Don't Bat An Eye

I recall an episode of Designing Women when Julia Sugarbaker was defending her slightly-off-the-mark brother to someone. She said something like, "We Southern families all have crazy people in them. We just don't hide them in the attic like you Northerners. We celebrate them. We bring 'em right out here on the veranda for everyone to enjoy."

The above was sent to me by a friend and it made me think.

Coming from a good Northern family, which is descended from a supposedly even better Southern family, we have more than our share of enjoyable relatives. We absolutely do not hide them in the attic, nor do we drag them down to the veranda. In our family we like to pretend they are perfectly normal and you are the one with a social acuity problem.

When my brother, who always asked my children to eat their cookies at the picnic table in order to keep their crumbs off his Aubusson rug, calmly remarked to the large dog gnawing on his antique tea table, "Hannah, dear, please stop chewing on the table." No one batted an eye. When my sister drove up in her large black car after a six hour drive and said, "I've been seeing double for weeks now. It's driving me crazy." No one batted an eye. My grandmother once saw a black cat cross in front of her. She immediately turned and drove through a construction site, barely escaping a brick wall that tumbled down a fraction of a second after she passed it. When asked if she was superstitious, she quickly replied, "Absolutely not, but if I hadn't turned when I did, that wall might have hit us." No one batted an eye.

We take things as they come in our family. My father had a full scholarship to Catholic Seminary. He was an atheist when I knew him. There must have been a transition period in there somewhere, but we didn't talk about those things in our family. My Aunt Lu was the eldest of eight children. She married her husband in 1900, when she was sixteen, the year my grandmother, her youngest sister, was born. One morning she asked her husband when he was going to order them a baby from Sears Roebuck. My Aunt Chloe named her son Bill. He named his son Bill, who also did the same and on it went. When we talked about them we always referred to them as Big Bill, Little Bill, Middle Bill and Baby Bill, who I am sure eventually grew up. How they ever spoke among themselves is beyond me. We eventually just lost track of them all, or maybe it just became too complicated to talk about them.

One of my brothers had a penchant for sleeping in the middle of sunny driveways when he was a child, Thank goodness he developed allergies to the sun as a teenager. My father went out in the backyard one evening and a neighbor thanked him for letting my brother teach her son to play the clarinet. Dad simply nodded and smiled. As far as we know, my brother never played a clarinet in his life, but the other kid went to state contests and got a blue ribbon.

I could go on forever. We have even more interesting people in our family, but they tend to be more controversial. In our family, those things you see out of the corner of your eye, are not there. Neither are they in the attic, nor out on the veranda. Don't bat an eye and no one will notice.