Family Ties: What We Talked About At Thanksgiving

For Thanksgiving, my son brought home the most delightful girlfriend.  I’m so pleased that he loves us enough to share her.  They cuddled and cooed all weekend. 

He hummed a happy song every morning as he made his coffee.  I’m usually the first one up, and sit in the relative quiet with my laptop and play.  In the past, he'd groan a hello and head outside for his breakfast cigarette.  No longer.  He's quit smoking, and his "Good Morning!" is electric.  The network news is usually on in the background, and never failed to spark conversation.

These are some of the things we discussed:

1. Social workers burning out because of onerous rules imposed from above that prevent them from actually helping people.
2. Obama being a tool of the capitalist regime.
3. Thomas Edison stealing patents and being an all-round scumbag.
4. The divide between the ultra-wealthy in America and everyone else widening.
5. The Vietnam War ending because the Viet Cong wouldn’t give up.
6. The military cover-up of rape of female enlistees and civilians by American combatants.
7. Obama reneging on his promise to get us out of Afghanistan.
8. America kowtowing to Israel.
9. My objections to being called old-fashioned for quoting, “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.” 
10. The American government doesn’t really want to capture Osama bin Laden; he’s a red herring, and most likely already dead.
11. Local government control is better than big government.
12. There is no longer a middle class in America.
13. Every American should have access to quality healthcare.
14. People talk about their pets in order to avoid substantive conversations with their fellow citizens.
15. Thomas Edison arranged to have an already doomed circus elephant electrocuted.  His only objection was that he preferred to say the elephant was “Westinghoused.”
16.  A college education doesn’t mean much anymore in terms of getting meaningful employment.
17. Employers don’t want employees who think.  This might lead to asking for benefits.
18. Not calling me old-fashioned.
19. Using the term “mentally ill” rather than crazy when referring to the person heading toward you on the sidewalk who is gesturing widely and talking loudly, and who has no visible Bluetooth.
20. Addressing the question of whether pc terms help make society better.
21. Transgender issues: can a female personality trapped inside a man, or a male personality trapped inside a woman ever be allowed free expression and acceptance without having to resort to surgery?
22. Are compassion and pity the same thing?
23. Monogamy as a social construct to control property.
24. Living outside the grid.
25. The overuse, misuse and abuse of the word “like.”
26. The French Revolution being ill devised since it led to Napoleon.
27. Tours of Israel where you’re shown only what they want you to see.  They don’t want you to see any Palestinians.
28. The American tax rate for the wealthiest citizens was 90% during WWII; been sliding down ever since.
29. The traditional who, what, when & where of journalism has been replaced by opinion in the guise of real news. 
30. Democracy has failed in America.  People feel powerless and disenfranchised.
31. Blackwater runs our military drones, not the military.
32. World hunger could be ended with under $50 billion.
33. Blood diamonds, Congo gold, and human rights violations to make a few men rich in the world.
34. P.O.C.'s are people of color.  I'm a diluted one of those.
    
35. Patience comes with experience, not with age.
36. The importance of never referring to me as old-fashioned.
    

Thanksgiving day was sunny and we walked to a local deli for brunch.  Dinner was later than I'd planned, but everyone pitched in and it was delicious.  The conversation was scintillating, and everyone pitched into that, too.  We didn't agree on everything.  Often, we needed to define and parse our terms to discover how close we were in our feelings about the world.

I felt like we were in a Norman Rockwell painting, a really radical one, where the family loves fiercely - each other, their words, their ideas for their country.

Passover Math: x = Old Friends divided by New Thinking

We have Passover dinner every year with old friends. Our sons no longer speak to each other because of a disagreement over the Middle East. A deep and ancient divide has caused a modern rift between two young Americans who've known each other since the third grade. But our friends are cool, especially my Israeli girlfriend. Not a rifle-toting ex-Israeli army girl, but from an Orthodox family that managed to get her service excused. Her husband is a mench, and together they are the kindest, most generous couple I know. Their older son will soon marry a beautiful Eurasian girl who works part-time as a flight attendant, and whom her father characterized as going to college to get her "M.R.S." degree .

 
Before dinner we read from the Torah. I didn't get to read my favorite part of the Egyptian/Hebrew story, but got stuck with the section that had a lot of math. Something about God coming down on the side of the Hebrews and 50 plagues only it was recalculated 4 or 5 times by lofty scholars in elaborate contemplation and argument with one another and ended up being 150 plagues, all of them really nasty.

The age range at the dinner table was 20 to 65. Our friends are now solidly Republican, although they started as Democrats. The fiancée’s family is also conservative. They complained a lot about Obama, don’t appear happy with anything he’s doing, but offered few alternatives. It seemed to me that they really want Obama to fail, which even if you didn't vote for him, is soooooo unpatriotic.

We discussed major world events of the 60's and 70’s, and M.R.S. daddy postulated that nothing now compares. I pointed out that Americans electing the first black president in our history was major, but couldn't get him to agree. One of the other old folks brought up that Obama had bowed to some middle-eastern dude and that that was wrong. America may need to float a loan from said lavishly rich swimming-in-the-black-bubbly country, so showing some respect may be good for us in the long run.

I had a great time. Passover is so not boring when people who have a totally different take on the world surround you. What do we have in common?

My girlfriend and I have an innocent history of standing in the sunshine outside our sons' elementary school. When I complained about working more than full time running a business that I loved, but feeling guilty about my son, and resenting my husband who seemed unaware of my conflict, she told me a story of her mother advising her on her wedding night to always pretend to be able to do less because it was the nature of men to take advantage of women.

At the time, I was astounded and dozens of feminist arguments sprang to mind, but I said nothing because the statement also felt true. This was the beginning of my understanding of my own victimization in terms of the feminist mandate about "having it all." Having it all was exhausting.

There was a time when I saw my girlfriend almost everyday, and when we were together we laughed until our sides ached, looked at each other, and laughed some more. We did a bit of that last night, but it wasn’t the same.

Politerotica Interruptus

Ever since I was, say twelve, I've had erotic dreams culminating in orgasm. This morning I awakened dreaming that I was kissing a man in bed at my girlfriend's house at the beach. We were naked.

I have no idea who he was, except somehow he's connected with VampireRave. The kisses were great, good lip pressure, right amount of tongue, tasty. There's a knock at the door. It's my girlfriend demanding that we allow a child to pass through the bedroom in order to get to the bathroom. He has to get ready for school. Her house is not set up like this, but dreams have their own moving scenery. The man and I tuck the covers around us and the kid comes in.

He's not even her real son. He's a mixed race kid with Jughead ears who looks like a miniature version of Barack Obama!

I look at my girlfriend with my What the Hell??!! expression. She’s glaring at me and without her lips even moving, I know she's really pissed because she's doing all the work with the kid while I'm making out in bed with a strangely silent good-kisser of a man.

I want to kiss him some more. I look at my girlfriend and she's smiling big-toothed and apple-cheeked and is herself but also Hillary Clinton.

I look back at the naked guy in my bed. He asks for a beer. It's all over.

Please feel free to criticize, sympathize or tell one of your own erotic dreams.


Cartoon by Walt Handelsman