Uncles

Four o'clock in the afternoon. Road construction on a busy US highway. I am driving, trying to beat my daughter home from Girl Scouts. I am buzzed, a combination of not eating anything yet today and drinking two beers. I hate myself.

My youngest paternal uncle is in town today. He lives in Florida and so my well-meaning aunt (married to my older, but not quite oldest, paternal uncle) chose to sync up our visits at the same time. He was stopping by while in town, I was stopping by to pick up some papers of my late father's. A little family reunion ensued, if by family reunion you mean two drunks, a middle-aged woman compulsively offering food to her guests, and me, the only available link to a dead man, sitting around a kitchen table trading stories. Ahhh, family.

My father came from a long line of drunk Archie Bunkers. If you were their color, religion, nationality, gender, approximate age and income level, and willing to buy them a beer, you were okay. To the rest of you high-falutin' blue-bloods, who needs ya! Being a non-racist inclusionary halfdyke like myself, I have always suffered some discomfort with my father's side of the family, especially since he died. See, they want to like me. I am Barry's blood, I'm all they have left of him. But I am not him, and that always disappoints. For many years I tried to be him; I slept around and I drank a lot and I pointed out the errors in other people's logic at the bar. But somehow the behavior one accepts from a middle aged war veteran isn't so well-received coming from a twenty year old girl. Also, the homophobe who applauds a hearty "Nice rack!" from a man won't always take it so well from a woman, not at the local VFW.

But still I try. I hate myself for it but for some reason, probably because these men are all that I have left of my father's blood, I try to find some common ground. So I laugh at their stupid jokes ("Want a bigger chest? Just rub some toilet paper between your boobs; it sure made your ass grow. Hahahahaha!") and I drink the beer they offer no matter the time, and I pretend for an afternoon that my father was the same man to me that he was to them, that he was a loyal and loving member of my immediate family and not some distant rarely seen face from my childhood. I try to pretend that I'm no longer angry with him when the most painful part of mourning him is my anger. And I really really try, harder than anything else, not to get a DUI on the fifteen mile drive home from the bar.