Grim News

I wrote this after Thanksgiving in 2007.  With the holidays approaching and the recent birth of my daughter, I felt like putting it out there again. -Grim

Executive Summary: More maudlin shit about the holidays without my dad. I’ll “get over it” when I’m god damned good and ready.

Still with me? That’s nice, but this is for me, if you get something out of it, that’s great too.

So we had Thanksgiving dinner at my stepmother’s house. My step mom, her new significant other, some friends. and of course, my wife.

My stepmother broke out “The Good China”, which as any of you who understand why I capitalized those words knows means “It’s Officially the Holiday Season Now.” It felt like just about every other holiday meal with the obvious exception of the deceased patriarch and obligatory crying and swapping of stories among those who knew him.

The table is the traditional “Table which is way too damn long to fit in a normal sized dining room, but we’ll do it anyway”. Places are set, and after some drinks and socializing, which involved beer and the end of the LSU/Arkansas game, dinner was ready.

As everyone filed into the dining room to begin the hyper-ingestion of tryptophan laden goodness, I went to my usual space near the head of the table and started to sit down. I felt a gentle nudge from my stepmother and she said, very quietly, “Son, you’re at the head of the table now.”

You have no idea how those words can change your whole perspective.

For those of you who may be unacquainted with the niceties of formal dining, let me take a minute to explain.

You’ve surely seen large families eating a holiday meal, and you’ve probably noticed that the father always sits at the end of the table. That’s old-school etiquette/tradition, and it isn’t an accident. The head of the table, socially-speaking, is “master of the feast” and the de-facto host of the dinner. What my stepmother was saying to me was “You are the head of the family now”.

As I said, it was an “instant perspective change”. I was still thinking “But this is Dad’s chair!” when my stepmother asked me to say the blessing. Since I really didn’t feel like adding hypocrisy to my already formidable list of sins, I handle it the proper way and ask my stepmother’s significant other (who is more religiously inclined, and the oldest guest present) to lead us in giving thanks. After a short prayer, I thought to myself “Wow, I handled that pretty well.” and then got right back to “What the hell am I doing in dad’s chair?”

As the dinner conversation started, I felt like all eyes were on me. There is a big difference between looking across the table and seeing one person, and looking across the table and seeing everyone seated in front of you. I had noticed that the conversations, unconsciously I’m sure, always focused on me somehow. Someone would make a point, and look at me and say “Isn’t that right?” or “What do you think?” Each time I heard that, I heard a voice inside my head “This is dad’s chair.”

As the meal progressed, and plates were emptied for the 3rd or 4th time, I slowly started to accept the fact that it was “my chair” now. I did nothing to earn it, nor do I particularly want it, especially not the way I wound up getting it. I just happened to be the person it came to. I further realized that when my wife and I have children of our own, one of them is going to have the same experience I had. They’re going to sit in “my chair” and think to themselves “I shouldn’t be here, this is dad’s chair.” In a way, it’s a kind of royalty. The only reason I am in this chair is because I am the son of the previous occupant. Someday, I will leave this chair to make room for my child, and I might not be there to tell him (or her) that it’s his chair now. They’ll have to figure it out on their own and do the best they can to be the kind of parent they want to be. Just as I will.

Happy Holidays…

-Grim

…and all we can do is smile back.

I got a note from a friend of mine recently.  Josh and I go way back.  We went to college together, we drank together, we worked together.  I was fortunate enough to meet his family on multiple occasions, and we have both stood as groomsmen at each of our respective weddings.

We’re tight, in other words.

In the course of the 15 or 16 years that we have known each other, we developed little in-jokes that we could make at each other’s expense, knowing that nobody else in the world might find it funny, but we would.  Whether it was me losing my temper at a movie theater and throwing a full large coke at his feet, (or him bringing that story up at the most awkward possible time), or my making jokes about dating his little sister which would cause him to come as close to physical violence as anything else in this world. (for a doubly ironic twist, I’m twice his size… literally)  Josh has one of the most biting senses of humor that I’ve ever known, and a total lack of fear with respect to timing and audience.  He’d make a killer stand-up comic.

I tell you all of this because Josh wrote to me about a robbery in New Orleans.  A couple of punks went into a bakery and held the place up at gunpoint.   An off-duty police officer shot one of the teenagers twice in the chest while the other robber fled the scene.  As the wounded thug was falling, he started spraying bullets all over the place.  Thankfully, nobody else was hurt, but what really chilled me to the bone was reading the name of the Bakery’s owner.

Josh’s little sister.

Hillary Guttman and I have spoken maybe a dozen words to one another in all of the decade and a half that Josh and I have been friends.  However, I am extremely proud of her reaction to the botched robbery that could have very easily ended her life.  She didn’t “play the victim” or crawl into a shell out of fear. No, she kept her head high and dealt with the aftermath of a very dangerous situation with nerve and humor.

Gunshot Cookies

She patched up all of the bullet holes with little cutout hearts because she was thankful that those bullets only hit furniture and not people.

If you are ever in New Orleans and have the opportunity, stop by the Laurel Street Bakery (5433 Laurel St., 897-0576) and buy something, a muffin, a cookie, just something.  Folks like Hillary need to know that there are people in this world who admire them and are rooting for them.

As for the robbers, I can only hope that Darwin does his job on these two slowly and painfully.

It has only been on hiatus for 14 or 15 years, but I’ve finally decided that it’s time for me to get back to “writing whatever the hell I feel like writing about” on the web.

Unlike my work on other blogs, expect this to be fairly uncensored and not-so-fairly vulgar.  I won’t pretend to be unbiased or occasionally narcissistic, but hopefully I’ll be able to massage my ego while entertaining you at the same time.

More to come.

-Grim