Bowling for Pleasure

Yesterday, my sister, her husband, and their son moved into their new digs. Four houses away from mine.

My wife and I hid.

When you're a little kid, you ardently believe that, if you hide under the covers and close your eyes, the monsters/kidnappers/murderers/IRA terrorists can't find you. When you're an adult, you realize that you actually have to haul ass and get the fuck out of the area in order to avoid being seen.

As they say in "Monty Python's Flying Circus," the first lesson in not being seen is not to stand up.

As her brother, I probably should have helped her move in. On its face, that sounds correct. However, if you take into account the fact that, since college, I moved five times and she helped (marginally) one of those times, and that I have participated in every single one of her post-collegiate moves, I didn't really feel compelled to assist yesterday. And I told my father that weeks ago.

"I'm not helping, just so you know. And you're old now, so you shouldn't either."

He laughed. It's not funny, of course, but that's never stopped him before.

I don't want my sister living four doors away from me, and I realize that I can't close my eyes and hide under the covers and make it all go away-- but I want to. The best I could do was go antiquing with my wife, then hit Anthropologie so she could pick up a sherbet-hued sweater and a fricking cute stuffed bunny rabbit, and finish up the little Sunday adventure with two games at the bowling alley.

She totally skinned my hide: 109 - 76 on the second game. I was mortified, but I hid it well.

There are many times in my life where I think I am a very bad person. As I completely ignored my sister on her move-in day, I couldn't decide if I felt like I was a very bad person. I think maybe I thought I was at different points in the day, but there were other times where I just didn't care, and I was really enjoying myself.

"It sounds to me," my therapist said last week, "that you don't really take pleasure in very many things. There are definitely things that you're good at, and things that you like-- but I'm not sure that you necessarily take pleasure in any of them."

He's right. It's scary how someone who has only known you for fifty-four minutes can be right about something like that.

So, I thought I would try to take pleasure in something yesterday and, for the most part, it worked. I knew that I would take absolutely no pleasure in helping my sister move into the house that I don't feel she deserves. Is it for me to say what she deserves? No, it's not. Am I still able to feel how I feel? Yes, absolutely.

Is it "right"? God-- what is "right"? I just don't know.

All I know is that, when I bowl, the ball inherently drifts over to the right.

I don't like the way I feel. I don't like the whole situation. As my mother said, "I wish that house were anywhere else other than where it is," and that makes me feel a little bit better, but it doesn't really help me. I don't know what is really going to help me-- if anything will. I never thought that I would feel jealous of my sister, or indignant, or anything like what I feel as I write these words, but I do. And it scares me, and it disappoints me, and it confuses and enrages me.

My therapist asked me last week why I do everything in my power to eschew my own expressions of anger.

"Well," I said, "anger isn't nice."

And it isn't. Neither is ditching your family to go antiquing, Anthro-ing, and bowling, but I'm far too old to just shut my eyes and dive under the blankets anymore, but I'm not quite mature enough to face the music 100% of the time, either.

And I doubt I ever will be.

Under the Lemon Tree

My sister closed on her house on Wednesday. And her birthday was Thursday. All this goes to prove, of course, that she is, basically, the center of the universe, and events as we know them sort of just happen... around her.

My parents are taking her out to dinner tonight.

My eldest sister is taking her out to dinner on Sunday.

At some point in the coming week, it will be my turn. Indian food. It's like Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee-- the ceremony just goes on and on and on. A veritable orgy of festive adulation.

Today is my father's birthday. There will not be much festive adulation to be had on his account.

On my way home from work yesterday, I picked up the phone to call him.

"I know you don't really give a shit about this," I said, "but I wanted to wish you a happy early birthday."

"Oh, Mummy," he said, laughing, "that is not... it is not even on my radar. What the fuck do I care about my birthday?"

"Well, I don't know, but I care about it, and it's on my radar. I just hope that you have a good year, that's all."

There was an uncustomary pause.

"Me, too, Mummy. Me, too."

The man's had it rough of late, but he's brought most of it on himself. Still, it doesn't change the fact that a year of chasing around a young baby, and chasing around after that baby's incompetent parents has aged him immeasurably. His attention wanders. He doesn't hear. His eyes sometimes appear vacant. This heretofore indestructable sabra, this Israeli desert warrior, with scars of battle on his shoulder and on his chest, seems to be fading.

Fading from importance.

Fading from view.

Well, from my view, anyway. I hardly ever see the guy anymore, and I live literally 5/10ths of a mile from his front door. Going over to that house fills me with immense sadness, so, generally, I avoid it. Interacting with him brings on depression, frustration, agitation and angst-- and so I avoid that, too.

All he wants to do is talk to me about my sister. And the house she bought, that sits four doors away from ours. It sits, waiting, inertly, unknowingly, waiting for the incomparably incestuous, meddlesome mess that is my family to begin. Well, not begin-- metastasize. It's been this way for a long time-- it's just spreading like a cancer through this formerly taciturn neighborhood. My family is a virus.

Save yourselves. Save the cheerleader.

I never really understood my father, and I suppose that's just as well, because he never understood me either. I can remember being an intrepid, precocious eleven-year-old, banging out obscure scripts in the playroom upstairs, on a tan electric typewriter with dark brown keys. I loved the thrum and the warmth of the electricity surging through the typewriter as I created elaborate interactions between primarily middle-aged male characters who behaved in a farcical way. I would eagerly present them to my father, who began to learn English as a youth in Israel by watching John Wayne movies, and he would read these things with a look of utter consternation.

That man didn't know what the fuck I was about. And I couldn't help but reciprocate.

I couldn't fathom the things that were important to him-- a business selling girdles and other undergarments for fat ladies and athletes. Business trips to Virginia and out west. I didn't get it. I didn't understand why he was so fixated on me learning math. And when we would do math homework together and he would take out his old Texas Instruments Galaxy 40x calculator (which he kept in its original vinyl slide case) two thoughts immediately leapt to my mind:

1.) I was definitely in for it.

2.) I was most likely adopted.

I mean-- why did a person who was related to me even own something that looked like that?

A couple of weeks ago, a nurse at work loaned me a book called "The Lemon Tree," a story about an Arab family and a Jewish family, and, on a larger scale, the founding of Israel and the grave complications that arose from the creation of a Jewish state. When I finished reading the book, I felt that I had learned more about my father than I had in thirty years of knowing him. I felt like I had finally tasted the dust and the milk and honey and the cordite and the cactus water and the olive juice and the lemon juice of that life he'd left behind.

And, while he'll never stop driving me absolutely crazy, probably even after he's dead, today is his day-- whether gives a fuck about it or not. That man-- oh, God, that man-- he's always on my radar, as I know I'm always on his.

Oh, Marvelous Illusion. Oh, Terrible Surprise.

For ardent G&S schdorks who got here by Googling the title of this post (yes, it is a line from the Act I Finale of "The Sorcerer") keep your proverbial Gilbertian dick in your pants. This isn't an Anglophiliac, Victorian operetta appreciation post. This is a post about how my family is falling apart, and how its pieces are descending slowly but methodically to Hell.

Sorry about that.

On Saturday night, while my wife and I were cleaning up after making fresh lemon bread (really, it's more like cake-- I'll give you the recipe, if you want it. It culminates in drizzling lemon juice and sugar all over the top of the loaf, if that's any indicator of its awesomeness) my cellphone rang. It was my father. I was to call him, "you know, Mummy-- later. Whenever. When you are... relaxed."

When I'm relaxed, I thought. What a strange thing to say. I am never relaxed, except post coitally, or post poo, and neither of those situations seemed like an entirely appropriate time to be phoning my father. So I said to my wife, "Let's get whatever bullshit this is over with so we can go watch COPS," and I dialed his number. It was 7:40pm. I let the phone drop on the floor at 8:45.

"Mummy, I just wanted to let you know," he said at the beginning, "that your sister put an offer in on a house across the street from you, and the offer was accepted, and so she is going to live there, with her son and her husband, and her husband's other son. Together. Across the street from you."

What followed was one of the longest silences I've ever endured in my life. A silence fraught with tension, where I could actually feel my blood pressure rising. My back began to sweat. My eyes darted over to my wife, who was busying herself wiping down the gold-flecked Formica countertop. He said nothing, and neither did I-- because that's what a silence is.

(Just ask Pinter.)

Finally, he broke it by saying my name with that "Are you still there/breathing" inquisitiveness. I responded with such a timeworn cliche, such a patently ridiculous, sitcom response-- but it was absolutely the only single thing I could even think of to say, the only thing I could possibly say to that unbelievably painful, awkward, unfortunate, searingly terrible statement of my father's. I said the only words that would trickle down the synapses from my brain along my nerves down to my lips.

"Is this a joke?"

It was not. And while I'm usually pretty good at sniffing out humor, or attempts at levity, or horrendously misguided jokes about severed babies or drunk-driving crashes or old ladies having sex with voles, I have to admit that the possibility that my father was serious about my sister moving quite literally across the street from me and my wife was really a very distant possibility in my mind when compared to the likelihood that this was some sort of inept Israeli attempt at a joke.

But it was no joke.

My sister, who routinely discusses openly her utter contempt for her husband, or talks of divorcing him "as soon as our kid's five-- I'm just using him for childcare," my sister-- who has never lifted a finger in her life to help someone else, my sister-- who uses my father and my mother for childcare, who uses our oldest sister as some kind of mix between a personal assistant and a slave, my sister, who text-messages me complicated coffee orders that I am to order and pay for and bring to her hand when I come visit her, my sister is going to be my neighbor.

"Everybody Loves Raymond" without the laugh-track.

What ensued, after the distinct dearth of humor was realized on the phone, was the most painful hour I have ever spent talking to anybody in my life. My father, who has created an insulated fantasy world for himself, where his sole mission in his life is to save my self-centered, misanthropic sister, and the innocent child she created with this unfortunate lummox, spent an hour listening to nothing that I said.

And I said a lot. And I said it loudly. And passionately.

But it didn't matter.

Today, there's a house inspection. Yesterday, there were papers signed. One step closer. Howdy-doodly, Neighbor.

I am absolutely crushed. It's not that I don't want the absolute best for my nephew. Of course I do-- but that would start with different parents for him, which I cannot arrange. It's just that I don't want the absolute best for my sister. Why? Because she doesn't deserve it. She isn't nice. She isn't a good person. And it kills me to say that, it makes me want to spew hot vomit across the room and throw myself down the stairs for thinking and believing that about my own flesh and blood-- but it's true. Since she had this child that my parents take care of more than she does, they have aged exponentially. My mother is falling apart. My father is driving himself insane trying to dump water out of the boat that contains his daughter's marriage-- the boat that bears a gaping hole. Everyone is scrambling to save it-- everybody but my sister and her husband.

They kind of just don't seem to give a damn.

And, on a hot, selfish, dastardly level: I'm disgusted at the mere thought that they get to have a child-- a miracle-- that they don't appreciate, while we remain childless-- and on top of that, they're going to get a house in the suburbs that they won't appreciate either, and that poor man is marked for divorce in T-minus a couple years, and he doesn't even know it. And now I get a front-row seat to our family's own personal, private Hindenburg. The whole thing is just one marvelous illusion and, for me, a very terrible surprise.

Though I guess it shouldn't be. It's just what it always was with her-- the world kowtowing to her every whim and order-- only the stakes are so much higher now.

Don't Wanna

Someone once told me, as I was complaining endlessly about an unpleasant task I had set up for myself to do one day, "Don't do it-- we spend so much of our lives doing things that we don't want to do-- paying bills, visiting our inlaws, wiping our asses, getting the car inspected-- why should you have to endure one more annoying thing that you don't want to do-- just because you think you should? Fuck that."

Just. Don't. Do it.

Hmpf. Pretty revolutionary, don't you think? As advice goes, anyway.

Trouble is, nobody actually said that to me. It's just sage-like advice that I pulled out of my ass (after wiping, of course). I do this sometimes-- give myself advice, like an old friend might, if I ever asked an old friend for advice. Which I don't, which is a shame, because that's essentially what old friends are for, and I do have a couple left. But I'm far too busy with my spinning little life to pay them much heed. You know, there are bills to pay and cars to get inspected.

Anyway, I give myself advice every now and then, and, invariably, I heed it not. At least I don't pay some clipboard-toting shyster to give me advice that I will then ignore. Of course, good therapists don't give advice. I learned that in college, and not much else, I'm embarrassed to say.

Yesterday, after a thoroughly annoying day of working with some of society's less fortunate, less desirable, and less assimilated beings, I got to fight through forty minutes of just-out-of-school traffic only to arrive at the doorstep of my middle sister's shabby apartment on the outskirts of the city. Broken red moulding disgraced the threshold and, as I leaned back against the wooden railing propping up her doorstep, it bent unceremoniously and threatened to cave beneath my not-very-impressive weight. I texted her, as she requests, probably because her doorbell is broken.

"I'm here."

My sister, who has had her iPhone surgically implanted up her ass, usually texts back in under two seconds flat. After four minutes of freezing my tibbles off in the cold rain, I called.

"Hi. I'm here."

"You're where?" she asked.

"I'm at your doorstep. Can you let me in, please?"

"What are you doing here?" she asked, obviously put out.

"Well, I was supposed to see you last Monday, and you postponed until this Monday. And now, it's this Monday."

There was a brief pause.

"Oh," she replied with customary eloquence, "well, I thought you were going to, like, confirm."

Like, confirm, huh? What is this, like, a doctor's office?

Instead of that biting little remark, I said nothing, determined to be a good boy.

"Well," she said, "it's too cold to go take the baby to Starbucks."

"Um, I know-- I don't care about going anywhere, I can just come up and say 'hi.'"

"Oh, yeah, sure, we'll come let you in."

And so began what was one of the more traditionally awkward twenty-six minutes of my life: meeting with my sister, on her turf. Where my mother and eldest sister are not around to conduct air puff residue tests on all of the baby's toys and sanitize his every corner. This apartment is not the happy medium I hope for my nephew. He toddles and doddles around the living room happily, putting discarded Starbucks coffee cups into his mouth that have been lying around on the floor, he gleefully chases a yellow, plastic ball that goes careening towards the vast tangle of wires and cords connected to her modem. There is shit. Everywhere. And she puts on some sort of digitized bastardization of Mickey Mouse that he pays attention to for sixteen seconds, and then wanders off in search of other stimulation-- I don't know, like, where it's supposed to come from.

And neither does he.

And neither does she.

Maybe he'll pick up some wisdom from the pithy quote on the side of the Starbucks cup, if they're still doing that-- but I doubt it. He is, after all, fourteen months old.

I'm tired of doing things I don't want to do. I just want to take my nephew away, to a diner somewhere, for bacon, eggs, and well-done hashbrowns-- like my father did with me-- once the kid's old enough.

What's Going On In That Van?

Ever learn something about a family member that maybe you wish you hadn't ever learned, but, once you learn it, it suddenly makes heretofore disparate pieces of their lives kind of just, I don't know, click together?

Recently, in the midst of casual conversation/family banter, I learned that my eldest sister attended pre-school in a van.

Note: she wasn’t driven to pre-school IN a van—the pre-school WAS the van. Really.

Now, when I think of vans and their intended uses, an educational facility in which to house a teacher, school supplies, books, and small children doesn’t immediately leap to mind. And I consider myself to be a reasonably creative, open-minded, outta-da-box kind of thinker. And yet, still, I have my strong doubts about the whole van-as-acceptable-pre-school-environment concept.

Simply put, sending your child to pre-school makes it kind of a given that they’re going to grow up to become cult-members, door-to-door cucumber salesmen, or Molly Ringwald impersonators.

Now, granted, my eldest sister attended pre-school in 1970-or-thereabouts. People had some funny ideas back then, eating all of those funny brownies and such. If you’ve ever seen a man’s suit from 1970, you know what I’m talking about when it comes to funny ideas: lapels that stretched to Idaho, and plaid patterns that might look halfway awful on your average amateur bagpiper’s kilt—complete with Liberty Bell-diameter-sized bell-bottoms. And you might think that looks cool and retro now, but you’re an idiot. Now sit down before you hurt yourself or somebody even more special.

So, not only did my eldest sister attend pre-school in a van in 1970, she also did so in 1970 Virginia. Now, Virginia might be not too far below the Mason-Dixon Line but, to Jews, it’s basically Jim Crow-era Natchez. Throw in some kids learning how to spell their names inside a van, and we’re almost talking antebellum stuff, hon.

The thought that my mother and sister ever lived in Virginia at all is almost absurd to me. My mother got married and pregnant (nobody really discusses the order much) at seventeen and eighteen respectively (or not) and she and her husband and daughter fled to Virginia—fled from my Lymphoma-ridden grandmother and emotionally retarded grandfather. But pain and loss, destruction and fucked-up’ed-ness pursued them, and my mother and her husband got divorced a very short time later. Maybe he didn’t like the idea of his daughter attending pre-school in a van—although it’s more likely that my mother was the one who didn’t like it. What does she have to say about it these days?

“Look, it was the seventies,” she said to me, popping a forkful of salad into her mouth, “everybody was an idiot back then—even me.”

The fact that my sister is a functional human being in any sense after being subjected to God-only-knows-what inside that van (I’m sure all the windows were covered) is a Virginia-sized miracle. Maybe her experiences therein, wasting away through story and snack time on those springy vinyl seats accounts for her, um, questionable emotional status. Did they leave the engine running the whole day? Perhaps one of her many dozens of physicians ought to test her carbon monoxide levels.

Of course, come to think of it, that any of us are functional human beings is rather a miracle, isn’t it? After all, we’ve all been fucked up in one way or another by someone or other—our parents, our siblings, our bullies and our mentors, our friends and our not-so-much-friends, our lovers and our leavers. Our second grade teachers who thought we were retarded for not being able to do 64 math problems in 5 minutes.

And I didn’t even go to 2nd grade in a van.

Kamikaze Birds, And Other Mother's Day Tweets-- Sorry-- Treats

Hey, it's Mother's Day.

If reading that sentence on this blog is your O.S.R. (Oh, Shit Reminder), don't worry. I hear they're selling pansies at the Mobil station. You can thank me later.

Pansy.

I was thinking about honoring my mother with a post on this blog, but then I started to feel like that would be trite, maybe even a little insulting, (especially since she'd definitely disown/disembowel me if she read 9 out of 10 posts contained herein), and assuredly too predictable. I mean, come on-- a post about your mother on Mother's Day? That's like... like... um... a Justin Bieber post on National Justin Bieber Day. (By the way, my wife explained who he is to me last night. I am now fit to go out and circulate in even my own socially retarded public sphere.)

Hmm... this post is, I feel, containing an inordinate amount of parenthetical references. I used to use those fuckers (a lot) in my high school writing, which featured prominently a story about a woman named Mary Jane who gets her virginity stolen and the woefully inept Superintendent James Henry Wobbypoohs who investigates the crime.

(Gay.)

Anyway, this is not going to be a post about my mother. I felt that would kind of be wasted on her. She's greater than any Mother's Day post I could create-- she's funnier, snarkier, more demure, more assured, and more, well, more than I'm capable of creating. It would just be tinny and hollow and, probably, sad.

So I'm going to write about my oldest sister instead.

It's a funny thing, I suppose, writing about her-- someone who, at 42 and stolidly single, will in all likelihood never be a mother, but maybe that's why I'm picking her as my muse.

Julie.

(Hi, so here's another parenthetical reference. It's explaining the pseudonym for my oldest sister, because I hate referring to her as "my oldest sister" all the fucking time, and I'm sure as shit not going to call her by her real name. So, um, Julie it is. "Julie.")

Julie doesn't have children, and I doubt she's ever going to. She's never had a husband and I doubt she's ever going to. I could be wrong, but I'd feel comfortable, maybe even a little cocky betting my wife's eyelids on it.

And I'm not a betting man.

Julie moved back in with my parents back in February when the mousketeers decided to commandeer her condominium. She just sent me a text message:

"Omg its exhausting living in a house w/stairs!"

Life is exhausting for Julie. She works for my father, an unending haze of unreasonable expectations, haphazard instructions, and half-Israeli profanities shouted at cringeworthy decibels. Julie hides while at work. If my father is really laying into her, she'll run and hide in the bathroom, the only place in the factory where he can't get to her.

Otherwise, she hides behind her computer screen. On Thursday, Julie e-mailed me 18 times.

"Ho hum, another day of wondering what should go on my tombstone:

The thing I say most: 'Fuck'!"

Kind of sounds like... me, doesn't she? I'm very proud.

(That reminds me-- I need to write my epitaph one of these days...)

Anyway, Julie doesn't have children, but she does have her beautiful nephew, on whom she dotes and smothers as if he were her very own. It's actually very touching to see the two of them interact together. When our nephew got a cold, he threw up twice, and cried afterwards.

So did Julie.

Julie has lots of stuffed animals. Before our nephew came into this world, she doted on and smothered her stuffed animals. She named them, and probably talked to them at night when she was otherwise alone. And while that's kind of unsettling to picture, it's better than what she used to do with stuffed animals when she was a young girl. She used to love to pretend she was a schoolteacher, and that her stuffed animals where her pupils. Sounds quaint, right? Well, not the way little Julie played. She would line them all up on the porch and scream at them at the top of her lungs, presumably for not having their homework completed or for going to the bathroom without signing out the hall-pass. Little Julie would scream and yell frantically and forcefully, until her face turned tomato red and her neck veins bulged almost to the breaking point. These little shenanigans frequently drew the negative, frightened attention of the neighbors.

Alas, a career in education was not in her future. She was doomed to work for my father from the very start. After all, he's the only person I know who can shout her down. Those stuffed animals never had a chance.

She tries, by God. Really, she does.

"What the hell do you want for your bday???????" she wrote to me in email #16 on Thursday. All she wants to do is the right thing, but in a world that consistently and unfailingly leaves her feeling unappreciated, why bother, right?

Julie will always bother.

As I mentioned some posts ago, there's the constant updates about crime in our neighborhood that she insists on sending to me.

"Over the past few days, several unlocked vehicles have been entered overnight in the township. Small electronics have been taken. Residents are reminded to park their vehicles in a well lighted area, remove all items of value, and lock all doors."

And there's the random consumer alerts about unsafe products and/or services that she insists on sending to me.

"More TV for toddlers equals school trouble later

By Reuters - Mon May 3, 3:31 PM PDT
Less surprisingly, children who watched more TV at age 2 weighed more by the time they were 10 and ate more snacks and soft drinks, the researchers reported in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine. "The results support previous suggestions that early childhood television exposure undermines attention," wrote Linda Pagani of the University of Montreal and colleagues at Bowling Green University in Kentucky and the University of Michigan."

And then there's the random bytes from the entertainment industry that she insists on sending to me.

"Teen Mom Star Maci Has Moved On to a New Guy!
Thursday – May 06, 2010 – 10:59am
Teen Mom star Maci Bookout has found a new guy in the wake of her split with Ryan Edwards, the father of son Bentley, 18 months."

I mean, really. Where the hell would I be without my sister?

And, in spite of her best intentions, shit happens-- mostly to her. Mostly in her car. Mostly when windows or sunroofs are opened.

In 1989, she was driving along in her beautiful red VW Jetta on a gorgeous, sun-dappled day when she stopped for a red light. All the windows were down. A man on a bicycle sidled up alongside her Jetta and stopped, too, for the red light, as some bicyclists do. Unsteady, he put his left hand out to stabilize himself against her car, and he fell right through her open passengerside window, right into her car-- she screamed like hell and the guy probably shit his little shorts. Alas, they did not exchange phone numbers and, eventually rings. Though it would have made for a hell of a how-we-met story told to the grandkids.

But that was a very long time ago. On Wednesday, though-- well... I'll let her tell it in her own words. Far more effective than mine-- just proving that there's a little bit of the storyteller in all of us Aprons:

"I was listening to book on cd (first time I ever used this cd player----the fuckin’ thing got stuck in it this morning)

Had the sunroof back---same as in the morning.

When I parked in the driveway, I stayed w/the car a bit to clean out the side pockets of crap.

I thought I’d felt something roll down my back, but looked around - like the doggies do -& couldn’t see anything on my back.

So I finished what I was doing and then I turned around to close the door & VOILA, dead baby bird smashed flat on my seat where my right thigh was.

MAJOR NERVOUS BREAKDOWN.

Dad called as I was bee-lining it to the house to take my HAZMAT shower. I just kept saying “when are you going to be home?” “when are you going to be home”.

He came in the house as I was coming out of the shower. I gathered gloves, plastic cups and a container of Lysol wipes & dragged him outside.

He helped me get rid of it. He said it probably fell out of a tree on my hair through the roof and I hadn’t been sitting on it the whole time.

Nice, I’d kept my hair up & it probably became a hearse-nest for the ride home.

I have no other explanation---only the creeps."

Happy Mother's Day, you fucking lunatic. There's a dead bird on your ass. And I love you.

What Am I'm Going to Do?

Hold onto your Deal-a-Meal cards, my little kitty-cats: both of my sisters are looking for houses.

Sister #1: 33, Recently married, has a baby, is a total fucking trainwreck.

Sister #2: 42, Unmarried, has lots of stuffed animals with unusual names, is a total fucking trainwreck.

Sister #1 has practically no money. Her husband makes a decent living, but a significant portion of his monthly doughage gets forked over to a Baby Mama.

Sister #2 has an appreciable amount of money and is a very smart shopper.

Guess who just got their offer on a house accepted?

You got it! Sister #1! You're SO SMART! Look at you. Somebody get you a fucking ribbon or something.

Now, of course, Sister #2 was the one who started looking for a house first. See, she was living in a very expensive condominium favored by elderly, widowed Jewish ladies, recent divorcees, pricks with neckties and male-pattern baldness, and the QVC-obsessed.

Oh, and mice.

Now, a normal person would do something, well, normal-- like call an exterminator, insist that the mice be eradicated as part of the exorbitant condo fee she is paying, or purchase a Vietnam-era ex-Army flamethrower and deal with the mice herself: Rambo-style.

Sister #2, however, did none of those things, though I could picture her one-day wigging out with loads of big bullets strapped across her chest. She moved in with my parents. At first it was "temporary." That was in February. And, as Joan Baez so wistfully sings, "And February was so long, it lasted until March..."

And April.

The way the real estate market is going, don't count out those languid summer months either.

After spending several fruitless and futile weeks being depressed and looking at real estate porn, she finally put her condo up for sale last week.

All of a sudden, Sister #1 was inspired, and contacted my father.

"Daddy, I want a house."

Veruca Salt, anyone?

Well, as is his way when she calls him with a polite command, Daddy hit the ground running, only ceasing briefly to fly to Israel to carpet-bomb his Great-Aunt Twat. Even while he was thousands of miles away, he was texting Sister #2, making sure she was dutifully schlepping Sister #1 around to look at houses.

You know, because Sister #1 has a baby, and is, therefore, more important.

My father got back from Israel Saturday morning. On Monday morning, Sister #1 put a low-ball offer in on a house. On Monday evening, it was accepted.

This is how we fuckin' roll, 'Cuz.

Don't ask me where the money for the down-payment is coming from. My father swears up and down that it's not coming from him, and that his name isn't going on a single mortgage document. I suspect the Mexican cartel and/or generally unshaven men in overcoats and sunglasses.

My father called me this morning to ask me questions about short sales, since, having been through one myself, I am now, apparently, the Grand Vizier of Short Sales. I told him that it was absolute Hell. Our closing date was postponed no fewer than six times, sometimes postponed on the afternoon of closing-- that the sellers threatened to call the police on me, that township inspectors threatened to take the roofer to court, that the sellers were deadbeats and owed thousands and thousands of dollars in back taxes and repair fees to people who had done work on the house.

I told him that, had I to do it all over again, for the sake of my physical and emotional health, I would have walked away. And maybe the yellowed scotch tape that is holding the various components of this house together will all simultaneously disintigrate when I write this: but I probably should have.

The fact that the house Sister #1 will be purchasing is in short sale is the least of the problems. The fact that she's going into this with a guy that she mercilessly complains about and cuts down every day is perhaps more unsettling. I discussed this with my father on the phone.

"Look-- if they stay together, the house is theirs, and that's great. If they don't stay together, well, then we're going to have a big fuckin' problem, okay? Is that what you want to hear? I know. I know! But what am I'm gonna do?" he yelled. His Israelisms always come out when he's excited. You should hear him when he's stuck in traffic.

"I'm just worried that, when this whole thing gets fucked up and all-of-a-sudden she doesn't want the house anymore, it's going to become your problem," I said to him. There is ample evidence of a pattern to suggest that this would be the case.

Daddy, I'm sick of:

my college #1

apartment #1

condominium #1

my car #1

my car #2

my car #3

my business

And he's gotten rid of all of them for her. *Poof!* as if they'd never existed. By taking care of her kid all the time, they're basically, in my opinion, doing the same thing with him. I know that's not nice to say, but give me a break-- my family's in crisis.

"Mummy," he said, "I know you're worried about me, that it's going to be my problem. What am I'm going to do?"

What am I'm going to do? The emotional death-knell of my father. A man who is trapped by his ability to see the future and his intense love for his oftentimes misguided, foolish, impetuous, bull-headed children. (Mr. Apron included, batteries extra.) The difference, I suppose, between me and Sister #1 is that, all the messes I have ever made in my life, and there have been a good many of them, I have cleaned up on my own. You know, like a reasonable impersonation of a grown-up.

It's none of my business, of course, and, when we're all having dinner at my parent's house, my mother "doesn't want to talk about it," so we gossip about it with Sister #2 in hushed tones in the dining room while my mother is doing the dishes in the kitchen and my father is doing stomach-crunches on the floor of the living room. We never have to worry about Sister #1 hearing us, because she never comes over to my parent's house for dinner anymore. Just to drop off her son, and pick him up. And complain about her husband. And wash her hair in the sink, leaving copious mounds of black curls all over that she doesn't clean up.

It's okay, though. Daddy'll do it.

Call the Coroner: The Coroner's Dead

Ah, let the dead munchkin jokes begin.

"And he's not only merely dead,
He's really most sincerely dead."

They'll probably carve that on Meinhardt Raabe's fucking tombstone, the poor bastard. The Coroner of Munchkinland died on Friday at the Penney Retirement Community, where lots of old bastards go to die, presumably. And Meinhardt Raabe was certainly old-- 94.

It's like the last of the Titanic survivors dying-- kind of. Or the last of the WWI vets dying-- kind of. Or the Holocaust survivors-- kind of. But not. I suspect this is the way I'll feel when all of the Golden Girls die. I mean, I was pretty bummed when Bea Arthur died. Now those "Don't You Wish Your Girlfriend Was Hot Like Bea?" t-shirts just don't seem quite as funny to me anymore.

Anyway, getting back to Meinhardt Raabe, he's dead. And it's funny, because he was the coroner. I wonder if Raabe, who lived a hell of a long time, ever entertained notions that he might somehow be immortal or otherwise invincible because he was perhaps the most famous celebrity coroner of all times, that he would somehow be given a free pass by the Almighty.

I mean-- that hat: n'yah mean? Special.

Death must come as rather a surprise to some morticians and coroners. I mean, it must be rather like being a dog trainer and then coming home to seeing your dog throwing up on itself whilst hate-fucking your throw pillows. Like-- they're thinking to themselves: that's not supposed to happen to me!

But I think Meinhardt Raabe knew the void was coming for him. He seemed like he was a pretty sharp guy, according to his obituary, which I read in the New York Times because I'm so fucking smart. Raabe was smart too: a bachelor's degree from the University of Wisconsin, M.B.A. from Drexel University, and a World War II veteran, serving in the Civil Air Patrol.

I'll bet his tiny old uniform would sell for a bitchload on Ebay.

He also served for 30 years as a spokesmidget for Oscar Mayer pigdicks, tooling around in the Weinermobile, hocking stronguls (don't you love it when books & articles italicize foreign-looking words, but never define them? Me too.) to the innard-loving American populous. Was there anything this dude didn't do? He sure packed a lot of living into that little body.

Actually, it wasn't even that little. He was one of the tallest shorties in the film. At his tallest (in his early thirties) he was 4'7". That's a pretty big deal for someone with dwarfism.

Obviously, at 94, he'd probably shrunk quite a bit. Is it wrong of me to wonder (and write about wondering) whether his descendants bought him a kid's coffin? It's probably cheaper. I've got to say, if my dad was a dwarf-- I'd do it.

If you're a human being who's alive today, The Wizard of Oz had a profound effect on you-- and don't even try to comment on here and tell me it didn't, because I can smell bullshit as clearly as I can feel an Oscar Mayer weiner being shoved up my cornhole. My oldest sister was born in 1967, and her favorite movie, to this day, is The Wizard of Oz. If I told her that Meinhardt Raabe was dead, or if she read either The New York Times or my blog (I think, if you consistently read both, you are automatically eligible to participate in any number of medical experiments at local teaching hospitals) she would probably lock herself in her room and not come out for a week.

In 7th grade, she played The Tin Man in her school's production of The Wizard of Oz. She can't sing for shit, so maybe they had her voice dubbed. Meinhardt Raabe claimed, in his autobiography that his voice was dubbed, so anything's possible.

I remember, years ago, for my sister's birthdays, I got her a special, commemorative release of "The Wizard of Oz". It came with this huge booklet of information about the film, and it revealed that many of the munchkins were of German descent, and that a good number of them had a soft-spot for alcohol. I can imagine that someone who stands at under four foot tall might not hold their liqour particularly well, and this suspicion was confirmed by the informational packet that said some of the munchkins took to screaming drunken profanities at the director, and that one of them fell headfirst into a toilet.

It's hard to imagine the dignified, blue-robed, goateed coroner toddling around all beschmoigied on Schnapps, goose-stepping his sloshed way into a shitbowl but, again, I guess anything's possible.

I wonder what Meinhardt Raabe said when he found out that Judy Garland had died. He was seven years older than Judy Garland, and yet he outlived her by 41 years. I wonder if he just couldn't resist saying,

"As coroner,
I must aver,
I thoroughly examined her,
And she's not only merely dead,
She's really most sincerely dead!"

I'll bet he said that-- to somebody at least, maybe his wife. I'm sure he thought it, at least.

Brown-Eyed Curly-Top

The middle child is having her birthday today.

Maybe you've heard about it. As Joe Biden said about this historic moment in the history of the world, "it's a big fuckin' deal."

Really, it is.

She's 33, but her life reads like an episode of "Teen Mom." If "Teen Mom" were a book.

My sister is unlike anybody else I know, and she's certainly desperately unlike anybody I would ever choose to deliberately associate with. She's the most self-centered person I know, and that's saying a lot, because I majored in theatre as an undergraduate and, consequently, I know a lot of people who are convinced with absolute certainty that their decision to get out of bed in the morning or drop a meadow-muffin is a potent, powerful and positive message to the rest of the world.

My sister is more self-absorbed than any theatre major ever could be. And I doubt very much that she would be offended at my saying that, because it would mean that she's first at something-- best at something, and even if being first and best at being selfish is her reward, she'd wear that bright red ribbon proudly.

When her son was born about half-a-year ago, she could not possibly understand why people like my parents were more interested in the baby than they were in her. She grew instantly jealous of the attention that her beautiful, sweet son received-- like a petty older sibling might. Dissatisfied though she may be with my parent's wandering attentions and affections, she's still content to bring her son to them at least twice a week (and often for overnight stays) to be babysat, as well as heavy bags of her laundry, along with her husband's and her son's for my mother to do.

Did I mention that she's turning 33 today?

My sister is beautiful, and always was, and maybe that's part of the problem. She's been able to pretty her way out of traffic tickets and punishments and bad grades, her big chocolate and volumes of cascading dark brown curls just melting troubles and consequences away like a fresh spring rain clears the world of a lingering heavy snowdrift. My mother used to call her "Brown-Eyed Curly-Top." Some of the things that she's called my mother in the heat of battle, well, even I'm too embarrassed to reprint here.

But, then again, maybe I'm just an aging mama's boy who's jealous of his badass older sister.

Maybe.

My sister is unlike anybody I know, and that's for sure. I struggle in my relationship with her, like lots of siblings do, I suppose. I go through periods where I judge her, and spite her, and ignore her, and attack her, and support her, too. I try, but it never lasts long. An unreasonable demand or a self-aggrandizing comment, a cutting remark or an obnoxious text will plunge me back where I don't want to be but all too often find myself-- that place where I sit and brood and wonder just who the fuck she thinks she is anyway.

"Why is my sister the way she is?" I asked my wife as we were just about to descend into a haze of sleep last night.

"Why is my brother the way he is?" she replied.

"Well," I said, burrowing deeper under the covers, "I know your mom just blames your dad for him, but I don't think that's fair entirely. And I don't think it would be fair to just blame my dad for my sister. There's always more to it than overindulgence..."

Our pre-bedtime conversations aren't always this lucid. Most of the time they're totally incoherent and sometimes slightly disturbing.

We didn't come to any conclusions last night, and the conversation was not picked up this morning, as we struggled to find some Passover-friendly alternative to cereal for breakfast and make sure Molly made it outside without peeing all over the green rug in the living room, but I'm still thinking about it, obviously. And still hurting over it-- all of it.

Most of all, over the fact that I sat down determined to write a happy birthday blog about my sister, and this is what came out.

ALERT

I love my eldest sister.

Really, I do.

And I don't say it in that smarmy, sardonic, I-wish-she-would-move-to-Iceland kind of way. I really do love her. I love her like crazy. I love the shit out of her. If she asked me to, I'd singlehandedly strangle every single one of the mice that are currently invading her $237,000 condominium and making it their own private little fart-nest. I love this neurotic, hypochondrical, forty-three-year-old single, emotionally and physically brittle woman but, I swear to everloving Christ, if she doesn't stop sending me e-mail alerts from our township and police department, I am going to kill her.

It won't be fun, and it won't be how I would have wanted it to end for her-- quietly passing away in some nursing home for aged spinsters with chronic digestive issues that minimize flatulence and maximize belching-- but if I get one more motherfucking e-mail alert about petty crime or snow removal ordinances, I will visit her in the wee hours of the evening, and plug up every orifice of hers used for breathing with a mouse carcass.

So help me.

She signed up for this service that sends an email (and a text message!) directly to her from the township's headquarters. She signed up for these alerts in July, I think. Now, I don't know how many they send her, but, I got the first one forwarded from her in mid-July. Since then, she has been kind enough to forward me thirty-six emails.

Here's a sampling:

ALERT:

County Health Department will be spraying for West Nile Virus in selected county areas.

The spraying will be done, weather permitting, on Wednesday evening, July 15, 2009 -the rain date will be Friday, July 17th.

Well, thanks, sis. I'll make sure to don my HAZMAT suit, sterile gloves, and my autographed Neil Armstrong space helmet to work on those days.
------------

ALERT:

The County Health Department has scheduled two walk-in H1N1 flu clinics for people in the recommended target groups. These clinics will only offer H1N1 vaccine to those who are in a high priority risk group as determined by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the Pennsylvania State Health Department. There is no charge for the immunization.

Okay, this one was actually helpful. We didn't get our H1N1 shots at the place recommended in this email-- we got them one night on the spur of the moment when my mother called us on the phone at 6:15 and said, "Hi! It's me! Did you two get your swine flu shots? No? Well, get your asses in the fucking car! They're giving them for free at the local elementary school-- but they're stopping at 6:40! Go go go!"

MOM ALERT!
-----------------

ALERT:

On 10-24-09 at 10:10 P.M., three students were walking together and were robbed by a lone male who implied that he had a weapon (none was seen). One student was struck in the head by a fist when he resisted. The actor fled the scene south on foot. He is described as a dark-skinned black male, about 5'10 tall, wearing a long coat that appeared to be pale blue in color and dark jeans. His clothes were further described as raggedy and shredded.

On 12-10-09, a student was robbed by three males at approximately 8:25 P.M. The student reported that he was driving his vehicle when an unknown object struck his windshield. When he stopped, three individuals appeared - one of them armed with a handgun. The student was robbed of his personal belongings and struck on the head with the gun.

The actors are described below:

#1 White male, approximately 5 tall or shorter, wearing a dark jacket, dark pants, and a bandanna over his face.

#2 White male, approximately 59, wearing a long jacket, jeans and a bandanna covering his face.

#3- White male, approximately 6 tall, wearing a long jacket with stripes, jeans, and a bandanna covering his face; armed with a black handgun.

Why the fuck is she sending this to me? I haven't been a "student" in the undergraduate sense of the word in eight years.

Also-- don't you love these suspect descriptions? "His clothes were further described as raggedy and shredded." I have this image of someone being cold-cocked by the dude from "Corpse Bride." Also, the other one I love, too-- very much. "Approximately 59." What the fuck is that? "Well, it was really late and dark out, and I didn't get a real good look at him-- but he was approximately 59."

------------

ALERT:

The township has experienced two burglaries of commercial properties and two residential burglaries. The residential burglaries occurred during evening and early morning hours. Entries to both residences were by force (breaking in). Residents are advised to use their alarm system if they have one, to secure their residence at all times and to use lighting inside and outside as a deterrence.

Wow. Well, that's great fucking advice. Thanks a lot, McGruff. Want a treat?

-----------

This one has to be my all-time favorite. I swear I'm not making it up, it's word-for-word.

ALERT:

Police are investigating the theft of nearly three dozen rats and mice from a local college research facility some time between May 22 and May 24.

According to police, someone entered an area where the mice were kept and
took 25 black and brown research mice. Nearby, nine white rats were also
taken.

Along with the mouse thefts, 19 cages, water bottles and food was also
missing from the building.

What I think is most funny about this one is that the crime allegedly happened in late May, 2009. The alert went out January 28th, 2010. Does anybody really think that these fucking mice are still alive, and does anybody seriously give a shit? Obviously, judging from the eight month time-lag, the answer to the latter question is "no."

It's likely, though, that the mice have bred in that time span. Maybe they're the ones shitting up her condo.

-------------

ALERT:

Somebody please stop my sister. She is bombarding my email account with horseshit, irrelevant, ridiculous municipal updates that I couldn't give a stolen rodent's red twat about. She was last observed sitting at her laptop nibbling her cuticles, knocking back a protein shake and obsessing over whether or not she is as up-to-the-minute on the local police blotter as she possibly could be. If you see this woman, please notify the authorities at once to have her commited to the local spinstertarium.

People Don't Change

Boys call their mothers for all kinds of different reasons.

Sometimes we call our mothers because we've run out of clean socks or underwear or plates and we don't quite know what to do about that.

Sometimes we call our mothers because we're afraid no woman besides her will ever love us.

Sometimes we call our mothers in tears or in hysterics or in our boxers or in despair.

Sometimes we call our mothers because the world is mean and shitty, unfair and unkind, oppressive and fucked up.

Last week, I called my mother to tell her that my sister was selfish.

It wasn't some random comment that just flew out of my mouth when I wasn't thinking. I had just gotten coffee at Wawa and was on my way to pick up the work mail from the P.O. Box and I pulled out my cellphone on the way to the post office, having made up my mind to tell my mother that I thought my sister was selfish.

I was full ready for justifications and defenses and excuses and heavy sighs. Miraculously, at 60, my mother is still able to surprise me.

"You're right," she said. My jaw dropped.

"She's always been selfish, she's always been all about her, and that's the way she's always going to be."

"But I thought," I stuttered, "that, when she became a wife and a mother that she would..."

"No," my mother said flatly, "she won't. She's always going to be like that. Her selfishness is one of her most unattractive traits. You have some traits that are very unattractive, too, you know."

And then, for my benefit, my mother proceeded to list them for me. She's so thoughtful that way. But I was barely listening to her as she recited my personality flaws, so enrobed I was in the rapture of hearing, for the first time ever, my mother admit that my sister was selfish. It was like tasting Caffeine Free Diet Coke from the Holy fucking Grail itself.

"And you're always going to be like that, too," my mother said, interrupting my reverie, "people don't change."

I don't always agree with my mother, but I always like listening to her theories, especially about human nature and how my sister is selfish. That might be my favorite topic of conversation to date. I don't know whether or not I believe people change or they don't or if they're capable of change or if they change so slowly, so creepingly, so intricately that it's impossible to tell.

Maybe they do change and we just can't see. Maybe it's our fault. Our failing.

When I look at the people around me, the people I've known forever, I try hard to figure out if they've changed. I think I've seen changes in my father-- in some ways. He's become more of a pussy about the snow-- that's one easy thing to spot. This week, he stayed home on two weekdays. When I was a child, that crazy bastard would go to work in blizzards, he would shovel out the entire goddamn street-- the idea of staying home from work because of snow was about as crazy to him as suggesting that he dye his shoulder-hair pink and march at Mardi Gras in a pair of clear vinyl chaps. If my father knew what chaps were.

He's gone from not knowing how to pronounce "internet" to sending copious amounts of text messages from a smartphone every day. He's gone from tooling around in Oldsmobiles and Buicks to enjoying the leather-swathed surroundings of Saabs and BMWs.

But he's still the same old crazy Israeli motherfucker. He still has coffee flowing through his veins, he still threatens to grenade the cars of people who have the audacity to park in front of his house, he still calls his wife and all of his children "Mummy," and he still thinks it's acceptable to go out in public wearing "sveatpants," loafers with no socks, clutching an engorged wallet secured by a rubber-band.

Tonight, visiting Pittsburgh with my in-laws, I was in a car, wedged between the door and my wife, who was wedged between me and her brother. He demanded to be taken to an establishment that served milkshakes simply by repeating the word, "Milkshake" over and over again until his desire was met at a Cold Stone Creamery. At 10:15 at night. When my wife asked him what flavor milkshake he got, he turned to her and replied,

"Milkshake."

He's twenty-six years old. And, though I didn't know him back in the day, I'm told that he hasn't changed a bit.

"I'm still wild and hilarious," he declared with typical loudness.

Indubitably.

God Save the Queen

I felt like a real baby yesterday.

Not in the burbling up mashed peas all over my onesie kind of baby, but in the not getting my way and not being particularly diplomatic about it kind of baby.

I had my heart set on seeing "The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus," Terry Gilliam's latest romp. Those of you who've been around for a while remember the blog post I wrote about the film, relating to the imagination of children several weeks ago, and will understand why I wanted so badly to see the film.

Because I work all day and teach and rehearse at night, my opportunities for seeing films are very limited, but Saturday night appeared to be all-systems-go, and so I asked my wife if she'd go with me.

"Sure," she said, "but, what the fuck is 'The Conundrum of Mrs. Parabolas?'"

"Don't worry about it," I said, dialing the number for my forty-two-year-old sister, our perennial third-wheel. She was, of course, being fed and babied at my parent's house, a mere 0.04 miles away.

"Pick us up now," I said into the phone, "we're going to the movies."

"Okay!" she said. I never have to worry about her having plans, because she never has plans.

The time was 6:51. The film started at 7:00. The movie theatre was probably ten minutes away for most drivers, seven if you drive like you really mean it.

Now, I would have driven, but my sister is allergic to dogs, and feels that, because our dog has traveled in our car many times that she cannot do likewise. Therefore, whenever the three of us go anywhere, she has to drive. In her pristine, 2009, gold ("Not trashy gold," according to my father), blonde-wood enrobed BMW where dust mites fear to tread.

As my wife and I stood outside on our street corner, waiting for a glimpse of my sister's xenon headlamps cutting through the evening air, I shook my head in despair after consulting my watch.

"We'll never make it."

I don't exactly know what happened to my sister but, somewhere along the line, she went straight from infant to senior citizen. In her apartment, there are heating pads and huge containers of vitamins and tubes of theraputic gels everywhere. Her condominium looks exactly like my great grandmother's apartment used to look like, only without the chifferobe-sized console television, the avacado-colored rotary telephones and blackened liverwurst hamburgers.

My sister has even started driving like an elderly person. Fortunately, only as concerns speed. She doesn't weave into the opposite lane of traffic, nor does she drive through people's lawns and hedges, the way my step-grandmother has, but she adheres to the posted speed limit signs with an almost religious fervor. This is a woman who used to rack up speeding tickets with all the enthusiasm of a chubby 7-year-old kid vying for skiball prizes. I rolled my eyes as she slowed to a cringeworthy 15mph and rode her brakes down what can be a very fun, winding road on the way to the movie theatre and I resigned myself to the fact that "The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus" would fly the coop before I got to see it in the theatre.

I wondered briefly if my sister preferred Polident or Sea Bond.

When we got out of the car at the movie theatre, it was 7:12 and there were approximately 30 people in line for tickets.

"Oh, Jesus Christ," I moaned, "fuck this, let's just forget it."

"Buddy," my wife said in her best impersonation of an optimist, "don't forget about previews-- they're usually at least fifteen minutes long."

We stood in line behind the yacking and irritating wealthy people of this neighborhood and, as we got closer to the ticket window I saw a sign that read something like,

"Dear Movie Patrons:

Due to a malfunction in our heating system, there is NO HEAT in movie theatre #2, which is currently showing "The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus." Please be aware that the temperature inside this movie theatre is approximately 55 degrees. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause."

I walked up to the ticket window when it was my turn and said, undaunted,

"Three for 'Imaginarium,' please," sticking my debit card in her face.

"Sir, you do realize that it is approximately 55 degrees in there, right?"

"Buddy," my wife said behind me, "I think I'll be cold in there." And she would have been. And if my young, sprightly, pixie-like wife would be cold in there, my woefully underweight, brittle-boned, geriatric sister would probably become an ice-pop before the first plot-twist.

I sighed and turned my gaze up to the other offerings or, in the case of this small theatre, offering. One other film, beginning at 7:15.

"Three for 'The Young Victoria,' please."

It wasn't terrible, but it was no Terry Gilliam film. If it were, a gigantic, slimey, cyclops dragon would have devoured Queen Victoria within the first ten minutes and its head would have popped open and a dozen tuxedo-wearing goldfish would have swam out singing German oom-pah songs.

But that didn't happen, and I was okay with that. I wasn't okay, though, with the filmmakers completely fabricating Victoria's husband, Albert, getting shot while shielding her from an assassination attempt.

There was an assassination attempt on Victoria, many, many assassination attempts, actually-- but in none of them were Albert shot. In the movie, he acts like a Secret Service agent, pushing Victoria back in her carriage while simultaneously leaping in front of her to gracefully accept the bullet into his powerful, manly shoulder.

But it was nothing but pure, Hollywood horseshit, and it made me furious.

What is the purpose of historical films if they are going to radically manipulate and outright lie about what happened? I know why they did it-- because, in the scene before, Albert & Victoria had just had a huge blowout and then they needed to have them make up. Well, couldn't they have done that without making shit up? It was ridiculous and unnecessary and all it does is make people who are too lazy to research things or are too trusting to think they don't have to believe things that aren't true.

I just think it's funny how films like these obsess over the historical correctness of period dresses and hairstyles and mutton chops, and uniform colors and the accuracy of medals and table linens, and casting just the right actress who looks just enough like the Baroness Lehzen, and then they just go and fantasize about rather significant happenings, or non-happenings and are content to rewrite history, because what really happened just isn't interesting enough. Am I a fuddy-duddy who only wants the history represented as it truly was-- or is that even possible?

Or maybe I'm still just in a funk because my sister drives like an octogenarian and I didn't get to see my movie.

Limousine Farts

As I type these words, my great-aunt is dying in Pompano Beach, as the great-aunts of many other sensitive, Jewish boys have done for years.

It's nearly impossible for me to think of my family as a thing, as a thing with many different parts, each one in its place, without Aunt Mickey. But soon, very, very soon, she'll be gone. Her stomach is riddled with holes. Her colon is torn to shreds. She's lost thirty pounds in two weeks. It seems that years of taking care of her erratic, bombastic, obscene, unpredictable and Alzheimer's-ridden husband has taken its toll and, while he is still going strong and physically healthy as a thoroughbred at 93, she will be finished, mentally brisk but physically in tatters, at 82.

She was told at the hospital that bowel surgery might save her, but she elected not to be saved-- a pretty predictable choice for a zealous atheist.

"Why should I go through all that?" she asked my father, who went down to Florida to visit her in the hospital, "my children don't need me, my grandchildren don't need me, my husband doesn't know me. I have no friends. Why can't I just decide that it's time to go now?"

Why indeed?

"Look, Mickey is a ball-buster," my father said to me in my dining room last night, coming over for an impromptu pow-wow. I smiled at that, because it's apparently true, and true to the last. "Nobody can tell her what to fuckin' do-- ever. I've known her for thirty-five years-- she was never sick-- not even one day. So, what? Now all of a sudden she's going to have nurses asking her, 'Do you have to make?' Stick some thing up her ass twice a day? Feed her like a baby? Fuck that. Mummy, she's doing it her way, and she's very happy."

A ball-buster is how Mickey will always be remembered in our family, and she would be proud of that moniker. In fact, she might even have left instructions for it to be carved onto her headstone, because that's how she rolls. She was a legend in the music industry far before it was commonplace to see a woman at the head of a Board Room. She had no problem telling men half her age or twice her age to go to hell and I have no doubt that, when she ran meetings, pit-stains and swamp-ass were the order of the day for her underlings.

She was the only person I ever knew who kept a black cook in her house, like Jack Benny or something. Back when she lived in New Jersey and would only summer in Florida, she and her husband would take the train and her "boy" would drive her Cadillac down to Florida so it would be there for her to maneuver erratically throughout the palm tree-lined streets.

And did she ever.

I can remember being in the backseat of Mickey's many Cadillacs as a child and silently praying and nearly wetting myself as she careened through the opposite lane of traffic and acquainting the barge-like car's wire-rimmed wheel-covers with the sidewalk. I also remember, as a very young boy, taking extreme delight in removing my shoes at her place in Jersey and running down her expertly-waxed parquet floors and sliding at least eight or nine feet. I remember watching Three Stooges shorts while lying on her enormous bed with my sister, and I remember finding the first piece of pornography I ever saw in my life: a Beta-Max videocassette called "The Hornymooners."

I remember the bathroom at her place in New Jersey, which was mirrored wall-to-wall, and the inside bathroom door was completely mirrored so that, when the door was closed, you saw your own reflection approximately eighty-seven thousand times. The mirror above the sink was also completely framed in gigantic theatre dressing-room high-wattage lightbulbs, so that you thought you were defecating directly on the Equator.

As we aged, one special treat we looked forward to as kids was going to stay with Mickey at her place in Florida for a week or two weeks, I forget. This event would happen when we got to be around sixteen. My eldest sister went first, of course, and took one of her best friends at the time. They behaved so poorly, and made Mickey scream so ballistically, that they were summarily banned from ever coming back. A few years later, the same exact thing happened to my other sister, who brought our cousin.

I never got my Florida vacation at Mickey's place, but I've made my peace with that. Chances are that it might not have had a happy ending anyway.

My oldest sister and Mickey repaired their relationship and it was better than before. For years, they spoke on the phone nearly every week, and, because my sister is the oldest, Mickey often talked to her like a friend, a confidant, and it indeed harkened back to the early days of my sister's life when Mickey played such an active role in bringing her up after my mother divorced her first husband. My sister is taking Mickey's decision to end her life this way extremely poorly, and with a lot of hostility and frustration. She loves her great-aunt, her last link to her grandmother who died so very young. And Mickey loves my sister.

"I'll never forget," Mickey told my father at the hospital in Florida, "taking your daughter, maybe when she was seven or nine, to a play on Broadway. Had my boy pick her up in a limo... and I was farting all over that limo's beautiful leather seats, and she was horrified! She said she never knew that Aunt Mickey farted! 'Aunt Mickey,' she said to me, 'you can't fart in here! This is a limo!' And I said, 'Honey, I fart wherever I want!'"

I don't know exactly where I'm going with this-- which is unusual for me-- usually the post kind of just pours out and writes itself. I'm not asking for "Awww, I'm so sorry" comments, though I'll take them, but I'm not really pining for sympathy. I'm not terribly sad, it sounds strange to say. As Mickey's son said on Thursday when she was sent home from the hospital with hospice care, "Friday's my mom's birthday, and I think it's going to be her best birthday ever."

And so maybe I just want to send out my wish that I hope Mickey's birthday, her last birthday, was her best ever.

My Sister; The Writer

If you think I'm the only person in my family who's a wordsmith, you're wrong, damnit.

My eldest sister, whom I introduced to you a few posts ago (and who is not autistic, Jay) is quite a pronoun princess in her own right. She probably could have been a pretty decent professional writer, but, then again, so could Mitch Albom.

So enamored I am with her own quaint, eccentric skills with the written word, I am content to let her take over for me here at My Masonic Apron. After all, it's a snowed-in Sunday, and nobody's reading blogs on a snowed-in Sunday anyway, right? You're out chopping wood or sipping lattes on your microfiber couches whilst lazily glancing at the New York Times book review section or fornicating through strategically-placed holes in your flannel L.L. Bean adult onesies.

Actually, most of you are probably reading blogs. Losers.

But, you're lucky that you're doing that today, because you get the rare treat of two members of the Apron family for the price of none. On Friday, my sister had to take her BMW in for service, and she was given a Mini Cooper as a loaner car, and she informed me of this via email. I emailed her back and said, "Oooh, a Mini? What's it like?" Six minutes later, I received this reply:

"Wellllllllll-

The outside is white (dirty) and seems to me to be a bit creamy.

Black top.

The inside is black—the rental man said it’s leather seating---hrumph.

Here is a picture of the dash & you can enlarge the photo I think to see the details: http://miniusa.com/sections/gallery/image/1024x768/CH77482_1024.jpg the dash controls stuff lights up the red color of my car that you saw.

Weird to me that the tachometer is above steering wheel and the speedometer is off to the side, smack in the middle of the dash---looks like a Produce Scale!!!!!

Check out the gas gage in the middle of the speedometer. The slots light up.

All the controls are in the middle too, like the window rolldown (which is a silver metal switch like in old sci-fi movies) switch, etc.

They do have a circular computer key which you insert the whole piece and then push the “Start Engine” button like in my & Dad’s cars.

I guess it has antilock brakies because I almost had an accident on the way to work and I had to stand on the brakes and it made that grinding sound……

I kind of feel like I’m driving in something from Hammacher Schlemmer catalog --hahaha

In the photo, there are radio buttons on the steering wheel……in the one I have there are NOT, but there are shift paddles above the cross bar….the rental man said he didn’t know anything about them.

I don’t know if the top comes off or not, because there are switches above the rearview mirror & I don’t know what they are for.

The heat is barbas*—my fingers were frozen, but the seat warmers work and have 3 settings like the ones in my car now.

The radio station display looks like the one in my car, but the controls are all silver and instead of old timey looking, I think the looks & feel is space-age.

Is this a rear wheel drive car? Don’t know.

Xoxoxo,
Sister Apron"

* The word "barbas" is a touch of Apron-speak. It means "shitty."

Raise your hands if you think my sister should quit working for my dad and get a job at "Car & Driver."

Fantastic Mr. Apron

My oldest sister is 42 or whatever. She lives in a spotless condominium that contains super-expensive white leather furniture that she is afraid to sit on. Nobody else lives with her in her condo, save for two stuffed dogs whom she calls Genevieve and Bedford.

Her idea of a good time is going over to my parents house so my mother can make her toast and eggs, and my father can make her coffee. Actually, she never really has a good time when she's there, so maybe it's her idea of a bad time, just with food. She is very fond of the coffee. After she's efficiently polished off a cup, the manner in which she attacks the innards of the basically empty mug borders on pornographic.

She has some sort of gastrointestinal malfunction that severely limits what and when she can eat. Though my oldest sister burps frequently, seismically, and athletically, I don't think she has farted since 1997.

She is frequently berated, belittled and beseiged with the inanities of an unappreciative family and an unkind world. It is because of this that my wife and I take my oldest sister out to the movies.

They're usually kid movies, because that's sort of where she's at. I don't suppose it's any coincidence that one of her favorite television shows is "Arrested Development" because that basically describes her perfectly. Her second favorite show, by the way, is "Sponge Bob."

I don't mind going to kids movies with my wife and my oldest sister. She can saddle up that tricycle anytime she feels the need to. Sometimes, though, I get sad when I think about what might have been for her. If my mother didn't get pregnant at 17 or 18 or whenever it was. If her first marriage didn't collapse. If my other sister and I hadn't come along. Would it have been radically different? Would we be seeing her on "SNL" or be greedily reading her "Going Rogue" right now?

Well, maybe it is good we came along after all.

When she was still living at my parents house at age 26, it was easy, and funny, for me to envision what the next fifteen-or-so years were going to look like for her. As we've grown older, I suppose it is still easy, though sharply less funny, to picture her future. Needless to say, it will most likely involve lots of plastic-covered furniture, a Jamaican nurse, a 20-year supply of Chocolate "Ensure" drinks, and several restraining orders.

Earlier this year she announced that, if her life doesn't change drastically by the time she's 50, she's buying herself a Maserati. Or maybe it was 45. I suppose I wasn't really listening closely enough-- which is typical, really. Not, of course, that her acquisition of a Maserati will encourage people necessarily to listen to her-- but they'll certainly see her coming.

My wife often tells me that I'm "a good brother." I don't really know what means. Is it sending holiday cards? Because, I don't do that. Is it sending funny emails to my sister when she forwards me text alerts from the local police department about college students getting donked on the head and robbed at gunpoint? Well, that I do-- but that's kind of just what I do. Is it taking her to the movies whenever something rated PG comes down the pike? Maybe.

Two weeks ago, we saw "The Fantastic Mr. Fox," and we all loved it mercilessly together. I think mostly because it's about a fucked up family that has a penchant for dressing interestingly and saying the wrong thing.

The Party

"The Party" is the title of a 1968 movie starring Peter Sellers in the pre-political-correctness role of Indian actor Hrundi V. Bakshi, who plays the sitar, is extremely polite and clumsy and, oh yeah, wears swaths of dark brown body makeup. In the film, Hrundi is mistakenly invited to a swank Hollywood bash where feeds a parakeet "birdy num-num," a runaway elephant gets a bubble-bath, and the police are summoned.

This blog post does not refer to that party, but, rather my sister and her new husband's party, celebrating their marriage and the birth of my nephew-- both events happening at approximately the same moment.

This festive do took place on Saturday evening and, miraculously, my wife and I were able to attend, in the one moment of our lives that was not consumed by a "Pirates" rehearsal. My mother, whose neuroses are reaching new and teetering heights with the appearance of her first grandchild, hired a Registered Nurse at some ungodly hourly rate to babysit the child while we all went off to the party to enjoy ourselves.

Or, did we?

My wife and I drove my mother and my other sister to the party, which was held at a nice-ish restaurant. We had the second floor to ourselves. I pulled our car up to a sign that said "STOP: WAIT FOR VALET." No valet was there, so we waited. The man who eventually showed up knocking on the driver's side window and almost giving me apoplexy was not a valet, but a valet-in-training: my father.

"Mummy! Leave the keys in here! Go in-- have fun! I'll take care of this!"

"Where's the fucking valet?" I asked, knowing he was paying for one.

"Sveetie! Don't worry, you worry all the time. Leave the car with me," he cooed, stroking my cheek in that patronizing way of his as three other cars lined up behind mine.

"You going to take care of all these sonsofbitches, too?" I asked, pointing to a white SUV that, whoops, contained my 85-year-old step grandmother.

"Sure!" he cried.

Sure. Why not? He's the Bionic-Jew. He can park your cars, grill the hors d'oeuvres, uncork the bubbly, and clean up afterwards without breaking a sweat.

Oh, yeah, and he's also really good at yelling at everybody behind the scenes while maintaining an unflappable facade. He could have been Head Maitre d' at the Four Seasons. You know, if he wasn't Israeli.

I was very interested in consuming heavy quantities of succulent-looking hors d'oeuvres (yes, they were probably made by my father in between scrubbing the lavatories and applying fondant to the cake) but I was monopolized by a totally bizarre woman with stringy brown hair who introduced herself to me as the woman who "used to make me peanut butter sandwiches."

For a millisecond, I was scared to death that I had just met my real mother.

Fortunately, she was the mother of my first friend, who lived a few doors down from us back in the old days. She had a daughter who was my sister's age, and they played together, and I played with her son until they moved away when I was around six years old. The daughter came bounding in later, proudly displaying her gigantic new husband and her gigantic new breasts, which were careening out of her black lacy top.

"What the hell was that nutcase from our street doing with her tits on display like some Victorian prostitute?"

"She just bought them-- her mother has a new set, too," my mother told me on the phone the next day.

The silicone might have been flowing freely at this shindig, but the mixed drinks were not-- unless you paid for them, that is. This was a huge bone of contention for my brother-in-law's mother, whose family, um, likes their alcohol wet and constant-- through an IV drip, if possible. I was shocked that my parents, both teetotallers and tightwads, even sprung for free beer and wine at the bar. My father was all prepared to make an apologetic speech about the situation to everyone when my oldest sister convinced him to shut the fuck up, which is not an easy feat to accomplish.

Believe me, I've tried.

As for my side of the family, I was fortunate enough to be seated next to my alcoholic aunt, who was already H.O.A. (Hammered On Arrival) so paying for mixed drinks didn't seem to bother her very much. I have no doubt that she had a bottle of rubbing alcohol and a funnel in her purse anyway. She's the one who rather infamously prepared for my dry wedding by dressing in a sari and consuming some unknown, fetid liquid out of a hip-flask in the bathroom.

My thoroughly inebriated aunt hissed and slurred into my right ear for two-and-a-half hours straight, and the topics of conversation roamed haphazardly from her opinion of my long-deceased grandmother ("Biggest snob in the world! When she was diagnosed with lymphoma, she decided she wanted a mink. Your fucking grandfather bought her a mink AND a chinchilla!"), her taste in music, ("I've got Emilie Autumn on my iPod-- she's a punk violinist. Suicidal. A goddamn genius. She was institutionalized several times so she had a lot of time to practice violin."), and her thoughts on male sexuality, ("Your sister should be on top of that handsome young kid at the table behind us. After 18, their semen gets all fucked up.")

I don't want to seem like an exaggerator when I say that she talked to just me for two-and-a-half hours straight-- she graced others with her presence and charming perspicacity as well, forcing my family to make apologies for indelicacies other than just the cash bar debacle.

Maybe I would have had a better time with a different seating arrangement, but I don't think so. The party was celebrating a dubious marriage and a kid who was being babysat by a nurse, harkening back to the way my parents rolled back in the old days, when my mother had a nurse for the first six weeks at home after each of us was born. I suppose, in that and other respects, some things never change. My aunt is always inappropriate. My parents are always apologizing. I never get to eat as much as I want. The best boobs are always fake. And the one thing people really care about is whether or not the drinks are on the house.

Forging Ahead Back In Time

While I was away on vacation, my sister had a baby.

I was relaxing on a small beach in Rockport, Maine, watching a ten-year-old blonde girl stab a hopefully deceased lobster with a stick when I got the typically dry text message from my father:

"NOAH is doing great was born
around 1 today big baby 7 lb 11 oz
everyone is doing great i love you
dad take"

My father's text messages are always the same: factual, uneffusive, grammatically dubious/containing scant punctuation and always, always concluding with one extraneous word. I suppose that, whenever he wants to send a text message, he merely recycles one he already sent, deletes most of it, starts anew, and forgets to delete the final word of the old message. Often I receive texts from him that end in a word having to do with his business-- manufacturing undergarments for sports teams. One day prior to Noah being born, he sent me a text about my mother:

"mommy is a nervous about everything
Now I know where you got it from ha ha ha
love dad phillies"


One thing he has gotten very good at with his phone is taking pictures. My wife and I enjoyed several of them while we were in Maine, sent as attachments to his bizarre text messages ("mom @ noah" [ed: I presume that meant "mom & noah"] "you sister is running away" [ed: the picture that accompanied this text is my oldest sister holding Noah as if he was a bomb slathered in radioactive honey] and, my personal favorite, "mom is high" [ed: I have no idea what the fuck that means.]) It was only upon our arrival home tonight that we were treated to the full barrage of Noah pictures on my father's cell-phone, including two others of my oldest sister holding her new nephew both gingerly and increduously. According to my father, my oldest sister's nose looks inordinately larger in these pictures than it ever has before. He now refers to her as "Pinocchio."

While a new baby was entering my family's life back in Pennsylvania, it seemed only fitting that I should make the acquaintance of an old baby in Rhode Island. Last night, I got to experience my wife as a captivating, newly-minted four-year-old girl, courtesy of some dusty Betamax video tapes, and the perhaps even dustier Betamax player that resides in her mother and father's bedroom and, miraculously, still functions. While we fumbled our way through setting up the Betamax player, which had lain dormat since, I presume, around 1987, when most of those items went the way of the dinosaurs and vinyl bench car seats, I realized that people were more intelligent back when Betamax players were popular. For example, the Betamax video cassette cases were emblazoned with the word "epitaxial." I mean, I can only presume that average, run-of-the-mill 1987 grown-ups knew what that word meant, otherwise they wouldn't buy things listing it as an apparent selling point or virtue. Also, you had to be pretty clever to actually set up the Betamax player, and being Hercule fucking Poirot couldn't hurt if you need to find the tracking dial.

I can't speak for Mrs. Apron but, for me, it was a pretty strange experience, sitting there on the edge of her parent's bed, next to my 27-year-old wife, watching her four-year-old self be-bopping around a totally different world. I mean, there she was, opening up presents that turned out to be not Anthropologie skirts but Babar & Celeste music boxes and puzzles. And, unlike in all the photographs I've seen, this version actually talked! She looked straight into the lens, at me, and she told me about how she went into the swimming pool at the Howard Johnson's and she stuck her head under! I mean-- what a big girl! What a sweet girl. A bossy girl on occasion, but, on the whole, a sweet girl. With her raven-haired father and her smooth-faced mother, clad in the eye-popping duds of the day. Frozen in time and bustlingly alive with motion, all at once. I'm glad the Betamax held on for one more trip down an epitaxial-laden memory lane.

We never had a video camera when I was a little boy. The earliest film of me comes from when I was twelve years old, filming a 6th grade English mockumentary about the Loch Ness Monster in which I played four characters, including the program host, and I referred unknowingly to another character called "Constable Clitoris." Thanks, Monty Python. Fortuantely, my English teacher refrained from calling home about that. Though it was an innocent faux-pas, the more innocent, earlier years exist only in still pictures, and I think that's actually okay. If I could see my beautiful and energetic mother moving around, devoid of her trigger finger and her arthritis, my robust father with more, well, hair, I just don't know. I don't know if I could sit through that without hot, blinding tears streaming down my cheeks. I don't know how my wife did it. I felt a thickness in my throat last night, and they weren't even my movies, my history. I guess I just look at the world differently than she does, and I think that's okay, too. Sometimes it's nice to just sit back and enjoy the world the way it used to be, without obsessing and depressing about what it is now or what it will be in days and years to come.

Well, I suppose it is anyway. I wouldn't really know.

It's okay, though. There are always new memories to enjoy, to someday join the old ones. There may not be Betamax films to preserve in a layer of dust-bunnies, but there are text messages, like the one my father sent me on Tuesday. He's been on a mad dash to find my sister, her husband, and their brand-new baby a house, seeing as they're rapidly outgrowing my sister's one-bedroom apartment. He sent me a text to inquire about houses for sale on our street:

"We just saw a twin near you the
realestate kathleen stupid blond told
me twice on the phone 185,000 i went
there at 5 to c it she said sorry mistake
its 285,000 i almost toppoled her out
the fucking window"

A Naked Marriage

My sister got married today.

She got married in judge's chambers, at approximately 4:00pm this afternoon. I was at home, having just walked the dog, and was in the process of trying to decide whether to take an online quiz about Poe, Melville and Dickinson, or masturbate. Today, the scholar in me won out. And I suppose it's better that I was engaged in an innocuous, studious act at the moment my sister was getting married-- better ju-ju and all that.

I never imagined that my sister would get married and I wouldn't be there. Then again, I never thought my sister would ever get married, and I certainly never thought that my sister would be eight-and-a-half months pregnant. My mother says that she saw it coming for years, but she also said that about September 11th. Well, perhaps I lack my mother's foresight/prognostication skills, but nevertheless, here we were, tonight, at 5:00pm, on the back deck of my sister's new in-laws, my sister as big as a zeppelin, celebrating a marriage that occurred with bewildering speed. I was informed that it was happening last Friday, and, Tuesday night-- kaboom.

My mother, my other sister, my wife and I were all there as my father made a semi-coherent speech that managed to embarrass just about every single person present. Being Israeli, it's remarkable what he gets away with. My side of the family all held glasses of champagne from which we all pretended to sip after the marathon toast was completed. From the moment we arrived, the groom's four-year-old son bombarded his father, my sister's new husband, with one question over and over again,

"Can I take off all my clothes now?"

After the photographs were taken, his request was granted and he careened through the evening's festivities in nothing but a pair of olive-drab colored Osh-Kosh underpants.

The boy wasn't the only one celebrating this naked marriage. My sister's now exceedingly ample breasts were positively valoomping out of her blouse. It was easily the most naked wedding celebration I'd ever attended, but then, I've never been to a wedding in New Orleans.

People we appropriate, by and large. There were certainly elephants in the room a-plenty, there was even a bichon that was the size of an elephant. This fucking thing looked like more of a basset hound than a bichon, and more of an ottoman than a dog. But, in spite of the elephants and the fetuses and the things left unsaid and the sidewards glances and the whispered side conversations and the groomly debates about what to call my father, things went pretty smoothly. The kid provided ample entertainment via streaking and beating the holy shit out of a starter child's drum set in the living room. As I watched him cavorting around in his underwear, enjoying himself the way four-year-olds can, barely aware that anything significant occurred today at 4pm that will change his life forever, I was seized with a palpable desire to be him, or at least his age. I wanted to run up and down the driveway in my Osh-Kosh underpants playing wall-ball with the kids next door, or giving my broken Rock 'Em, Sock 'Em Robots to my grandfather for a quick repair. I wanted to not give a hoot in hell about what was going on with the adults in the room-- all the drama, all the tension, all the questions and the doubts and the bullshit because, as much as I like to say "I don't care" about what my sister does or how all the stupid things she does and the irrational, ill-advised choices she makes are inconsequential to me, well, that just isn't true.

I do care.

I just wish that sometimes I had the excuse of being four-years-old. Or even Israeli.

I don't know how things are going to turn out for my sister, or her new husband, or her new step-son, or her soon-to-be-born child, but I care about how things will turn out. I expressed some concerns about what was happening to my mother on the phone and she said, "It will all work out."

"You mean that we're all going to die?"

"Jesus Christ," she said.

I can't help being morbid. I've always been that way. I've always obsessed about death, ever since I was old enough to know what it was, and probably before that. Tonight, my mother asked my sister's new husband how old the furniture dog was.

"Eleven," she answered, then remarking that the life-expectancy of a bichon was around 15 years.

"Oh, well don't think about it," my mother sagely advised, which I found very funny.

"Yeah," I said, "I never do."

And then I thought about what I'd said when I saw no reaction from my sister's new mother-in-law. She was meeting me for the very first time, didn't know me from Hell's bartender. Anyone who knows me would have cracked up at my saying I never thought about death, or they would have at least given me a knowing smile. It's funny how you can lie, stone-faced to people who don't know you, and they have no idea. One day, I hope that she gets to know me, to know all of us, better.

I hope a lot of things, for my sister, for her husband, for their kids. I hope it all works out, and not just in the end.

Hi, I'm White Trash

My telephone rang at 11:04pm last night, and, like any neurotic, Jewish worry-wart, it scared the shit out of me. Someone's dead. Or at least bleeding profusely. I had left my telephone upstairs on the bed and my wife and I were watching "Law & Order" downstairs because, now that we have cable, there isn't a moment when "Law & Order" isn't on. And, even though Elliot was shouting at tear-stained Hillary Duff about pictures of her grabbing a man's crotch on her "Face-Space," I distinctly heard the theme from Terry Gilliam's "The Adventures of Baron von Munchausen" blaring out from upstairs.

Tell me there's someone else in the universe with that ringtone.

I raced up the stairs to retrieve my phone and saw that I had just missed a call from my oldest sister. My oldest sister is a world-renowned hypochondriac. Having a younger brother who is an emergency medical technician only makes this condition worse. Every time I visit my parent's house for a quiet family dinner, she is there, in her assigned seat, waiting patiently to accost me with some ridiculous malady that I can diagnose and/or treat. When I enter the dining room, she promptly sticks a rash-covered limb or a misshapen mole or a prominent zit in my face. Most recently, I was greeted by her wide-open mouth displaying a uvula covered in dark blood.

So, naturally, I feared the worst.

Fortunately, this time, she wasn't lying on her kitchen floor in a pool of phlegm or urine. She was calling to gossip about our other sister.

"Did you know she was getting married?" my oldest sister blurted out on the phone.

Actually, I did know, but I had only found out that morning. It will be a civil ceremony, in judge's chambers, sometime during the week of August 10th-14th-- whenever the judge gets a break from mediating traffic court, I guess.

She's marrying the guy she's been seeing for about a year-and-a-half. They guy who impregnated her. The guy who already has a kid from a one-night stand in college. The guy with tattoos all over the parts of his body that the outside world can see. The guy who's a post-man and also a part-time employee at the pizza joint where he's worked since before he could drive a car. The guy who has a baby mama.

My sister is eight-and-a-half months pregnant with this guy's kid. The kid who will be my nephew. When she told me of the impending marriage to the unenthusiastic lothario, who apparently proposed to her while they were sitting on the couch watching TV, my response was,

"Oh. Okay."

I wanted "congratulations" to slip from my lips, but I didn't feel very congratulatory. Besides, the information was presented to me in a very ambivalent way, so that's kind of how I responded. Tone for tone.

My oldest sister, unfortunately, had found out about the impending nuptials from our 84-year-old great-aunt, who lives in Pompano Beach where she takes care of her 92-year-old husband who is suffering from Alzheimers and, consequently, tries to pick up married women in their twenties at the local country club and routinely walks around his condo in nothing but a t-shirt that doesn't cover his dong, as my parents observed when they spent a week there two months ago.

"Is your mom happy about the wedding?" my great-aunt asked my sister.

"Um, what wedding?" my sister asked.

"Oh."

Yeah. It's that kind of a thing.

In conversing with my pregnant middle sister, she also told me to "save the date" for a "beer and hoagie, hey, we got married and had a kid party." She also warned me not to make her beau's family feel "uncomfortable" by wearing a tie to said event. I wanted to ask her if I should not shower for a week or tug on my crotch incessantly at the party in order to make them feel more at home, but I didn't. I've done a lot of growing up since I was fifteen, and I know now that the cheap thrill of engaging my sister with smartass comments is short-lived and only causes familial turmoil.

"Oh. Okay," I said as I put the event into my Treo's calendar.

I don't know how this all happened to our family. Children out of wedlock, baby mama drama, white trash inlaws... it just doesn't seem real to me. But it is. The bulge underneath my sister's shirt tells me that it's very, very real. I know my mother wants my sister to be married before this baby's born, to legitimize the whole thing, but is what's happening here worth legitimizing? What if she doesn't love him?

"Well," my great-aunt opined to my eldest sister over the phone, "after the baby's born, they can just get divorced!"

Yeah. Good idea.