inlaws and outlaws

I love my daughter-in-law. We’ve only had a few days together, because they live in Mississippi and we live in Utah, and neither of us can afford much travel.
We had a family reunion some months ago. My husband, who hates to fly and hates even more much noise and confusion, presented me with what to me was a very generous sum of money, and my brother, who has a large house, threw it open to the family and took those of us new to the family to family landmarks such as a very old family cemetery. K and I both fell walking from the car to the cemetery, but we recovered, although we had to stop at a small store to get some wipes to clean up the blood on my scratched leg. Meanwhile K was coming down with a cold and running out of steam.
My generous son-in-law provided a room and a suite at an exremely plush motel; this was partly generosity and partly a slight problem involving the sheep dog, who wants to get all the humans together and then make them stay where they have been put. It is, of course, instinctive and she can’t help it, and doesn’t understand why people insist on getting up and wandering around the house when she has them all neatly arranged in one place, and clearly it is her job as a sheepdog to keep all her sheep together.
But back to K. I wish she lived next door. I am autistic, and it is very difficult for me to bond with people. But I bonded with K even before K and Patricio were married, just from talking with her over the phone. The odd and assorted (some of them VERY odd) females that he has collected in the past didn’t, shall we say delicately, light up my galaxy. But my galaxy is much happier now that it has K in it, and Patricio has been threatened with the wrath of God (and of Patricio’s mother) if he does anything to mess up this marriage. But I don’t have to worry. If he misbehaves, K threatens to tell me, and that is threat enough. (Okay, Amelia Peabody Emerson I am not, due to lack of funds, but our personalities are similar.)
As I was saying. I love K. The other day I went to bed with exhaustion and headache, telling T not to let anybody talk to me unless it was family members. It developed later that he misheard and thought I said not to let any family members talk to me, as I have been known to do when I had a migraine, so he was quite surprised when passing my bedroom door a couple of hours later to hear a peal of laughter from me. He concluded that it was one of my daughters, and was quite surprised when he learned later that it was K.
Besides being a thoroughly likeable females, and I’m emphatically not one of those women who like everybody who isn’t male, I don’t really like very many women, and I like and even love far fewer. Fortunately, the list of people I love now contains all my surviving inlaws and some of my deceased inlaws.
How else can I praise K? The accent in the state she came from is very pronounced, but she’s already losing it and developing a Southern accent. But that’s a small thing. What is big, and important, is that she can accept love.
Because of some incidents in her past, she finds it very hard to believe that people really love her, and several times at the family reunion she was found in a corner facing away from most of the hubbub, crying. I’m not going into details here, but Patricio and I, along with some of my brothers and one of my sisters-in-law, were snuggled around her reassuring her that now she’s a member of OUR family, and OUR family loves her.
And we do. All of us. She’s bonded neatly with M, and one of my brothers asked me how Patricio, who in the past has always picked losers, managed this time to pick a winner. I didn’t want to go into details, so I just told him it has to do with his last (as in most recent) heart attack.
But I don’t think he’s likely to have any more heart attacks any time soon. When on the phone with one or the other of them, I frequently hear background noise from the one who isn’t on the phone, and the noise is always positive or only kidding -negative.
if you can squeeze every penny until it protests that you’re hurting it while buying groceries, and then pay $100 for a book one member of the family speaks of in the same tone of voice s/he would speak of the Second Coming, you probably belong in our family.
Our family is a very special place to be. When one of us has hauled in what the rest of us regard as a dog, eventually the dog goes away again–not because he or she has been frozen out, because none of us would be that rude, but because that person just clearly didn’t belong in our family.
If you can stop in the middle of a crying spell because your eye has just caught a book that looks interesting, you probably belong in our family. If the mention of a rare book in a used book store suddenly has the whole family herded together almost as well as the sheepdog would do it, you likely could belong to our family. If you have Banned Book Parties during Banned Book Week, and if you have Shut-up-and-Read parties on Harry Potter Night, and if it interests you to know whether or not Neandertal genes contributed to modern human genes, there is a strong likelihood that you are in ouir family.
But enough of that. I love my daughter-in-law. My previous daughters-in-law or pseudo-daughters-in-law clearly did not belong in our family.
Uh, I think I started out to review a book, and I was going to talk about inlaws (the ones that belong in our family) and outlaws (people who do not understand why I looked appropriately stern when taking my daughter home from middle school with a three-day suspension for fighting, and then got to the car, sat down with my forehead on the steering wheel, and howled with laughter, finally explaining, “I wondered how long it was going to take you to slug her.”
We have no outlaws in the family at present, and may it remain so. Patricio is sleeping–still not much at night, but at least he is sleeping, and I think when he can get out in his new neighborhood and get to know people who don’t, shall we say, know the past dogs he has hauled home, I think he will relax, his tension hormones will drop, and he will be able to write again. .The outlaws trigger heart attacks, and I’ve lost count of how many he’s had, and he’s 23 1/2 years younger than I am and I have congestive heart failure, which alas also runs in the family, but I haven’t had any heart attacks yet.

Book, Anne. Book, book, book.

I just paid fifty-odd dollars for a DVD of the completely National Geographic. I’m glad I did it and I’d do it again. I’ve found that when it comes to art, sculpture,. music, books, movies in any format, in the future I regret the ones I didn’t get a lot more than the ones I did get, whether I could afford them or not.
And maybe that serves not only as a review of 121 years of National Geographic, but also as a review of our family. One of my brothers said, “We can’t help coloring outside the lines, because we can’t see where the lines are.”
I vote for never again seeing where the lines are. I saw a picture of Patricio in his “best” job he ever had financially, no mustache, no beard, no sprawling, no black T shirt–and no Patrick. This was about a year before he had his first heart attack. I then came up with a recent photo of him, beard, mustache, “club” as they called it in George Washington’s day but “pony tail” nowadays, both arms sprawled out and a quizzical look on his face. Nobody would give him a job like the job that nearly killed him. But it was a picture of my son. Before, he hadn’t met K. After, he had met K and was on his way, though he didn’t realize it yet, toward marrying her.
I greatly prefer the second picture. Patrick–and most of our family–like to sprawl. We like wash and wear hair. We like clothes that feel good on us, emotionally as well as physically.
Oh yes–nearly forgot to say it. No, M isn’t my d-i-l. She’s my s-i-l, and she fits perfectly into the family. Happy birthday, Mary, and I’m so glad you’re part of our family.

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