My cousin Max flew for freshman year yesterday. He left for college for the first time, which is of course the important one. I saw him Saturday at Oma's eightieth party for her eightieth. Despite near not sleeping night before and the vibrant shock from a mini cup cappuccino, kindly given with delightful frothy Monaco milk, the birthday was the best family gathering. Resting my unaccustomed to the drug, over caffeinated nervous system on the stairs, I felt warm as watched dad guitar and Grandma Ros sing with Unco. (Means "old man" in Vietnamese. It's not cruel, it was my grandfather's idea of what we should call him. Sense of self takes strange forms in family.) The artist formerly known as Unco, latterly Dutchly dubbed Opa, and occasionally called Grandpa Denny, may be remembered for his vocal talents from the b’ima at my Bat Mitzvah. He sweetly sang the first verses of "I'll be loving you always" before the polite horror of Rabbi Davidson interrupted and I continued chanting. Guests later asked what language he'd been singing in and hardly believed they'd heard English. But at Oma’s birthday party, Unco/Opa/Grandpa Denny and the sweet strains of Grandma’s Ros aged operatic voice had something so lovely about it, even as they sang “You are my sunshine” twice in a row and I wasn’t sure if they’d encored to switch to a better key or because they hadn’t remembered singing it the first time. My Dutch cousins, Siska and Elske were there too. It’d been five or more years since seen Siska and she didn’t remember right away. She’d grown blond and nicely normal, so foreign and it strange to think of her as related to me and family. Guess the strange ones ran away to America. Saturday with a temporary truce and effort to remember the pretty past I was happy to come from somewhere and them.
Running away back to last year involuntarily, it was the fault of my metempsychosising Max goodbyeing his high school friends for first time. Fresh from second half of senior year slump into serious fun, felt ache of leaving friends and family. I wouldn't go back there but seeing him struggling brought back the remembering despite dearest wishes not to be reincarnated in that edge of the future (although if I have to avoid getting sent any time, middle school is still the personal hell I'd never in a million years go through again). There's this thing about it that glimmered though his nonchalance into my reflections. It’s still incomprehensible to me. I can’t name it. One year ago I would have named it simply separation anxiety. The feeling of being spilt apart. Struck me that I seemed to be a passive piece of wood a timely woodsman had lifted and swung an axe into. Hurt throbbed from the sound of the sharp crack, the blade of the axe and the splitting down the side. Two years ago I would have dubbed it acknowledgment of “the special grief of privacy being human holds” and felt connected in inevitable loneliness that had haunted from Gilgamesh way more than thousand times two years ago. But maybe the malady is named romantic comedy. Maybe it’s just the effects of too much Austen topped off with teen t.v and Say Anything. There’s the real danger to minds. The violence isn’t half as bad. Plato was right. Writing, plays, art or Dawson’s don’t cure by catharsis. Instead they allow us to indulge emotions which we should not be taught to feel. Forget fully being human. It's too dangerous if your self-preservation streak is short.
