balletic eyes are crossing

spent the day with my parents. this has lead to weariness. i helped my mom make fruitcake (apparently this is not just an urban myth) and it was actually very tasty. i asked if they had any wine and she got a huge smile on her face and said "really?" very excitedly; i had 1.5 glasses and she drank the rest of the bottle, as is usually the case at family gatherings... she proceeded to get more and more animated, much to my father's obvious consternation. i gave them a box o' swag from trader joes, the coolest grocery store in these parts if one is seeking out, say, corn relish or dried banana strips or chili mangoes or prepackaged naan. they surprised the crap out of me with 3 framed pictures that i'd drawn when i was a teenager. i hadn't seen these drawings in years. it made me actually cry. those are very nearly the coolest gifts i've ever received (right up there with the glass starfish that hangs in my window, the 'golden ticket of wuv' that lives in a box above my stove, and the original 1969 life magazine of the beatles.... but i digress...)
xmas is bullshit, really, but there was something comforting as fuck about seeing their tree in the corner, with ornaments i remember as a kid- it made me feel nostalgic and oddly melancholy, a reminder that we've all gotten older and distance has changed the dynamics. they also gave me a photograph of us posing beside an iceberg in portage lake- back when the glacier actually produced icebergs. i was about 9. my parents are smiling and youthful; i am wearing a bright pink parka and glasses, scowling.
the situation with my oma and opa (my mother's parents- uber deutsche) is severely fucked up. they had an appointment to tour and put a down payment on a unit in an assisted living community (and to further my hatred of such treacly euphemisms, the place is called "the willows", as if there are willow trees around here) and completely blew it off. my grandfather is still driving, despite the harsh reccommendations otherwise of his doctors and family. "they are two incredibly selfish people" wrote my uncle's wife in an email to my mother. replied my mother: "it is difficult to believe that we four kids were raised by such ghouls and turned out fairly functionally." (i am delighted by her usage of "ghouls" to describe her parents- not only is it mostly accurate, it is an allover fantastic and far too underutilized word.) realizing how much crap she's put up with from them for her entire life is very sobering. "any story we tell about our childhood involves one of us getting punished for something," she wrote back. "there are no real happy memories."
i asked my parents tonight if they considered their childhoods happy. "yes" my father said immediately. "i thought it was normal to have a dad in a wheelchair." my mother laughed bitterly into her empty wine glass and proceeded to tell a story about when she was about 10 and it snowed. her parents went to the store and she was put in charge of her 3 younger siblings. "don't go outside" they were told. "if you walk on the snow you'll kill the grass." it rarely fucking snows in tacoma, so once the parents were gone they went outside to play and made a huge snowman ("the biggest on the street!" said my mother), all being very careful to walk in the bare grass of the snowman's wake. when oma and opa returned home there was no marvelling about the snowman or how cool the weather was; they were instructed to line up and pull their pants down ("because the belt hurts more on bare skin") and opa spanked them all. yes, with his belt. i hear stories like that and wonder anew how my mom must have felt to watch my father punish me. i never had The Belt, thank fucking god, but i did get smacked around, and once i received a black eye. "do you think you had a happy childhood?" my mother asked me. "sometimes" i replied, smiling to keep it light, feeling guilty for knowing that my crap is nothing comparable, feeling grateful as fuck that no matter how horrible shit once was between the three of us, we are now adults and friends who are able to talk about such things. my mother immediately flitted into a story about when she and my father took mushrooms and were too freaked out to go to the laserium at seattle center. apparently elton john was playing the colesium (since reinvented as key arena) that same night, circa captain fantastic, and the crowds attending were dressed up in full elton regalia: huge glasses, feathered hats, haberdashery. it rubbed them the wrong way. i was seconds away from relating my similar tale of mushrooms on hallow's eve, tweakishly being served food by a corpse with a dagger protruding from her bosom, but decided against it.
i am ignoring the paranoia of earlier in the week about the new guy. i think we're on sort of the same page, maybe. i am not going to jinx this any further with my circuitous trollop, so enough of that. sountrack of the past several days: trey anastasio "sleep again." (the first part of the album is very mediocre; the last part improves... just like phish...)
12% of americans name their boats 'serenity.' thank you, uncle john's bathroom reader, and thank you parents for having it laying around to school me.