Learn From It

A couple of weeks ago, I agreed to do a thing that I didn't really want to do: spend Thanksgiving day with people I don't know. Normally, this isn't something that bothers me. In fact, I'm one of those people that thrives in a group of large people, and although often it takes me a while to engage strangers in that kind of situation, I eventually do. And it's fun. And I always learn a thing, even if that thing is that I don't ever want to be around that person again. Kidding. Kinda.

It didn't have anything to do with where we were spending it. In fact, if it were other than Thanksgiving (well, or Christmas), I would have been eager to go. There are just some traditions, I guess, that when they “get in” early enough and/or deep enough, they stick with you no matter how far away from your origins you discover your own true center.

As I said, Thanksgiving and Christmas—the “dreaded Winter Holidays” as Sam calls them—have me wanting to be with my family (including the chosen family of friends as well) or to be a homebody, hunkered down with any kind of food and a stack of movies, huddled next to Sam and shuttered away from the rest of the world, and, most importantly, not around a bunch of strangers.

So we went, and I'm so very glad I did. Matt Consola had graciously offered to include us in his family's holiday—30 people at dinner!—and so we headed down to San Jose (not all that far from the Mothership, as it turns out).

I met some people when we walked through the door—the kitchen was a crazyhouse of activity as you might imagine—and headed out back. Matt showed me his father's “year 'round” garden and we talked about Italian peppers and how I am still convinced that citrus trees are a ruse to fool us non-Natives and that oranges and the like are actually produced in factories, and then I decided it was the right time to call my own family.

So, standing in the garden wearing just a dress shirt and slacks—hey, it was 70 degrees out! On November 24!—I called my parents. Mom answered the phone and that's when the gnawing ache started: I wanted to be there with them. I talked to her for a while, then she told me that one of my long-lost (see “crazy bitch ex-sister-in-law” entries) nephews was actually there for dinner! She put him on the phone; he didn't remember my voice, and I certainly didn't recognize his. I only knew it was not any I recognized and I deduced it was Nick. We talked for a bit—he's 15 and thinking about coming out this wintertime so we can all go snowboarding/skiing in Tahoe—and then he put my dad on the phone. More gnawing ache. I love my dad. I love all my family, and I'm so much like both of my parents that I can't give priority, but I love talking to my dad. We are not of same temperament, but we are of the same kind of disposition: abstract, artistic, visceral, emotional. We have plans to talk sometime next week and I can't wait for it.

I also talked to brother Sam, then his wife Karen. Then my brother Anthony and his fiancée Jess (both formerly of Phoenix and now back living in Pennsylvania). By the time I hung up the phone I was exhausted and invigorated, missing them and having them immediately there close in my heart. And the phone read: 40:10. That's the longest I've been on a phone call that I can remember.

So back to the immediate festivities I went, striking up a conversation with Uncle Joe (Guiseppi), talking about Chicago and Pittsburgh and the fact that I went to Carnegie Mellon and that he knew someone who went there, too. And the differences between their Italian family and the Italian part of my ancestry and the neighborhood Italians I grew up with. I told him what my sister in law, Karen, had said about the “wops” (Uncle Joe and I laughed about that word): “Gobble-freakin'-gobble!” was the judgment of Thanksgiving by the “goombahs” back home. Joe laughed at that one, too. As did his wife, Pat.

We talked about finding “Home”, which is for some of us different to where we grew up. He is, perhaps, 15 years my senior, and new to me, and yet we were talking like old friends.

Remarkable.

Most of the “pups” were also there, and as Sam pointed out in his blog, no drama ensued. But in large part that's due to labored avoidance on my part. Labored, until, as I pointed out, I discovered Uncle Joe and whiled away and waxed poetic about family, about our pasts and about the collective past of the Valley (“yeah, well, Pat remembers when there was an actually orchard at Stevens Creek and De Anza!”).

We also talked about wine. And drank wine. We practically ran the gamut on reds—Italian wines, our fine California wines, and even “frog wine” as Joe called the Frenchie-French stuff.

Conviviality continued through dinner and afterwards, more alcohol. This time in the form of a caustic, kerosene-like aperitif called Fernet Branca. Supposed to ease the digestion, they said, but I patted my own belly and reminded myself that I have no trouble with digestion. Still, I tried it. I think parts of my tongue are necrotic because of it. Seriously. I think it was all a dare.

I'm so glad I went. I'm so glad that I talked to my own family (but that's always true). I'm glad that Matt Consola is in my life.

I have a pretty good life, I must say. My 'sense of abundance', as my therapist Ronald calls it, is unassailable. Bad things happen to everyone, it's all in how you handle them, or abide them, or dispense with them. Or learn from them. Or transmute them into something rife with positivity.

Does that make me some kind of pollyanna? Well, fuck you too, if you try to trivialize me thus. :)

It might surprise some of you out there, those of you who have some idea of what life has been like for me in the recent and receding past, to hear me talk about how much I love my life, but I hope you get to know me better: at least well enough to not be surprised by the engine of optimism that drives my life onward and upward. To that end, these Counting Crow lyrics may help:

The devil’s in the dreamin’
You see yourself descending
From the building to the ground

And you watch the sky receding
And you spin to see the traffic
Rising up and it’s so quiet
And you’re surprised and then you wake

For all the things I’m losing
I might as well resign myself to try and make a change

I'm not losing anything more than we all are, as we trundle along in our lives on these borrowed days, but still, I try.

Traditions are not designed, they emerge. And in emerging and continuing, they change. And the best kinds of change are expansions. Like how Matt's parents expanded the meaning of family and holiday and tradition to include strangers like us, thus improving our experience and hopefully us improving theirs.

And now understanding that things can be improved, why not do the thousand little things each of us can nearly-effortlessly do to make a change?

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