She laughs at me with my loud yawn.
“You and your sound effects” she says on her way to the bathroom.
I protest that she is making fun of me, in that whiny husband-tone.
You are so loud I can hear it in my office when you are in the bathroom, groaning in the morning.
Really, I thought that was a private bathroom?
Not when you’re in there.
That’s my main place to play Words with Friends, so sometimes I may be groaning or exulting over a well-played word… And that’s the problem…in my tribe we laugh off what others would call manners.
My wife is clear that I was raised by wolves.
“Your mother blowing her nose like a banshee, no regard to how many rooms it can be heard in…and your father with his phlegm-clearing coughs at the dinner table…”
She’s right I admit silently to myself while offering my standard feeble protests.
I was raised by two southern teenagers with chips on their shoulders and a stand for doing everything themselves, not listening to their elders, figuring it out themselves. When I was three they were 23, just out of college and in the Navy, being told where to go and who to be. Perfect compared with all that awful freedom back home in Baton Rouge. Freedom to be a part of the white ruling class even though it gave them no specific individual advantage, and the freedom to keep being part of all that society had created. Their elders had given them Little Rock – which seemed like next door to them – in 1957 when I was not quite one year old. Dad says they figured it would only be a matter of time before federal troops would have to come to Louisiana to make them integrate the schools there, and he knew from what the whites were saying that it would be bad, worse than it already was, when that started. And he wanted out, he wanted a family that didn’t grow up with that constant specter of the mistreated underclass bound to rise up and get its due, he wanted a meritocracy, and fancied he found it in the Navy.
So we became nomadic, unmoored from the mores of our forbearers, manner-less and unkempt, with clothes from Sears and a willingness to settle for anything that wasn’t Here.
Of course I thought they totally had it together, and never noticed the elbows on the table, and the competitive conversations where if you couldn’t fight your way in, you didn’t get in, and no one apologized or seemed to notice. I didn’t think it odd when Dad was halfway finished with his meal by the time Mom sat down with hers, the seventh plate she had served.
I did learn to make my bed in the morning and to brush my teeth every night.
When I turned ten they turned thirty. I remember that year, they seemed older to me, now that my parents weren’t in their twenties anymore, and I felt older and like I could talk to them differently. It was in Jacksonville, Florida. Dad was going away for a long time for the first time—ten months to the Med on the aircraft carrier USS Shangri-La—and he told me to help Mom watch the other kids, to take care of my sisters and look out for my little brothers. I remember thinking he really meant it this time, like not just something to say, but really to have me be alert and awake and look for danger like he would, and I suddenly felt a strong feeling in my chest and realized for this first time I would miss him. All the other times he was gone it was just exciting, because it would just be Mommy and so in a way I would be in charge, or at least she would pay a lot more attention to me and what I wanted. But now I wanted him to stay, and I promised to write to him on the ship. I did write a number of letters to him during 5th and 6th grades, because the Shangri-La was sent back to the Med in 1967 for the six-day war in Israel, and he stayed gone most of that year too. He wrote back, in his elegant and always legible cursive handwriting, and I still have some of the letters.
Thinking back, he was just 31, writing to his eleven-year old son, who was hanging on his every word. Even if he taught me bad habits and actually chased fire trucks with me in tow and threw a glass of milk at the wall that one time, he was alive and he was responsive and he was real.
I think of my sister Michelle, born in a family of firstborns.
Three of us.
What an impossible challenge.
She had to invent a third way, the silent way to power.
And she had to leave the family.
Still part of it and always.
And from the Left Coast, a continent’s-arm’s-length away.
And so I honor my parents.
While leaving behind the world of grunting and groaning.
And optional manners.
To enter the world out here, thank you very much, and oh excuse me, no, after you, please!