Parents.

I make fun of them a lot on here. I can't help it. They do a lot of funny things. But I also think they're awesome and I feel lucky I got such good ones and I love them to pieces. Look at the cuteness!!!



That's them on the Golden Gate Bridge last weekend. I'd been sick for a few weeks, and it was a nice weekend, and when they left it made me surpringly emotional. They love me in a completely unselfish way, nobody but one's parents do that, and I watched them sacrifice financially for us growing up, and it was always clear we were their whole life, my dad worked his ass off but never mentioned it, and my mom has endless patience and cheer, and they're getting so OLD!, and soon my mom will stop being beautiful and my dad will stop being strong, and they're going to die, and one will die before the other, and the remaining one will be lonely because they're still in love and I catch them kissing alone in the kitchen, and my dad grabs my mom's ass when he comes home from work, and when they're gone I'll have no safety net, I'll be alone, which I basically already am, which we all are, which is depressing, and it makes me sad, except not really, because they're supposed to die before me, and they don't feel sorry for themselves, in fact they're incredibly happy, and they know I love them, and it's all okay and maybe actually beautiful.


So I reconciled myself with their inevitable aging and loneliness and death. But knowing something intellectually and feeling it are completely different. I read "Meet Me in St. Louis" in Jonathan Franzen's How To Be Alone the other night and it triggered a random cathartic cry:


"My mother had long ago reconciled herself to staying in the house while her children fled to the coasts. We invited her to move to one of the coasts herself, but the house was her life, it was what she still had, it was not so much the site of her loneliness as the antidote to it...For the last week or so before she was hospitalized, my mother couldn't keep any food down, and by the time I arrived her refrigerator was empty of almost anything but ancient condiments and delicacies. On the top shelf there was just a quart of skim milk, a tiny can of green peas with a square of foil on top, and, next to this can, a dish containing a single bite of peas. I was ambushed and nearly destroyed by this dish of peas. I was forced to imagine my mother alone in the house and willing herself to eat a bite of something, anything, a bite of peas, and finding herself unable to do so. With her usual frugality and optimism, she'd put both the can and the dish in the refrigerator, in case her appetite returned."


Ooof. Ambushed and nearly destroyed indeed.