Wednesday’s Child Says Goodbye
Omnia mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis
“All things change, and we change with them.”Please note that this blog spans a broad period of time. The intervening years have brought many things into my life, including divorce and remarriage. As such, some older posts reference a relationship which is no longer active. In context, however, the portrayal is accurate.
For many reasons, I have chosen to let entries such as this one remain in the overall continuity of the site.
Some final episodes from the last few days of the Family Reunion…
Walking along the street with one of my nephews, he tells me of seeing dark figures from time to time, creeping around his house. But they vanish when he tries to tell anyone. “My dad says I’m psychotic,” he tells me. “But I’m probably only hallucinating.”
Turns out one of my cousins has racked up a $400 bill on his room, using the in-room dataport to access e-mail and do some work online. Only problem is, he was dialing up with a long-distance number. Halfway through the week, he gets a call from the front desk.
My wife asks “What day is it?”
“Wednesday.”
“Wednesday’s child is full of grace,” quoth my uncle.
“Actually, it’s ‘woe’ for Wednesday’s child,” I tell him.
“Sam and Julia were both born on Wednesday,” she says.
“Yup.”
“What day of the week were you born?”
I do not look up: “Wednesday.”
Karaoke has become a family tradition, but this time it’s a little flat. I do a passable “Like a Virgin” accompanied by a lackluster striptease. Disappointing. The high point of the evening is my nephews singing “Bohemian Rhapsody”. Sandberg very nearly saves the night with a surprisingly good “Bizarre Love Triangle” augmented with a shimmy I suspect she swiped from Cameron Diaz. She’s great but it’s ultimately a washout, probably because my brother Jim has gone back to Sacramento to work on the gubernatorial recall campaign. Since Arnold announced his candidacy, the signal to noise ratio in Jim’s life as a political consultant has increased exponentially. So I blame Arnold for the disappointing night of karaoke.
Staying up late on Wednesday night, talking music and airport security, followed up by a long conversation about the future and I got to bed sad once again.
The last day features a trip to the tidepools which turn out not to be tidepools but an actual normal California beach. I hate the beach and feel particularly pleased to me moping around in jeans, boots, and a black t-shirt. Fortunately the day is mildly cool (not unlike myself) and so I’m not utterly a freak. My brother and I escape for an hour or so, ostensibly to pickup lunch for everyone. He prowls the winding cliffside roads, searching for a clear cell phone signal so he can continue his battle to make the world safe for Fascism.
The last evening ends with a major battle, people behaving badly and burning bridges. Just like last time. If only we could shorten these things by one day, maybe we could avoid the last battles that always happen and end things on a high note instead.
Every problem, every argument has the residue of all other unresolved issues imbedded in it. So each one is larger than the last, and more difficult to manage. Each new battle is fiercer than what came before, and the stakes are higher. One day something could prove to be impossible to resolve. This is how things happen. This is how companies and countries and communities and families and relationships erode over time. Faulty DNA that self-replicates it’s deficiencies into each new generation, stronger and more lethal than before, like a virus.
Friday morning we all pile into cars with more baggage in town than what we came with and head out — some for the airport, some for parts north or south, and some (like me) for a couple of days at my brother Scott’s house before flying out to points east.
Saying goodbye to my mother and father.
There are some things that are so sad, it’s impossible not to break down. Caring for a suffering child, reassembling a broken heart, missing absent friends, saying goodbye to family . . . I’d just as soon live on a rocky limestone island somewhere than have to go through it all again, over and over again…