December, 24, 2013

Family and Christmas go together, right? Like love and marriage. Like horse and carriage, right? Well, I won’t disagree. But growing up in a mostly non-practicing Jewish family, I didn’t know much about it. Sure, we had Christmas in Salisbury Elementary School and W. Tresper Clarke High School in the 1950s and 60s suburbs of Long Island, New York. And fer sure, the other-side-of-the tracks O’Farrells and the D’Agostinos let us upper middle class Jewish kids know all about their Irish and Italian blue collar ways, with their anti-Semitic middle school harassment and their Catholic jock-swearing braggadocio. “Fuck you and your kike neighbahs”, they’d curse, mangling yet another one of our Schwin bicylcles. “What’s a ‘kike’, ma?” “Never mind that now. Let’s get you some new pants in the shopping center.” You get the point.

But I don’t think I helped decorate my first Christmas tree until I was in college in Buffalo, New York, when a whole bunch of my Italian fraternity brothers (Alfano, Siragusa, Campagnola) introduced me to the practice. I loved it. It was festive and fun. Wrapping and putting colorful reindeer and Santa Claus-papered presents under the angel-topped Christmas tree, then opening them on Christmas morning, was a revelation to me. Of course, my non-practicing Jewish parents didn’t like hearing about my new discovery, and they even accused me of becoming anti-Semitic myself at this point in my life, which may, or may not have been, true.

Nevertheless, Christmas was family time, and I liked seeing the Christian families celebrate together. Not that we Jews, practicing or not, didn’t have family and holiday celebrations or rituals. We had Chanukah, the 8 day “festival of lights”, celebrating the triumph of Judah Macabee (definitely no Irishman or Scot) over the Greek suppressors of the “chosen people” in the Biblical Holy Land, about 200 years before the birth of Christ. So glorious and miraculous a victory was Judah Macabee’s that now, over 2200 years later, we modern-day Jews still celebrated the fact, or the myth, that somehow… God chose to recognize the stubborn resistance of this small but mighty tribe of  Macabees… in His name, whereupon… He let just a smidgen of holy oil burn in the Temple for an entire 8 days. A “miracle!” Hence the “menorah”, the eight-branched candelabra of the season, and the Festival of Lights, also spelled Hanukah.

Soon after college, our family, mostly based on me and my younger sister’s newly-learned predilection for Christmas, its tree decoration, and exchange of gifts on December 25th, started celebrating the holiday together. I don’t think we were exactly sacrilegious or anti-Semitic, we just laid back on the 8 days of Hanukah and agreed on the more efficient gift giving ritual on the single day of Christmas. Then again, I always loved watching Frank Capra’s Christmas movie, “It’s a Wonderful Life”, an annual holiday ritual all its own. Who didn’t? Plus, I admired loyal Christian kids of all ages traveling long ways to return home for Christmas to be with their families. I guess it was just impossible  for me to resist the larger society’s recognition of the Christmas “season”, even if it was commercially and shopping mall driven. And then… there was always… magical and wonderful… Christmas in New York… Salvation Army Santa Clauses ringing their fake-bearded charity bells on every corner; artificially-frozen, winter wonderland ice skating in Rockefeller Center; the crisp chill of December in the air that had you exhale visible steam out of your mouth, always hoping for a Christmas Eve snowfall to create a White Christmas, just like the one that Bing Crosby sang about every year, even though it only seemed to happen every other decade.

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Anyway, I last left you at the Rotterdam train station on Christmas Eve, with my wife and me being picked up and greeted by her favorite Indonesian sister, Wati, and her and my Indonesian-Dutch brother in law, Dave. We’ve trained into town with Santa Claus and tomorrow is Christmas, the cheesy and uncomfortable time of year, when once again, we all have to consider “family”. Sadly, with both my parents gone in the last years, I have only a tiny remaining natal family left to me. There’s just my younger sister, Alison, her Chilean husband, Edgardo, and their two daughters, Amanda and Marcela, my nieces. By contrast, Surya, my wife, has a whole village of Manalus (the name of her family’s Sumatran “Batak” tribe) holding down the Indonesian family fort. The Bataks are a  fierce and matriarchal tribe. Basically, Sumatrans know not to fuck with the former cannibal-practicing Bataks. And when it comes to her actual mother, older brother, three sisters and three wild and wooly nephews, da wife is completely attached and inter-dependent, calling or skyping or “whatsapping” one or two or three of them… every week.

It’s a dreary Christmas Eve in the Nederlands, especially here in Rotterdam, not exactly my favorite city in Holland. It was entirely rebuilt after the Nazis bombed it into oblivion at the end of the Second World War. Everything is boxy and boring; sometimes it still feels “broken”. The Germans may have ultimately lost the war, but they did manage to destroy all the old world beauty and charm of the greatest harbor in Europe.

But seeing my wife’s smiling enthusiasm and childlike joy in seeing her sister, after well over a year, certainly takes the chill out night.

They are instantaneously like two peas returning to the comfortable and familiar family pod. Physically affectionate, chatty, and attached at the hip of common childhood memory.

So different than my thorny guardedness around my own family… even when my parents were alive. I could never quite explain it to them… my feeling of wanting to protect myself… from them… from the very idea of “family”. Perhaps it stemmed from the extreme discomfort of my own childhood. From always feeling like the umbilically-attached, parent-pleasing “good boy”, whenever I was around them as a wannabe “adult”. From the pains of growing up unknown to myself. From the pressure to conform, to become their middle class New York Jewish son, “the doctuh”. From the pressure and expectation to make money. To get married. Most of all, to be “happy”. When to the contrary, all I was usually feeling was aching and self-conscious repression, socially shy and crippling awkwardness, and the pimply and oily growing pains of adolescence.

Da wife and I go back to Wati and Dave’s harbor-hugging condo and sit around the small, electrically-lit, artificial Christmas tree, and… all is well. Red wine, Swiss chocolate, and Dave’s mother, Ibu, (younger than me by three years) and brother, Ray. This has been an unusual trip for me, in that my usual modus operandi on a trip like this is to make all the decisions myself: where to travel, how long to stay, transportation, connections, budgets, guide books, sightseeing, etc. etc. But on this trip, we are staying entirely with friends and family. With our Israeli diplomat friend, Michel, in Pareee. With our Servas host friends in St. Gallen, Switzerland, Bruno and Karin. And now with Surya’s family in Rotterdam. I’ve had to instruct myself to let go of the reins and allow myself to “be taken care of”. Not an easy assignment for me. But one well worth it. Because to simply “relax”… to be invited into friends’ and family’s homes, to their dinner tables, into the homes of their friends and relatives, to see their cities through their eyes, to be fed meal after generous meal, with all the local delicacies and charms of their different and distinct hospitalities, is for me, simply astounding . So new. So different. So passive. So… nice.

We sleep in what used to be the unfinished third floor attic, which now, with the help of a little LA loan since the last time we visited three years ago, has become a comfortable and cozy guest room. Dave has to turn up the heat for us, because apparently we warm-weathered Angelenos, especially yours truly, have developed thin skins and delinquent immunities to the nasty European winters, no matter how “mild” they are claimed to be by the locals. Same has been true in Switzerland. Paris too. Everywhere we’ve gone, it’s been an apologetic, “would you mind turning  up the heat a bit? We’re cold.” “Really? I’m already sweating,” has been the consistent reply. But that’s something family and friends do for one another. Turn up the heat. Feed you something you especially like to eat. Drive you across the border to an historic holiday Christmas market. Take off work, using their vacation days. So simple yet so foreign to the ol’ family-averse and crusty monologist, yours Trulesly.

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The entire week after Christmas unrolls and reveals itself lazily…  as we literally seem do absolutely … nothing. Other than eat, and walk, and then eat some more. Oh yeah, we exchange Christmas presents… at midnight on the 26th! What else is there “to do”? The Batak sisters just want to talk and talk and talk some more. And they laugh. A lot. And reminisce. A lot. Dave and I? We’re just convenient and friendly appendages. “Husbands? What are those?” Or, more likely, “who needs them?”

We were so jam-packed busy in Switzerland, running like over-programmed Swiss clocks with Bruno and Karin, from busing to sledding to hiking to training to thermo bathing to Swiss cheesing and chocolateting, that we never had time to rest… other than to come home, eat, change, and go out touring again. Here, in Rotterdam, our rhythm and activity level has dropped to… zero. It’s a shock to the system, yet absolutely… fine.

I’ve prepared myself for it. For the whole “family” thing. For giving over the reins. For letting my wife’s love of her sister and for her family, be the rule of the day. She certainly deserves it. After spending 13 years with me in America, in LA, traipsing around the globe with me, primarily on my work schedule, fulfilling my needs, on my time table, now certainly seems to be her turn, me thinks. Time for me to “let go”, to be a little more flexible and tolerant and generous than usual. Not that I’m not a generous and loving husband. I think I am. We Jews tend to be. But just more consciously so on this trip. On this leg. In Rotterdam. With Wati and Dave and da wife and… da “family”.

Yet there’s the rub. That word “family” again. Isn’t it strange? That I suddenly have this vicarious family here in Rotterdam. While my own, so-called “real” family celebrates the holiday season back in far away northern California. With my one, 22 year old niece having just returned from a junior  semester abroad in Chile, surviving an at gun point “collectivo” taxi robbery. With my other, 20 year old niece readying herself for the win some-lose some Olympic trials of college applications. With my Chilean refugee brother-in-law coming back from his own annual visit to his natal family in Santiago, Chile. With my fierce-loving, always younger, sister gathering her well-tended brood around her for the uncomfortable-to-be “out of the nest-off to college” years, without her two precious and precocious daughters. With her eternally-missing, never quite available, crusty older brother, me, half a planet away with his suddenly new surrogate “family”… whose languages (Dutch and Indonesian) he doesn’t even speak. Whose new “family” members, each and all, are almost an entire foot shorter than him, and who, each and all, he barely really knows, except through the grace and desire of his family-loving, Indonesian wife.

And yet again, here I am, indeed. In Rotterdam. “With family”. Sounds something like “with child”. Does that mean I’m pregnant or something? Like I’m now stuck for the rest of my life with this Indo-Dutch surrogate family… of Ibu and Ray, Wati and Dave, Nouri and Chris, Mian and Jon, all new members on my insta-family, some of whom I’ve just met this last week? Sounds also a little like “Insta Gram”, one of the current, omnipresent photo crazes on the internet. Just point and shoot. Click and Post. New pictures. New family. Not quite real, but virtual. Better than “real”. Easier. Less connected. Beyond language. No need to speak. Just be in the presence of. Be included. Next time we’re together, you’ll be there. I’ll be there. We’ll all be there. Together. Family. As long as I’m… as long as you’re… still… married.

Sort of… nice. In a comfortable, non-committal way. No history. No scars. No short fuses, like between me and my sister. Where sometimes, all we have to do is be in each others’ presence for less than say… 3 minutes… before the old bomb goes off… the same patterns… the same parents…the same words… the same hurts, injuries, offenses, grudges, wounds, explosions. “Fuck you!” “No, fuck you!” No, fuck you and your over-controlling, self indulgent parenting non skills.” “No, fuck you and your boringly narcissistic self-involved, self hating, stupid, unable to love your own family, un-brotherly ways.”No, fuck you no, fuck you no, fuck you no, fuck you…” ad… infinitum.

Until…. 10,000 miles away…. in a small, sort of ugly, rebuilt  Dutch city still with the biggest port in Europe…. on a Christmas holiday with hardly anything to do except to be around these small, decent strangers calling themselves, and my calling them, “family”…. perhaps is the opportunity… to feel how… actually shallow and superficial this temporary “family” is… although simultaneously comfortable and “nice”… because I don’t really have to talk about anything substantial with them…. because we don’t even speak the same language nor do we have any personal history together….  Until here… in Rotterdam… just perhaps… is this opportunity to reach out to my very far away, “real”, or at least actual, natal family… to attempt to heal the wounds… and to become just a little closer to my fiercely loving sister…. who has always wanted to have a relationship with her ever-so-smart, older brother, who for some hurtful reason, tore himself away from his own mother and father and sister, at the peak of his adolescence… for what he claims were… reasons of self preservation… but whose emotional withdrawal and  self hatred, whose lack of love and complete inaccessibility, were always so, so… terribly, terribly painful.

Yes, perhaps here in Rotterdam, amidst the workman-like but uninspiring architecture of a city that had to completely re-build itself after the heinous bombing of the Nazis, here… might be a starting point to decide to rebuild my own failed relationship with my own self-negated family… the one I set aside and rejected my entire adult life.

Not in lovely Amsterdam, my favorite Dutch city, with her romantic canals and her intact, un-bombed Euro architecture and her pot dealing, free-wheeling  coffee shops, and her ever so accepting, liberal-minded Euro friendly residents.

But here, in damaged, re-built Rotterdam, a city I never gave a real chance to…  a city I spurned and rejected for being second rate, for being not as good as others I considered far preferable. Here… may be an opportunity to call my fiercely-loving sister to apologize to her for my life-long criticism of how she raised her two girls… who actually turned out far better than I ever expected them to. Turned out… not like the spoiled Jewish American Princesses who I was so sure my sister had raised them to be. But turned out more like independent-thinking, self-assured young women who I rarely see, even amongst my college co-eds who I have taught with such arrogance and self- assuredness for the last three decades… at indeed, the so called “University of Spoiled Children”.

Yes, perhaps, here and now… on this very day…. amongst my new, Indo-Dutch, ever-so-comfortable insta-family…. might be the opportunity to start over… to start anew… with a more inclusive, a more accepting, a more self-accepting… idea of … “family”.

Yes.

“Hey, Aleee-son. Hola. It’s your brother. Calling from Rotterdam. To wish you and Edgardo and Amanda and Marcela…. a Happy New Year….”