Golden, Pt. 1

It is 8:04 p.m. on the last day of 2008, and I am at a computer kiosk in the B concourse of Chicago O’Hare waiting for my flight to Buffalo. It is scheduled to depart at 9:41 p.m. CST, which means I will not get home until “next” year. The B concourse on this side is very quiet, although not as quiet as I’ve seen some airports. I once got stuck overnight in the Cincinatti airport, one of the more depressing experiences of my life.
I’m on my way home after a week in California with my immediate and extended family. I arrived on Christmas Eve after a long day of travel which included four hours in this very same airport on the way out West. There had been several days of snow here and elsewhere in the United States, and I think I was lucky to have made it in and out of Chicago at all. When I arrived in Sacramento I still had a three hour car trip to Arnold, the small mountain hamlet where my parents, in their mid-seventies, have lived for nearly two decades. My father picked me up at the airport and as we drove home he droned on in his usual way about his and my mother’s recent cruise through Mediterranean ports-of-call. I love my father, but he can really be a bore. He has a habit of talking without taking stock of his listener and his listener’s stance. He has a habit of connecting subjects with the phrase, “Anyway…” and one can hear the ellipses in his voice. I suppose he falls into that habit with people he’s known as long as he and I have known each other, but I also noticed that he (and to an extent, my mother) are both like that.
My mother had injured her left leg earlier that afternoon, and was relatively immobilized for the next several days. I was also surprised to find that her older sister from St. Louis, my aunt Marguerite, was at the house in Arnold. Within the last year Marguerite lost both one of her (grown, married) sons and her husband of many years within months of each other, and as she is getting on, my mother had invited her out to spend the holidays. It has been many years since I saw her; she is hearing impaired, and the sound of her voice—expressive but affected in its particular and peculiar if understandable way by her handicap—is one that takes me back through the years very quickly, since I only heard it when she was visiting from the Midwest. My brother John and his wife Lori had already arrived, and there was a good foot and more of fresh snow on the ground. My sister Julie and her husband Dave arrived late, and I forced myself to fight back travel fatigue to stay up with them as long as I could.
Being a little more familiar with the particular ways that my mother likes things done, and aware that physical incapacitation is something she accepts with extreme reluctance, I was able to help her throughout the next several days, getting the dinner ready on Christmas Eve (informal and buffet-style) and making breakfast and dinner the next day. My mother made a bit much of my help, and my brother and sister started ribbing me about it, saying that I was the “golden” child. I smiled and laughed along with them, but if there is anything I think I deserve credit for, it’s simply knowing how to handle my parents with with love, tact, and concern. I notice that my grown brother and sister have a habit of engaging my parents—together and separately—in exactly the sort of way (conversational subject, action, random comment) that provokes an archetypical response. Then they wonder why my mother and father respond in the same ways they’ve done for decades. I, on the other hand, quietly managed to sidle out of the room and into another part of the house whenever the allegedly fair-and-balanced coverage of current events on Fox News got under my skin. “The O’Reilly Factor” comes on much earlier in California, which is unfortunate; I had to escape to the computer terminal upstairs and concentrate on answering e-mails for the duration of the broadcast.
(to be continued...)