my weird family

7/3/99

Bought a dress today. Now that that’s over with, the wedding’s starting to seem like fun again. Everyone’s accepted that it’s going to happen, everyone’s coming, it’s all set. Even John seems to be more enthusiastic about it.

Mom, Dad and I had dinner tonight at one of those restaurants where you can write and doodle on the paper tablecloth with crayons. Dad pulled out a brown crayon and drew a Georgia-shaped blob. Then he drew in South Carolina and we got into a crazy-loud discussion about the length of Georgia’s Atlantic coastline. He and Mom thought it was a tiny corner, I was sure it was a long bulb down the eastern edge. After a while we added Tennessee and a few cities. When the food came and we gave up, I oops-dripped a glob of spinach dip on the table and called it Adrian. Later on, someone dropped a jalapeno pepper and it was Nashville. I nudged it south until it was Montgomery. Dad flicked it and it became Lansing.

We were watching the antiques road show tonight and my parents started pulling out their old stuff. Mom got down an iron inkwell that she’d gotten from the elderly lady down the street before the woman’s death. Ruth (the elderly lady) had given the inkwell to my mother, telling her that it was for Matt when he got older, saying, “He’ll be a writer someday.” Matt couldn’t have been more than 4 or 5, but she was right. The patent date on the bottom says 1879. For me she left a cameo, and I’m glad my mother’s keeping it for now, I’d probably lose it in one of my moves.

Is that the cameo that Mom had me wear for my senior pictures? I thought I was borrowing that.

Dad brought out a silver cigarette case with an eagle and a swaztika on the cover. Something my Pap brought home from the war, probably traded by a POW for food or cigarettes. I hope it was nothing more gruesome than that.

I guess I knew my grandfather was in the war. My uncle was born in ’42 and my dad in ’47, so Pap must have been in it till the end. I saw Saving Private Ryan. I’m lucky to be here. Dad doesn’t know where Pap was, and I’m sure my grandmother “doesn’t remember.” All those stories lost.