As I buzzed about chapel in my ill-fitting bride’s maid dress, the older woman in the back row thought, “Is that one my granddaughter?” She didn’t remember what I looked like, didn’ t know how I had aged. My grandmother asked my brother’s girlfriend, “Are you Jamie?”.
Aunts and uncles whom I haven’t seen in ten years or more gave me hugs that ranged from full and warm to awkward and detached. One uncle merely shook my hand, lightly. I can’t tell if I scared him off with my girlfriend or if he scared me off with having found jesus.
“What are you doing now?” a few people asked. More people didn’t, and this to me is delightful, and for this I must thank Facebook. My entire and extended family, blood related and step and through marriage, are on Facebook. Thus: being gay = no surprise. Selling porn and talking about sex all day = not brought up. Only a few stragglers asked what I do for a living and those few got the answer of “Oh, you know, wholesale stuff.”
I think I swore too much, and too much in front of the children. I danced, ate pigs in a blanket, and had a bloody mary for breakfast. I took black and white pictures, and was promised pictures of my mother from when I was a baby. She died before I would be able to remember her.
White bread and American cheese made their way back onto the menu of my life, if only for a day, and fruit disappeared almost entirely. We brought back homemade bran muffins from the aunt that bakes, and tasted her first run of low-fat cheesecakes. There were surprises large and small, and there were subtle hints of how my childhood with these people helped shape who I have become.
Ten years ago, when I saw most of my family last, they were in different lives. Some have made decisions that made me decide to write them out of my life entirely; could they tell I was erasing them as they spoke?
A lot happens in ten years. the kids grow up, the adults re-marry, the houses are sold. But still, all the years that build up a family are still there, pulling everyone into the same orbit. Around what, I have no idea. At one point, in whispers to my girlfriend before we went to sleep, I told her how a certain woman could never be the matriarch of this family. But who could be? Are there still heads of families, does that still happen?
And now I’m back in San Francisco, away from everyone, happy I saw them, but glad to be home.
to homes and families both given and created,
jameson.
keep up the good work i enjoyed reading your blog….