World Class Family Dysfunction

Wifey and I were talking over the weekend, as she went through old family photos, of the sad state of our extended family. The photos showed visits with siblings and cousins, and through a Tolstoyan set of varied circumstances, we have nothing to do with most of them now.  I remarked that if my parents were alive, they wouldn't have believed it -- that we somehow went from a family that got together often to one so permanently fractured.

But then I read two articles, and concluded we're barely minor league in the dysfunction department.  One tale was in the current New Yorker, about a Dutch crime family. Somehow I had never heard about them, but a big brother was involved with the successful kidnapping of the Heinekken patriarch, and how that vaulted him to John Gotti status in the Netherlands. His younger sister became a lawyer, and defended him and his cronies, including a brother in law, but then turned state's evidence and is testifying against her brother in a trial lasting years. The sister lives undercover, like Rushdie after the fatwa, because she knows her brother wants to have her killed, and has the resources, even from jail, to do it.

Apparently there was a movie made about the kidnapping, and several movies are in the works about this Dutch version of The Sopranos. Now that I know about this, I plan to learn more. Tolstoy was right: happy families are all alike, and unhappy ones unique in their suffering. The latter are, sadly, far more interesting.

And then this am, I read an essay in the Times by a writer named Rachel Abramson, about her father, who was a distant and absent man. He was himself raised in an unloving home, and was the same in raising Rachel. After her parents divorced, she had barely any contact with him, but he remarried and became father of the year to his new stepkids. The writer thinks it was because they were already grown, and he didn't have to raise them, just be their buddy.

But get this: the Dad lived in Palm Beach Gardens, and was found murdered in a field -- single gunshot to the chest, and no weapon found. But after an extensive investigation, the cops figured out the fellow killed himself -- with a gun he strapped to a weather balloon that floated high over the ocean after he pulled the trigger. Imagine that. The father wanted to, apparently, save his new family the guilt of having him commit suicide -- somehow being murdered by unknown assailants in some field in rural Palm Beach would be easier to take.  Again -- world class dysfunction.

So there's always a worse tale for anything that saddens you. And truly nutty people set the bar pretty low for what it is to be a bad parent.

Meanwhile, D1 and Joey stopped by Saturday, to pick up some boxes at the local post office. D1 has been an ordering fiend for their new house -- hopefully to be completed in September. Our garage has been turned into a true warehouse.

I really can't stand being a storage facility, but I told D1 and Joey -- the ONLY exception to that is for my two Ds and their two men. I will store anything they wish. Anytime anyone else asks me -- I refuse vehemently. I'm looking to get rid of my own crap -- I don't plan to hold anyone else's...

Joey installed a Nest thermostat for our master bedroom -- it was one his brother Alan had used, and moved away from his rental apartment. Joey is wonderfully mechanically inclined -- he put the thing in amazingly fast, and now I get to tell my bedroom to get cool from anywhere I happen to be.  In that way, D1 married a man very unlike her father -- I am all thumbs when it comes to assembling things or installing them.

We enjoyed our time together, and will meet again Friday at an Italian place in the Gables I've been wanting to try ever since Dr. Barry and Mike have raved about it.

The Ds and their men are sacred to Wifey and me. We shall never be estranged.  As for extended family -- well, that you never know. But compared to testifying against gangster brothers, and faked murders with guns and helium balloons -- things can always be worse.