Disintegrated Expectations

For the second time in as many weeks, last Thursday The Boy and I got on airplanes and flew to an exotic locale for an exciting event.

Admittedly, referring to the arid hellscape of Barren Vista, Arizona, as an “exotic locale” is a bit of a stretch, but there is an awful lot of money five miles in any direction in the foothills. And there’s a concentric ring of safety in the center of the town at the University. Whenever I meet someone, usually on planes, who likes Barren Vista, I assume they either matriculate or teach at the University in town, and I am almost always right.

Or they’re salespeople, who stay at the five-star resorts in the foothills. My goodness, they don’t have enough superlatives for the place.

Usually when I go back home to the town I grew up in, however, my own personal expectations are not very high.

If I get through the weekend without having a throw-down with my 84-year-old Mom, I consider the trip a huge success. I’m not saying I have Mommy Issues, but… oh wait, I guess I am. Busted!

But I’m sorry, Mommy Issues are boring, so I’m moving on.

Anyhow, the bar is set pretty goddamn low. Safe flight, no internecine squabbles and somebody waiting at the airport when I land: That’s all I require for a low-stress weekend in Barren Vista. The bad memories, the crime and poverty, the overall feeling of despair that blankets the city; I shrug it all off and focus on the one thing I actually like about the place: needling my sister who still lives there.

We had also hoped to check in with my nephew, just back from Afghanistan, but he was required to be back on base out-of-state the same day we arrived. But he’s back on native soil, in one piece and good spirits and that’s mostly what I needed from him anyhow.

Unlike my previous excursion with our son a couple weeks back—which resulted in a migraine, a cold, consecutive sleepless nights and brutal Advil PM hangovers to balance out the fabulousness of the wedding and time spent with family and friends—this time everything went as smoothly as pie. Or I should say, “pah.”

There was a lot of discussion about “pah” with my brother-in-law from Texas, who I realized this trip sounds likes a groggy Elvis. If I shut my eyes, I could imagine The King, waking up confused in The Jungle Room at 3 a.m., rubbing his eyes and asking me run to the kitchen and fetch him some pah. It made it much easier to get along with a fellow about whom I have not formerly been completely crazy.

But of course, we were not there for the pah. It was kind of an impromptu Bastardson family reunion. One sib and his Missus had a free weekend at one of the formerly-mentioned swanky hotels nearby at about the same time as my nephew was due back home from his first tour in Afghanistan. Another sib is already in Barren Vista and the other and her Mister are always ready to drive out at the drop of a hat. Still, because I am an asshole, I had to have my arm twisted, but I eventually relented on the condition I got to bring The Boy.

According to Joseph Campbell, I have to establish the normal world of the story I am going to tell so that the reader may more fully appreciate the dramatic change to come.

And the normal world back there is drama.

Our family isn’t special; I’ve observed almost all families have their own dramas. The difference is, other families’ dramas are just that—entertainments, staged for my enjoyment; one’s own family’s drama is rarely as entertaining.

But last weekend wasn’t dramatic, it was fun, uplifting, even. For instance, I went back with a specific plan to pick a specific fight (just for my own entertainment) and then decided not to, the vibe had turned so unexpectedly positive.

What made it better than the usual such event—imagine your own family get-togethers then times it by crazy—was the arrival of a new family member at the same time as our visit.

It sure sounded like a bad idea on paper. My niece (who also resides in Barren Vista) wanted to help her Jamaican-born husband bring his 7-year-old daughter to the United States to live with them. It might not have sounded so nuts if they weren’t poor as church-mice. Or weren’t planning to bring the girl to America to live in a place at least as and probably more horrible than the one she was leaving. Or about a million other reasons. You always hear the horror stories (my extended family even has one) of U.S. couples adopting former Soviet bloc country kids who turn out to be heartless, manipulative sociopaths straight out of “The Omen” movies.

I have never been so happy to be pretty sure I was wrong. My older sister has been dying to hear me say it, she will have to settle for reading it instead.

Angelina turned out to be a delight. Funny, inquisitive and occasionally blunt, she was also polite as hell, and I really, really like courtesy and am impressed when kids her age demonstrate it. It’s still like pulling teeth to get The Boy to drop a “please” here or a “thank-you” there, but this kid had it down.

Plus, she and The Boy hit it off like a house on fire. If they weren’t on the floor of the spare room with their coloring books and markers, they were running through the house, laughing and playing games they were making up as they went. The Boy was so smitten, he even wanted to go out clothes-shopping with them (apparently Angelina didn’t arrive here with much more than a suitcase), and usually it’s murder getting him out of the house for an errand run. They ran around the little girls’ section of Target for 45 minutes while her clotheshorse father himmed and hawed up an entire wardrobe for her.

The morning we left, they even took to a kind of grappling contest in the front room. For safety’s sake, I set a rule about both contestants having to remain on the latch-hook rug. There’s a lot of unyielding, pointy-edged objects in my Mom’s house, and not a lot of maneuvering room.

The weekend even contained unexpected little victories. My sister who still lives there was driving me to the airport. I opened with a mildly disparaging joke about Obama to make sure I had her Republican attention. Then I asked her if she’s looked at the copy of W’s ‘auto’biography that I bought Mom. She says she hasn’t had time yet. I tell her he talks about the lowest point of his administration and would she care to guess what it is? She guesses 9/11. I agree with her, that was pretty bad. 3,000 people died. But no, that wasn’t it. I asked her if she thought it might be the WMDs that turned out to not be there. She agreed that was probably it, but I said no. Then I said, how about the photos of Abu Ghraib getting out? That was pretty awful, wasn’t it? She thought that must be it, but I said no. Then I told her it was when a pop star was mean to him once on TV and she told me to cut it out, and laughed. I said, no, seriously. In his own words. You don’t even have to read the whole book to see it, it’s right there on the inside flap. She said I must be joking. And so on.

Oh, it was so much fun!

Almost as much fun as sitting around the dinner table after the meal one night and talking the economy with the Barren Vista-dwellers. The Obama-hating, Republican party-liners and me, talking economics. Turns out they’re boiling mad about The Elites getting their tax cuts extended when they, the Barren Vistians, were barely making ends meet, and that on a month-to-month basis. They said for sure rich people ought to pay more so working people like them could stop being poor and work their way up to the middle class. Then we discussed how there was no middle class any more—The Missus and I ought to be middle class, by virtue of her PhD if nothing else and the years of work it represents, but we’re living paycheck to paycheck, too—and how society was separating into the haves and have-nots without leaving anyone in between. And I didn’t even lead the conversation in that direction. I must have looked like I had just been smacked upside the head with a 2x4.

I would have felt even better if I thought their innocently-arrived-at Democratic talking points would cause them to take a pass on the GOP next time, but I already know better. They vote the straight God ticket and the Democrats, they are repeatedly assured by Fox News and Dr. Laura, do not appear anywhere on the God ticket.

The end result being—and you’ll forgive me if my revelations are somewhat me-centric—for possibly the first time in my life, I came back from Barren Vista in better spirits than when I arrived. Do I think everything is going to work out great? Of course not. They live in Arizona, for Christ’s sake. The weekend I was there, the lead local story was how budget cuts were forcing the city to lay off dozens and dozens of police and firemen. Dante’s Desert Inferno just got turned up another couple of notches.

But I am a little less certain that my niece has made the mistake of her life by bringing her husband’s daughter here. Angelina is either a genuinely sweet, precocious, intelligent little girl or future Academy Award bait. I just wish we, as a family, had something better to offer her than Barren Vista, Arizona.

And something my big sister had pointed out to me a while back really stood out this trip, and I think it, as much as the addition of Angelina to our family, is what sent me home with a smile on my lips and a song in my heart.

A lot of we Left Wingers talk a good game, diversity-wise. We pay lip service every chance we get. But for most of us, the truly poor people we know are few. And the Republicans we regularly break bread with are practically non-existent. In spite of our beliefs and inclinations, we find ourselves drawn to like thinkers, and that just doesn’t promote a lot of the diversity we’re supposed to be so hotly in pursuit of. After all, we don’t have the problem with diversity, so why practice it in our daily lives?

But sitting around my Mom’s table—my Mom, the W-loving, Jesus-take-me-now, right-wing-voting born-again Christian—was a veritable United Nations of ethnicity, inclination, income-level and outlook. I have never sat at a table in a left-winger’s house and experienced such a vast panoply of the American Experience and I’d be surprised if I ever do.

In one tiny, tin-covered corner of one of the most desperate cities in America, harmony has broken out. Civility doesn’t reign, but neither does discourtesy; hell, even I shelved my prepared hurtful remarks. It’s crazy, but it’s a hopeful, well-intentioned crazy…

It’s so fucking crazy, this cynical old bastard thinks it just might work.

It turns out grace, like crazy, can flourish under even the harshest circumstances.