cousins redux

So obviously I've been thinking a lot about family lately, certainly over the past few days. The visitation last night was surreal. I mean, it's wierd to walk in to a room full of people you really haven't seen since the last funeral and say "Hi, how are you?" "Oh, great, fine." Hell, if everybody's fine, what are we doing here?

I think the Anglo American mourning tradition could use a good dose of old world reality. What you want is weeping, howling, tearing of clothing, swearing of revenge. What there is is hushed silence, sad standing around and semi-hysterical non-death related conversation over lots and lots of cigarettes out in front of the funeral home. I wanted to grab my glassy-eyed cousins and say "SCREAM, CRY, you'll feel better". She was their sister for heaven's sake and now she's in a box with putty in her head.

There must also be a universal rule about proper casket wear: for women it's always long-sleeved and pink. I don't wear pink in life, please don't make me wear it when I die. I'm much too sallow, I'll just look like a bruised banana lying there. I am never one to buy in to the whole "Wow, she looks so good" rubbish either, when T asked me if it was open casket he said "How'd she look?" Well, she looked dead. Yeah. Dead. Still dead. Personally I want to be cremated immediately upon death and they can do the big glossy photo thing instead of the casket viewing. Or like in "Love Actually," a cool video montage with the Bay City Rollers as a soundtrack.

So another cousin inevitably floats up in conversation, this one is actually my double cousin, meaning we share both sets of grandparents... his dad is my mom's brother, his mother my dad's little sister. See? No inbreeding involved. Get your minds out of the gutter.

He, however, is a family curiosity as he was always very different (meaning kinda smart and artistic and really eccentric) and more so because he has surgically removed himself from our family, both sides, really. Except for his mom and dad. I'm sure it's been more than 20, maybe 25 years since I saw him. Now he's playing in what looks to be an up and coming bluegrass band http://blueharvestband.com/index.html. Interestingly it seems he has claimed his heritage after all, albeit from the comfortable distance between here and NYC. Genetics has obviously programmed even the unwilling to love bluegrass, the folksier the better. It's been my dirty little secret for a few years now and I profess to owning a few bluegrass cds of my own. And I took my mom to see Nickel Creek, which is sorta but almost not really bluegrass. But the mandolin was always my favorite, ever since the 80s when Bruce Hornsby recorded "Mandolin Rain", which isn't even a mandolin song. And yes, I even own a Mike Marshall/Chris Thile cd. And now I'm just babbling. Point is, the band thing is cool, and even though he lies (a lot) about his age on myspace, I hope it becomes fantastically successful. Our kinda smart and artistic and really eccentric grandfather would have been thrilled.

Cousins, cousins, its all I've thought about. Can't we get back to some normal craziness? Well, there was a strange cat stuck 30' up in my maple tree last night -- that was pretty run-of-the-mill crazy. I ran the dogs in to the garage for the night and left the back deck light on so it could work out its issues backwards, down the tree. By morning it was gone.