I went to Florida.  I hate Florida.  Disney of all places, which is a monumental birth control advertisement, a screaming kid flanked by miserable fuckless parents every few feet.  Awful. It was a conference on e-Learning.  I emailed my boss mid-session to tell him I want to be appointed assistant dean (rationale: most of these people are so fubar’d that I’m shocked, and undervalued, even for someone with a humanities background [who thus doesn’t deserve a paycheck at all, of course]).  He put in a budget request for the position….I just might get that….which would help, because I still want to buy that cottage, in which my father wants to live (with me) as it turns out….

Dad lives in Florida in the winters now, so I rented a car and booked down there for a night to check out his digs and to hang out.  Aa got a last minute stand-by seat in first class for $200, and flew down to join me for a 24 hour dinner date.  I wish I had taken a picture of the mobile park, but I didn’t.  I was overtired, thought as I always think about Florida, “this is so weird, like a movie set of a comedy starring Alan Arkin maybe, or a B horror film” and then I crashed out for a long nap before dinner.  But dad was SOoo excited we’d come, he trotted out the array of booze he’d gotten for “the party”, and proceeded to drink an entire quart of scotch in a few hours.  By 5 p.m., I was pushing dinner as fast as I could to soak some of that up. Dad had also bought a new grill just for the occasion, and steaks, and he melted the siding off his trailer with the grill then served us raw steak. In between all that, we talked about my endless cottage/cabin obsession, and his plan to live there once I find it (ha, didn’t see that coming). He’d put on a room addition, and teach the boys how to kill a deer with a double lung shot before he died. Well. I agreed: having all the young men in the family learn to hunt before Tbone’s too geezer to teach them seems like a reasonable goal.  I showed him all the cabin links on my phone.  We gamely cut into the tartar and added salad.  Tbone took one bite, then he threw up like mad.   Aa and I finished dinner.  Then Aa wiped down his bathroom hazmat style and stayed awake with him, lest he pull a Janis Joplin – Aa is in an odd newly created position (aka assistant dean) in the family vis a vis Tbone, longed-for son and certified health professional, willing learner of double lung shooting and hall monitor.

Then home, and Thanksgiving right on our heels, and my sister and her whole family including my mom arrive for a 4-day stay, amazingly. She said she was going to come, but it’s such a long drive, and through a snow storm, but damned if Jen was going to be daunted.  Holidays are for family god fucking damn it. We drink, we eat, we eat more, we talk, we laugh and laugh and laugh.  More talk about the cottage/cabin.  I realize: off the grid is out of the question. Her kids are maniacs. And she’s planning week-long summer stays, at least. I tell her dad is planning to live there.  She says, “No.” (ha)  She rattles off the stipulations: he can park an rv, but has to sleep in it, he’s only allowed inside sober and in spurts, if he wants a toilet he can dig a septic container…etc etc.  She is very firm with me that I am to be very firm with him.  “He’s still dad, don’t forget it. Last year he beat the shit out of someone and got kicked out of his last park, that’s why he has a new one.  He waited all night, pissed off, and still drunk in the morning, went over to the other guy’s trailer and beat him senseless in front of his wife.”

Tbone had said to me as he served the steak, “I love every single thing about you, every … single … thing.” 

This Friday, Aa and I make our first official shopping trip to the Adirondacks.  Eight cottages and cabins to see by appointment with a real estate agent to whom I emailed this entire story as it happened.  As I went from “I’m looking for something off the grid one room in the middle of 40 acres where I never have to see anyone” to “scratch that, I’m looking for something near water in which my sister might ‘accidentally’ drown her kids and my mother, and it should need a room addition but not really”.  The agent says he thinks I’m hilarious.  Either that is actually so, or he thinks I’m insane and is taking pity, or he thinks this is a date.  He says, “I almost hope you don’t find anything, because what will I do for comic relief when your emails stop?”  Aa is excited for the cabin and the shopping trip, though he notes growlingly that I’ve not mentioned his existence to the agent (Rick).

I just want everyone to love me. Which is tricky business.