Two somewhat horrific things Yours Truly includes for dramatic and narrative effect.
For f-b*mb's sake, YT is a writer and may a: let It all hang out; b: investigate the incomplete and the effusive and the uncomfortable (related to a.); and c. narrate and dramaticize.
So, there YT is, in the midst of the familial portion of this holiday, this mid-Hanukah and Kwanzaa Eve = Christmas. The one with Jesus is the reason for the season, key player.
sidebar: Rio informed me, non-truthfully, that a banner hangs above her familial KY home stating same so that Santa knows that we are not heathens. I move along.
I am at the home where I was raised, so to speak, from age 2-20, before I hit the awaiting adult world that has led me, convolutedly, to this place. I am in that home, Christmas night. The place where my parents live, where I am from time to time bumping up against the past of me that is awkward and I would like to say jam-packed with familiarities that are pleasant but I cannot.
The usual hodgepodge, collage of the good, bad, adolescent, etc.
At some point in the holiday proceedings two highly evocative/awkward things happen.
The first is that, in the midst of one of my tales, my father claims that he has heard the tale-in-progress before. I question him. A few times. I realize that the only place he ever - ever - could have heard this traipsing and difficult tale was here, on epinw. epinw. My dad is an abashed epinw reader. For once he was busted he could not admit to anyone, even Perfect me, that he reads this daughterly blog.
The other horrendous thing was this.
When I was a child I wrote poetry beyond the abilities of a child but nonetheless I was still a child. When I was a child I lived at the home of my parents and discarded a few hand-written books of poetry written by me as a child into the ol' trash, to learn, in complete shock and horror, that these books had been dredged from the trash by my mother and were being not only read by her but read aloud to gatherings of her lady pals.
I have told, here and there, others of this not only lapse of judgement but lack of homestead privacy and tonight sat diplomatically as one of these high school books of pomes was again extricated from the archive, cracked open (I was catapaulted down memory lane when I saw the little Asian, hand-bound volume) and in-part read aloud.
I had to step outside of myself and say to YT OK, this is your mother and obviously she derives some happiness out of this and your ever-thickening skin can survive this newest fiasco.
What made an entire weekend of ebbing & flowing, self-congratulatory holiday smarm tolerable were a few final hours spent with old friends - Erin and Justy - at the newer Middling City joint of gatherings and such. And what really was the proverbial whipped cream and jimmies (if you go for that sort of thing) on the whole tasty escapade was a meeting-up with a woman - Peggy - in a wolfhead. I made her pinkie swear we could be pals. We did. She is the assistant to the director of the Salvador Dali joint in Florida, so close to the land of Papa and cigars and home to alligators and whatever else. Oh, that team.
So Peggy Wolfhead when saying goodbye opened up her plastic jaws and spread them atop my head and I let out my patented MeatScream that was perfected oso long ago by YT and Elba in the midst of Summer Camp Chaos. It is a from-the-toes kind of scream and one was emitted by Perfect me as the faux wolf had my scalp, stopping all action in the room, a similar sensation was being hit by that car whilst riding my bike, the feeling of being in a vacuum.
The moral of the story is this.
Every counter-intuitive event which cramps the soul and psyche and style needs an antithetical faux-wolf moment, a delicious and spontaneous encounter with grace and art and kindred joie-de-vivre.

Faux Wolverine Love.