Spring Break Road Trip

Part One of the "Sarah reconnects with her family road trip 2008" is off to a mediocre start. Nothing worth writing a play about, but I did linger on the edge of tears in the Met, hiding behind a giant ionic column to avoid the crowd.

All weekend I felt like my relationship with my dad was foundering. We get along alright, so I've never really sat down and thought about our relationship before. Now that I am, I realize that it can be summed up as such:

I talk. He digests.

Here's a frustratingly typical interaction:
we have arrived at the Met, obtained a cup of coffee and are standing at the balcony, surveying the entire museum - the best art the world has to offer! - at our fingertips.
me: So what are you excited about seeing?
he: I don't know.
me: well. I think I'll see the modern stuff.
he: I think I'll just go back to the hotel and read a book.

So he left the museum and I hid behind the column, feeling awful, fielding phone calls and ducking into the Impressionism room when the guard glared at me for talking too loudly. It's there that I saw some Monets and felt better all of sudden, staring at the water lilies. I like being in museums alone, where I can stand for as long as I want in front of a piece or pass the famous ones by. And I don't have to explain what I think of a work and try to articulately justify my reaction.

And that's what my dad and I do exceedingly well together: sit quietly absorbed in our own thoughts. We go out to eat and do crosswords instead of talking or ride the subway 100 blocks together, both silently reading different papers. Today we took the train from Penn Station to Boston and most of the way I was getting silently angry about the way he never laughs at my jokes or responds to my ideas. We talk about food, dogs, architecture, anything but anything important. I got coffee from the cafe car and came back and took a deep breath. It felt the same as when I work myself up to tell a boy I like him, so before I could stop myself, I tumbled out some words about breaking up with Anand. And it really changed things, a little. From there through the day, across Boston and the Maine border, up through the pine trees and across Casco Bay, every once in a while, we'd pick it up again and start talking about relationships. No kind of heart-to-heart, but a solid comfortability.

The farther north of the Maine border you get, the more the population decreases and the roadside store puns increase. In Wiscasset we hit "Maine-ly sewing" and I started to get genuinely nervous, realizing we were almost here to my grandparents house. I haven't seen my grandparents for... I figured this out earlier ... 6 years (?), due to nothing more than mutual lethargy and apathy. I made us stop at the grocery store and buy flowers. Holding them on my grandparents' small front porch, I felt like I was beginning a blind date, grasping the flowers in front of me for protection as the door opened.

My grandmother doesn't acknowledge any of the time or mutual benign neglect, of course, greeting me after six years with, "Oh, you shouldn't have brought flowers." - pause - "I thought your hair would be more blonde." I'm surprised to find, though, that I like my grandparents. I don't think I've ever gotten their sense of humor before, which I've discovered now is slow and dry and sharp. "Where did you get that sweater?" my dad asks politely over dinner. "Oh," my grandma replies, "My son and his wife sent it to me." You see?

Thus the "Sarah reconnects with her family roadtrip 2008" is swiftly becoming the "Sarah acknowldeges the strengths of distance and independence within family relationships and resolves to let the whole desire for a close family thing go SPRING BREAK LOBSTER ROLL YES! TOUR 2008."

That's my theme recently, my mantra. "Let it go"

... or, more realistically "Let it fucking go already, you overthinking fuckwit!!!"

"It" being boys, expectations and Want in general.