyone, and we don't say nuclear weapon phrases like "I don't love you". We may undermine for years at a time, or be unreasonably irritable, or fail to connect in some dispiriting way. There are conflicts and painful situations that aren't allowed to be mentioned or discussed.

But we don't have "holiday" stress. Despite all my complaints about my psyche and my issues, I'm very grateful for my family 99% of the time. My heart goes out to everyone who has to Survive instead of relaxing around now.