Just taking a moment
My Godmother—The Gaydi Project’s dearest friend from college—was visiting her sons in Seattle over the holidays. She stayed at my mother’s place which was fortunate for us, given that she’s a chef. This meant Sam, Ruby and I didn’t have to go the usual route of subsisting on Red Vines, red wine and weed. Far from going hungry, this year we feasted gourmet-style until our pants were uncomfortably tight. At least mine were until I secretly unbuttoned them beneath my long sweater and then went back for second helpings.
There was a lot of history in that candle-lit apartment, where two families—both headed by women—gathered on Christmas night with four grown children, one grandchild, a husband, a girlfriend, several members of the chosen family and so many intersecting stories alongside them. Memories were shared and re-shared and at one point, hysterically re-invented. Wine was consumed. Laughter predominated. There was an over-abundance of love, a richness that can’t be bought and an open recognition of how lucky we all are to have what we do between us. I may not have had the most traditional or even the happiest upbringing, but I wouldn’t swap it for anything.
As is the ritual in my Godmother’s home, she selected and read a short passage that was particularly meaningful to her and surely as it was intended, perfectly captured the sentiment overflowing in my mother’s apartment that night. It’s posted below.
I hope everyone spent their holiday season surrounded by people they love the deepest and that 2009 brings more of that for all of us.
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(Excerpted from The Maytrees, by Annie Dillard)
“Just as few men love their wives so much as their daughters, few, if any, women love anyone so much as their children. Parents love adopted babies with the same passion. Often she missed infant Petie now gone—his random gapes, his bizarre buttocks. How besotted they gazed at each other nose-on-nose. He fit her arms as if they two had invented how to carry a baby. While she walked, he patted her shoulder in time with her steps. If he stopped patting, she stopped walking. If his pats speeded up, she stepped lively. He was driving her; they both died laughing.
Later, she washed his filthy hair and admired his vertebrae, jiggled his head in toweling that smelled like his steam. She needled splinters and sandspur spines from his insteps as long as he let her. Every one of those Peties and Petes was gone. That is who she missed, those boys overwritten. Their replacement now sat at the green table wiping crumbs onto his plate. Pete’s friends came by to get him for a party no one wanted to attend without him. He was good-natured; could he also be the life of the party? Did she ever know a noisy fisherman?”
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