Taking a sharp left turn from my previous style (thinking-thinking-OMG-overthinking-crying-crying-catastrophizing) of dealing with my family situation, I opted this vacation to simply block everything out. Instead, I threw myself head-first into the legality of buying pot in California, going so far as to phone a couple dispensaries with questions.

(I haven’t smoked pot this century and was not really into the idea of getting blazed. I WAS obsessively interested in the process of purchasing an item legal by state law and illegal by federal, and why legalized pot is somehow not taking off here. PS: If you want to talk privacy issues and 2nd amendment violations, I am now somewhat well versed.)

This obsession was so overwhelming, I didn’t find time to pack for our trip until the morning of. (If you want to talk about allllll the things you forget to pack if you do so hours before departure, I am now somewhat well versed.)

During the multi-hour car trip up there, my husband casually asked how I was doing. I covered my ears, turned to face the window, and whined, “Shut up, I’m not dealing with it until we get there.”

Pretty effective!

The first day started like previous visits, with Middle and my mom immediately getting into it about who was serving dinner that night, and all the secret meanings and power plays behind said dinner. Readers who’ve been around since Tahoe will recall I have fallen into this trap before. After a grocery shopping trip in which Middle and I first loaded up a cart, then unloaded all those items as Middle yelled into her cell phone at our mother, Middle hung up and proceeded to download a thesis on what dinner meant (and perhaps laying groundwork for some kind of meal time mutiny) I stopped my sister mid-sentence with a, “Talk to Mom. I literally have no control over how this goes down.”

Middle: “Yeah, but you know Mom’s gonna—”
Me: “I have no kitchen, I am assigned no meals. Talk. To. Mom.”
Middle: “Yeah, I will, but don’t you think–”
Me: “I HAVE NO CONTROL OVER DINNER.”
Middle: “OK, but Mom’s–”
Me, teeth bared, arms flailing: “ARRRRRGHHHHH! LEAVE ME OUT OF IT.”

I’ve never read a fairy tale in which a spell was broken by someone freaking out, but whatever cursed circle my sister and I were trapped in was. She pulled back like I’d grown fangs, shut the fuck up, and didn’t bring it up again.

The next day at the ice skating rink, when Mom started in with Little and me about Middle, I stood and said, “You can shit talk all you like, but I don’t want to hear it.” And wobbled haughtily off on my ice skates.

Was feeling smugly self-righteous, refrigerated ice-air blowing my hair back as I circled the rink on my skates, knowing neither my mother (who would never risk the slippery rink) nor Little (pregnant and therefore also would never risk the slippery rink) could follow me.

(PS: Little’s pregnant! Due in Feb.)

It only lasted a moment, as one of my kids immediately took a cracker of a fall and had to be escorted off the rink, sobbing and with a huge blue bruise forming on her cheek. And after checking pupils and asking all those concussion related questions, I held her close and sobbed a little myself. But that had everything to do with seeing my kid get injured and very little to do with standing up to my mother, who would have never in her prime shit-talked her own kid. At least not to me.

At home, I sat with my Dad for about ninety minutes. He had a John Grisham book, and read out loud to me (or approximated) the title, author, and the author’s other books from the inside page.

Very carefully, he drew his finger under the letters and said, “John Gish.” Sometimes, “Joh Ish.” And when he seemed tired, merely, “Issam.”

Once, very clearly, he said, “A bad boy.”

I said, “He’s a bad boy huh?”

My dad frowned as if I were an idiot, and turned to the ALSO BY page. “No.”

His eyebrows asked me, over and over, if I knew the books listed: The Firm, Pelican Brief, The Rainmaker, A Time To Kill. Most times, he couldn’t read the words, and sometimes he’d make it up. Sometimes he’d surprise me and get a big word, like ‘pelican’.

Years ago, my dad told me how John Grisham’s first novel had barely been published at all. That the author had a trunk full of copies, and he’d hand sell them everywhere he went. It was one of those stories my father told where I was never sure if he meant, “Look at that dedication! Grisham single-handedly clawed his way to recognition. He knew he was a bestselling author, and by dint of will, he made others believe it too. You should be like that!” or perhaps, “Look at that idiot! Think of the years he wasted carting around that one book instead of writing the next ones that actually sold.”

These are the things you ponder when stuck on a couch next to a Dad who wants to read you the ALSO BY page while both of you are missing dinner in the next room.

After about sixty minutes of this, we stood, and he took me to the bookcase, perhaps getting ready to return the novel to where Mom kept it for him. While there, he pointed at a photo of my grandparents and said, clear as day, “That’s my Mom and Dad. Good people. They’re dead now.” He teared up, a rare thing for my father.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of believing that by giving emotional energy, like priming a pump, you can energize my father’s brain receptors, make them work again, so that a glimpse of him rises to the surface, and he is there again. I know this is not true. Love isn’t the cure to medical illness. If it were, my mother would will my father into health.

But I can see the trap, as potentially deadly as trying to rescue a drowning person by swimming out after them. Here was my father, tearful over the deaths of his parents. It was such a complicated show of brain organization! He knew them, his relation to them, the history of what happened, the sadness of what it meant.

Instead of returning the Grisham book to its place on the shelf, my father pressed it into my hands and tapped the cover. He gestured at me, and the book again, insinuating I read it. But make sure to bring it back!  he added with broken words.

I’m pretty sure I’ll never read that book. Even holding it on the way home, it felt hot and squishy and pulsating. Like a living organ being transported for transplant.

I brought it back the next day, lied and told him I’d read and enjoyed it.

That day, he sat next to my mom, holding her hand and laughing and nuzzling her while we opened presents, spoke a few whole sentences in the jumbles. Easy to believe in Christmas magic. Or at least, easy for me, who spends a few hours a year in my father’s presence. Middle and Mom seemed less impressed.

Later, he walked through the house with his pants around his thighs and a broad band of his tighty-whities visible, calling for my mother. Either he’d been pulling his pants down or back up with his belt still buckled. Urine in the hallway and feces flecked the guest bathroom’s toilet seat. Of course, there were also two potty training children in the house, so we all carefully avoided mention of it and figured Mom would come upon it eventually. WE ARE A CLASS ACT IN MY FAMILY.

Mom texted that evening, after my family had returned to Middle’s, and again in the morning before we left:

As everything gets stripped from my dad, the basics remain. He’d still give me his most treasured possessions for reasons I don’t appreciate in the moment, or understand in retrospect.