July 14: Families being together

 Late on Christmas Day of 2017, I asked my dad if he had enjoyed his Christmas. 

"It was one of the very best," he said.

We had just finished Christmas dinner - turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, salad, and mom's homemade Christmas pudding. The tree stood in its usual corner, bathing the living room with soft light. Underneath, multi-coloured paper from so many presents. A fire burned in the fireplace.

But none of that was why my dad thought that was the best Christmas ever. The real reason was that, for the first time, all of his most beloved people were together for Christmas for the first time. Usually, I celebrate Christmas out east but that year, Ash told me I could take my son out west to be with his grandparents. It was an unbelievably generous gift. From the very beginning, I told Ash that I would never take her son away from her on Christmas. This was a great sacrifice on her part and I still don't know if she realizes how happy it made my dad.

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Here I am. A soon-to-be 50-year-old and my parents are both alive and kicking. Even out here in East Ontario, 3500 kilometres away, I still think of mom and dad's bungalow in southwest Calgary as the sun and I am just a lowly planet orbiting it. I'm always spoiled whenever I visit and when I object to this, they quell me by saying that they get to spoil my sister and brother throughout the year; they only get to spoil me on occasion.

I have a feeling that this coming Christmas might be my dad's happiest ever.

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Kurt Vonnegut was fond of saying that the biggest problem with humanity is loneliness. Everyone needs to belong to something. He believed that this explained the popularity of organized religion.

In his novel, Slapstick, he creates a world that solves the loneliness problem. How it works is that, at birth, everyone is randomly assigned an artificial family. There's probably thousands of these families and all of 'em are named after things you'd find in nature, like blueberries or mountains or thunderstorms. Further, each person, in addition to having one of these new names, was assigned a number between one and 20. I, for example, might be Shteevie Bluebird-16 W and my kid might be B-Man Dragonfly-4 Imsocute. 

So if I met someone who was also a Bluebird but they had a number besides 16, I was to treat them like a cousin or distant relative. If they were also Bluebird-16, I was to treat them like a mom or a dad or a sister or a brother.

I liked Slapstick and found myself wishing that that comforting system would work in real life. It wouldn't, of course. Human nature is too neurotic and xenophobic to make us accept that the guy on the street who wants to squeegee your windshield is your brother. It would also piss off real life close knit families like mine. I have a tendency to involve perfect strangers in my day-to-day life, having conversations with aliens in public parks and shopping malls. This annoys my friends and family, who wish I would find joy in the relationships I have already established.

And now I must cut this short because AV and I are going to see Elvis. The movie, I mean. Not the man himself who, I hope, knew the difference between family and fans.