I've been thinking about the purpose of this blog now that I'm more settled into my new life. I will continue to add 'updates' but will also start to integrate more stories, prose, and other things I've written. I wrote this first story over a year ago for my creative non-fiction class. Some of you will be familiar with its characters.
---- Why is it you can always find a Kentucky Fried Chicken until you actually need one? On this particular Christmas day, my traveling family was asking that very question.
"I told them we'd bring fried chicken," my dad says as we exit the highway into suburban Detroit. He drives for a few miles, passing every chain in the fast food universe except a KFC. He mumbles something and then turns the car in the opposite direction.
I can tell my mother is starting to get annoyed. After driving two-and-a-half hours from the west side of the state, we're now driving in circles. But she remains the peacekeeper and just takes a deep breath. My 17-year-old sister is next to me in the backseat, tuned out to the iPod in her ears.
My dad decides to drive toward the church -- our ultimate destination -- and instructs us passengers to keep watch out our windows. A few more miles and I spot a red, black and white sign with the beneficent colonel smiling down on us.
"There!" I shout, and my dad quickly switches lanes to make the turn.
Ten minutes later, loaded down with fifty dollars worth of fried chicken breasts, wings, thighs and drumsticks, we continue to my grandmother's church. The aroma of the three large buckets fills the car and I fight back the urge to sneak a piece from the nearest bucket.
We finally pull into the church parking lot, and as I walk through the back doors of the building, I realize I've never been in a Lutheran church before - and I've certainly never entered one with buckets of fried chicken in my arms.
I walk into the church’s community room and see familiar faces right away; the tiniest one lunges at me full force. She's my five-year-old cousin Lilly, and although we've only seen each other four or five times in her lifetime, she always manages to become my shadow.
Since the four of us traveled the farthest, we're the last to arrive. I look around at my father's extended family. A strange bunch to say the least.
My dad's parents divorced when he and his two siblings were young. Both of them remarried and had more children with their new spouses, enlarging my dad's brood to a sister, brother, two half-brothers, and two more half-sisters.
Ever since I can remember, his parents have remained on good terms despite the divorce. To attend my birthday parties, they would even share a single van for the drive from Detroit to our house in Kalamazoo. At gas stations and rest areas along the way, my grandfather loved to tell strangers, "These are my two wives," with one of his mischievous winks.
But we had always kept Christmas gatherings separate: one at my grandmother's and another at my grandfather's, which makes for a lot of Christmas. I never complained; I liked that our family Christmas festivities extended over several days.
Then it gets even more complicated. (Try to follow this – sometimes a diagram is necessary.) My Aunt Sheryl married Jim, who already had a grown son, Doug, from a previous marriage. Doug married Jeanne, Sheryl's half-sister and another one of my aunts. So, Sheryl is Jeanne's stepmother and her half-sister.
Doug and Jeanne now have two kids, so Sheryl is simultaneously their aunt and grandmother -- what they've cleverly termed "Auntie-Grandma" -- and my grandparents are the children's grandparents and their great-grandparents. (I still haven't figured out what exactly that makes me to the two children.) Outsiders usually think this situation is weird, but it's all relation through marriage, so everything's legal.
As I walk through the room, I greet the overwhelming number of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, going through the annual routine of hugs and hellos, the how-are-yous, and my familiar refrain, "School is good."
One person stands out from all the rest. He looks so thin, frail, and aged. The last time I saw him, about a year before, he had been cancer-free, plump, and jovial. His form takes me by surprise and I purposely avoid giving him a hug.
As the newest member of our family, Dan is Lilly's father and my aunt Suzanne's husband. They've been married for three years, and I've only met him a few times.
Although he's been receiving chemotherapy, the doctors have already given him his prognosis of less than a year. This is most likely his last Christmas, and although none of us say it, we all know and feel it.
When all the food is finally laid out on red-clothed tables, we form a circle and hold hands, extending from one side of the room to the other. I look around the large circle, at this rag-tag family under one roof for its first Christmas together. It all seems so normal it’s strange we ever did Christmas any other way.
As the eldest child and with the reputation of being the most poetic speaker, my dad is elected the prayer-giver. He waits for everyone to quiet down and clears his throat.
"I think..." he begins, but is clearly choked up. "I think we have a pretty special family." Whenever my dad gets emotional, it creates an instant reaction in me and my eyes swell up with tears, just as they are now. I look around the room at my grandfather and his two wives; at their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.
A series of squeezes go around the clenched hands.
"Amen."
It’s the shortest family prayer I can remember, and yet the strongest I've ever heard.
We laugh off the heavy emotions and get in line for the ridiculous amount of food spread out on the table, including the three buckets of KFC -- which now seem out of place next to my grandmother’s annual honeyed ham and my other grandmother’s annual lasagna.
As I sit down to eat, I look over at Dan, who has three pieces of fried chicken on his plate. The chemo is making it difficult for him to keep food in his stomach, but for right now, he is enjoying the taste of the greasy chicken. I should have hugged him.
