I’m in Lake of the Ozarks- retreating to bed after a long day with my matrilineal kin. The contrast between here and my home in Brooklyn is vivid. In this modest section of central Missouri you’ll find a lot of churches, a lot of cattle, and a lot of rusty old barns. Here, adult super-store billboards memetically compete with bible passages for interstate highway ad space and if you don’t go to church, chances are you’re a meth addict. Successful men here either start their own farming business, or climb the ranks of the military. Beauty is an adjective confined to children, for by age 12 most people have ballooned into obesity or failed to meet even substandard grooming expectations. For anyone without family ties to this area, it would seem like a bleak hell-hole: a web of dysfunctional systems unintelligibly constructed by a sparse community of well-meaning, but incompetent country folk. This is where my mom grew up. These are the people I call family.

At our reunion, my mom, step-dad, brother and I are the only ones who live outside the region. Entering adulthood, my mother chose to escape to paradise after paradise, dissolving Missouri ways more and more every year as she sought out new and better cultures. We lived in New Mexico, Florida, Hawaii, and California. She set up a home in every major American vacation destination and declared at her arrivals, this will be the place that will make me happy.

My grandpa gave our reunion supper commencement speech. In his Ozark twang he commented, “I wanna thank ya’ll fer comin’ out t’day. We know things is tough financially fer a lot ‘o folks. Gas is tough. Insurance costs is high ‘n all that. Now I d’know what the difference is between days when I was growin’ up ‘n now, but lemme ask ya this: What in thee world is Obama doin’ wrong now wheres when I’s was growin’ up, our folks was raisin’ eleven kids just fine on a farmer’s salary, and now-a-days seems you can’t hardly seem to feed jest one or two…” We prayed for our sick family members that weren’t able to travel to the reunion that day, we said our pledge of allegiance to a proudly displayed flag, and we ate our country style casseroles and drank our sweet teas.

These events are always a little strange for me because I am always, definitively, the sore thumb of the bunch. As often as I come here and as hard as I try I just can’t seem to shed my San Francisco/Brooklyn style quick enough and it usually makes for a string of awkward conversations with relatives where we mutually attempt in desperation to find our cultural commonalities, often failing. But a blood connection warrants much kindness and good vibes are often salvaged with a strategic comment like, good heavens you sure do look like yer mama.

Two of my second cousins brought their guitars to the gathering and my great aunt urged me into the limelight with them so as to sing. I scanned my brain for a repertoire of family-appropriate songs and feared I’d dry up after two. My second cousins, Jim and Junior, delighted me with a sequence of gospel and country-western classics. Junior wore a camouflage hunting cap and cowboy boots while singing a heartfelt rendition of Merle Haggard’s “Swingin’ Doors” and my cousin Jim yodeled in perfect mimicry of Jimmy Rogers. I sang them the one original song I’ve written that I’d know they’d appreciate. Written in reaction to a health scare for my grandma, the refrain goes:

I long to be in Swedeborg Missouri, where the land of my family is and my ancestors are buried.

My grandpa shared with us one of his favorite gospel songs. He sings a’capella and is always incredibly off-key. He is possibly the worst singer you’ve ever heard who insists on singing all the time. But much like a parent would frame and display a stick-figure drawing by their five-year-old, I savored his erroneous notes with pride and a feeling of deep connection. This is my grandpa. He’s in his eighties. This may be the last time I ever get to hear him sing. Chet Baker couldn’t deliver a more poignant song in that moment. I looked around the room and realized that my connection to my mother doesn’t enrich my life solely because I know and love her, alone; it also enriches my life because I am by default connected to everyone else in her life too. I wondered about my dad as I often do. What grandparent, great aunt, and second cousin am I missing out on his side? If I enjoyed him as a social father would we be singing gospel songs at his family reunions too? Or would his cousins prefer Prince?

Often when I’m struck by how connected I feel to my mom, or anyone on her side of the family, my joy is met with an intense feeling of loss for what I feel should have or could have been a connection to my father and his family members.

On the drive back home my grandpa pointed out every little thing on the highway that purveyed meaning to him. “Look-ey there! That’s where me n’ your grandma Betty used to go to buy hens when we had an old hen coop! And see there! See that ole’ mobile home stickin’ up on that sixty-foot pole? They call that mobile-home-in-the-sky. That’s where I used to work for twenty-odd years- assemblin’ mobile homes for six dollars an hour. If it weren’t fer the mobile home bizness yer mama woulda never got fed.”

To anyone without family ties, this area would be a bleak hell-hole… void of charm and redemption. To me, it is trickled with the anecdotes and footprints of a modest group of people that I am both biologically and socially tied to. Even my sun-worshiping mom is changing her mind about her decision to live in San Francisco. With the material glories of a Prius and Porsche in her driveway and a shiny new baby grand piano and big screen high-def TV in her living room, paid for by a once generous California economy, she comments to me, “I think I want to move back to Missouri. I think I would be happier here. I have friends and family here that love me no matter what mistakes I’ve made.” We sit on the edge of a dock on the Lake of the Ozarks, careful not to let our feet touch the water because of high E. Coli (local businesses recently dumped raw sewage into the lake to shortcut time and costs of environmentally sound disposal methods). Despite being unable to dive into the polluted water she gives me a grin and looks up at the sky, “I just think it’s so beautiful here.”

The beauty, conveniences, wealth and overall paradisal features of California and my mother’s many other choice living environments have proven unable to compete with the glory of home- this polluted, dysfunctional, pocket of America filled with a bunch of toothless people we love unconditionally. I’d like to extrapolate this idea to that of biological parents. So they may not qualify as fit and attractive candidates for mainstream notions of “good parenting”; beauty is indeed with the eye of the beholder. We want a chance to know our parents, both our parents. We want to hear their stories, and exchange human moments of affection and connection with them. We want to decide for ourselves what good is, because I guarantee it changes in conjunction with the word belonging.

Categories: Aging, Disability, Death, Dying, Childhood, Fatherhood, General, Motherhood
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