Mr. Tootles

April 14, 2008

On Saturday morning, Deborah lifted her head off the pillow and told me she felt like shit. She'd been suffering from a cold for three days, and it didn't seem to be getting any better. I was already out of bed, getting dressed and ready for another drive to New Jersey, this time for a brunch being held in honor of my aunt and uncle's 60th wedding anniversary.

I suggested she get out of bed, have some coffee, and see how she felt once she was up. I know that for me, when I have a minor cold, the mornings are the worst -- groggy and congested from lying down all night, it takes a little longer to get going, but once I'm up, I start to feel better.

"I'm not lying!" said Deborah.

"I didn't say you were lying."

"Well then, how about a little sympathy?" She wanted me to say, Aw baby, ask her if she needed anything, and most of all, tell her she should just stay in bed and that I'd go to the party without her. Instead, I was quiet, continued to get dressed, and drink my coffee.

It's hard to dissect exactly how these things progress, and it's rarely productive to even try -- each side has its own idea about who said what and interpretations of how it was said -- but whatever the case, our morning pleasantries quickly collapsed into a shouting match.

"I'm not lying!" said Deborah, again.

"What the fuck are you talking about? I told you, I never said you were lying, ever."

Despite the fight, Deborah got up, got dressed, and got in the car. Once we were underway and she'd had a little time to stare out the window, she told me about the fights she used to have with her father. "That might have something to do with it," she said.

When Deborah was a little girl, she would often get car sick, sometimes on the bus she took to school, or more often in the family car when her father was behind the wheel. Her father would yell at her over his shoulder as he drove, "Stop lying, you're not sick!"

"My father always drove like an old man," said Deborah. "Even when he was young. Drifting into neighboring lanes, slowing down, and speeding up for no reason. I'd get nauseous and feel like crap, but he never believed me. I guess that might've had something to do with why I got so upset."

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"It's gonna be an old crowd," said my cousin, Tom, as we watched a few guests struggle out of their cars and walk into the party with canes. Truth was, the crowd was closer in age to Tom, who is in his fifties, than to the guests of honor. Once you reach eighty, a lot of your friends have been left in the dust to dust. We talked about aging, and Tom said that hitting forty was the worst. "That's when all the aches and pains started to kick in. You really notice a change. Turning fifty was much easier. The most important thing is to exercise. Keep moving."

"A body in motion tends to stay in motion, a body at rest tends to stay at rest," I said.

"That's exactly right."

"Do you exercise?" I asked. Tom is a big guy, six-four, at least, who used to run track for St. John's University. I remember going to my aunt and uncle's house for holidays as a kid, and seeing Tom’s plaques, medals, and trophies, proudly displayed.

"I walk five miles every day," he said. "Of course, I also drink 80 gallons of beer a week, which I suppose offsets any benefits."

The brunch was a rather fancy affair, held at a place called The Mill in Spring Lake Heights, New Jersey. Out of fifty guests, I was the most casually dressed. Even my mother's cousin, Ronnie, a big bear of a guy with a Santa Claus beard who lives in a rustic trailer on his farm in rural Virginia, managed to clean up better than I did. I hadn’t noticed how underdressed I was -- or at least, I was stupid enough to think no one else had noticed -- until Ronnie looked me up and down and said, "That's how I prefer to dress."

My cousin, Donna, was responsible for organizing the party. She was standing near the door, watching for the final guests, trying to decide whether to wait for them or get the party started. Near the door was a table with my aunt and uncle's wedding album. I flipped through it, marveling at the huge, Catholic ceremony, everyone dressed to the nines, my uncle in an elaborate white tuxedo, and my aunt, with the train from her dress swirled into a pool in front of them. A few years before their wedding, my uncle had lied about his age to enlist in the Navy. He was assigned to the Navy's newly formed construction battalion, the SeaBees, and stationed in the South Pacific, where he helped convert the island of Tinian into WWII's busiest airfield. (Good luck trying to get him to talk about it.) Full of post-war optimism, ready for a new life with a new wife, his smile in the pictures ran from ear to ear.

"I guess you're next," Donna said.

"What do you mean?"

She laughed. "I mean, next month, your wedding."

"Oh yeah. Well, you know, it's going to be a pretty low key affair. A lot more casual than this," I said, waving my hand over the black and white photos. "Even more casual than this anniversary party."

"It doesn't matter how casual it is, however low-key, it's still legal."

"Tell it to the judge, right?"

"You said it."

Most of the guests I hadn't seen in over ten years. Although I know I'm related to them, you'd need a degree in anthropology to map it out. Regardless, very little time was spent catching up. Instead, the brunch conversation was mostly non-sequiturs. My cousin Tom was on the opposite side of the table, discussing his favorite topics: gambling and booze. "If someone has the aptitude for it, they should be allowed to do it," he said, regarding card counting at a blackjack table. "It's not cheating, it's still a game of chance." And then, a short while later, he was evangelizing Absinthe.

"The stuff is amazing," he said. "A flask between me and two other guys was more than enough to have us flying."

"You mix it with water, right?" someone said. "Pour water over a sugar cube or something like that?"

Tom cocked his head back and furrowed his brow. "Fuck that. Sugar and water and all of that bullshit. First of all, the stuff is sweet enough as it is. Why the hell would you want to add sugar? It's all a bunch of crap the fucking French dreamed up. It's fine straight out of the bottle. Besides, what am I gonna do? Pull over on the side of the road so I can mix a drink?"

Another relative, sitting closer to me, was talking about a new superstore that opened near her home. "I kept seeing these people rolling around huge shopping carts filled with stuff, and I was like, what the hell can they be buying, right? So I finally go in there, and what do I buy? A knight in shining armor. My very own knight in shining armor."

"Huh?"

"A full-sized suit of armor. It doesn't weigh as much as you'd think it does, but it's awkward, and I had to get one of my kids to help me get it out of the car and hide it in the garage so my husband wouldn't see it."

"He must've seen it eventually," I said.

"Oh yeah, he did. He came home and said, You have to take it back."

"Did you?"

"Oh no. We have him in our family room now. Mr. Tootles is his name. We dress him up for holidays."

I suppose that's as good a place as any to end it.