I first noticed the family values patter in the mid-eighties, I think. Perhaps you were too young then to remember that in the beginning it seemed as if old men in suits and color-blind women were speaking in tongues on national television. There was a recession on. I had a small child, two minimum wage jobs and a boyfriend who kept a meat cleaver in his trunk. When I would occasionally run past a TV it was because the space shuttle blew up or because late-night Ben Casey made my harrowing existence a little less harrowing for an hour, so it took a little while for these throwbacks to cross my field of vision.

Lucky me.

The life I was busy having was no laughing matter – at the time. After my two jobs I was taking a basic wiring class at the Middlesex County VoTech with electricians’ apprentices from a couple of IBEW locals. When the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers local for my town held its annual “One of us…one of us…” drive, there were three openings. I aced their exam because back then my brain still went ZOT! on cue. It was an exciting time! Then came the interview. I expected the electricians to – as people did – marvel at my work ethic and stellar I.Q. Instead, the interview proved a shock – no pun intended. One of the interviewers said these actual words to me. I forget my phone number, but I remember this:

IBEW Brother: Why should we give you a job and take one away from a man supporting a family?
Tata: Because I’m the single parent of a family no man is supporting.

No, I didn’t get the job, so I moved to Perth Amboy and applied to a different IBEW, hoping they weren’t all filled with mouthbreathing yahoos. And I was so wrong! It was at this point I gave up hope of becoming an electrician and providing a decent life for myself and my daughter. I became the bad university secretary who would hang up on you. I still had no money but I was at home nights when the TV was on. Suddenly, Jerry Falwell played a huge part in my life because hating someone with every fiber of your being takes up mondo time and energy. And Reverend Donald Wildmon’s despicable antics occupied more of my waking thought than even my own.

See, nothing, nobody, no power on earth would or will convince me that gays were a threat, or feminists were evil, the homeless wanted to be homeless, starving children deserved to starve, Communists were the tool of Satan, or any of that other shit televangelists shoveled. Being born beige and middle class in modern America is nothing other than a cosmic accident, and from this position of tremendous fucking privilege it is my obligation to minimize suffering caused by my presence in the world by not acting like a soulless, selfish bastard who doesn’t care who she hurts to get her way. I am not a nice person and sometimes I’ve lived closer to this modest ideal than others; however, dating married men is not morally stinky on the same order of magnitude as goading your followers to blockade and firebomb women’s clinics, or failing to prevent it.

This is the gap between intention and action: the harm factor. In the eighties, our Catholic and evangelical leaders failed to observe or lament the suffering they caused and from there, it’s only gotten worse. It is as if, drunk with power, they forgot that laying down the law is not the same as shepherding the flock. It’s sad, really. One neglected idea at the very bottom of their common philosophy is not a bad one: it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if we could raise children to be secure, smart adults – possibly, they shouldn’t be selfish bastards, either.

But rhetoric took off and riot was incited and passions remain inflamed and all reason is lost. I can’t even look at their faces anymore without feeling as if I’ve been suckerpunched and forced to spend the last twenty years of my life defending the simple notion that free people should be free, and – I’m terribly sorry – the family is not the be-all and end-all these bigots make out as long as the family rejects some of its members for being gay, or poor, or HIV-positive, or independent women, or of a different belief-set. I am officially sick of hearing about the family, about family values and about my role in the family. I don’t want to hear another religious figure tell me our society is corrupting its youth. The reason I and others can say this?

According to the 1990 and 2000 Census and as reported by the Wall Street Journal, the nuclear family is no longer our most common living arrangement. The Journal’s take on this change in American life is pathetic and sentimental. Somehow, it suggests, we drifted away from the thing that offers strength and companionship. What the Journal fails to note is that living in nuclear family structures is often extremely uncomfortable. Family is the problem you’re stuck with until you construct your own family solution. In my case, I live alone or with a lover, whichever! My friends are my family in the absence of a more conventional household. The prospect of someday being unable to care for myself and relying on Miss Sasha – however scrumptious she may be – fills me with a desire to eat day-old sushi on a hot day. With mayo. My family may take offense and that’s their right, but feelings are facts, and the fact is I will never live in a male-dominated structure that includes children. I won’t miss it a bit.

So. About family movies, family meals, family values, family entertainment, family trips, family television, family anything else: stow it. The family unit turned on itself in the eighties and proved a fragile, unbending structure. It snapped, despite all the rhetoric and damage to individuals and stifling oppression. Now whose fault is that?

Rise up, rise up.

Tata: Hey, I called you yesterday.
Paulie: You did?
Tata: You don’t remember?
Paulie: No…
Tata: Your pants answered.
Paulie: What?
Tata: I called and your pants answered the phone. You were at the hospital and I could hear your dad. You were arranging your stepmom in the hospital bed.
Paulie: I was? Wait – I was!
Tata: Then it got quiet and I couldn’t figure out what that rhythmic sound was. And it was you, walking!
Paulie: That’s funny!
Tata: And the whole time I was shouting into the phone, “PAULIE! PAULIE!”
Paulie: You were?
Tata: What, you don’t remember ten minutes of your pants shouting your name?

Everyone needs a hobby. Usually, mine is trying to remember why I should come to work. Recently, I learned how to code links into my posts which, if you were born after the cut-off date, you probably learned in pre-natal typing class. Good for you! Shut up.

Tata: My link doesn’t work.
Mamie: It’s broken. I’ll fix it.
Tata: Grrr! Grrr! Arr. Grrr!
Mamie: While I’m at the conference –
Tata: The ten days I’ll spend swearing you’re grounded but in the end I’ll just be glad you’re back?
Mamie: – pester your friend Jazz. By the look of things, he’s spending too much time with grownups.

Uh. Okay. So Jazz is the reason broken things at PIC are all glued together and pristinely duct-taped. Anyway, very cranky persons have complained the wedding stuff is all backwards and interspersed with specious musings. Good for them! Shut up. Here’s Miss Sasha’s wedding, in order. If you missed it the first time, be sure to picture me with a perfect manicure and a splitting headache, because weddings are not about the Mother of the Bride. Are they?

Leading up to and including the bridal shower.
Plastic fruit aplenty.
Speak no evil. Well, maybe a little.
Shopping and sharpshooting.
When ‘rustic’ attacks and when we fight back.

The altar and the alterego! Cheers!
Percussive and concussive.
Waiting up is hard to do.
Coffin or caffeine?
The best advice you’ll hear all week.
Orchestras rehearsed on the Titanic, too.
I’m not listening! You can’t make me!
Dressed and repressed.
Get a tissue. This is the good part – for you!
Laughter, horror and a tasty buffet.
After, and after that.
There can’t be more. But there is!
Home from the honeymoon.

I still have no wedding pictures, but that’s okay. I’m not desperate to see myself in a purple blouse tailored for Ming the Merciless – and it’s not like you’ll get a glimpse of that triumph of textile engineering. Ugh. Well, unless it’s hilarious.

We’ll find out, I guess.

You there! With the opposable thumb! It is I, Larry, the little black cat bent on stealing your soul! I grow weary of your wheedling and obfuscation! Since you cannot boil water without tutelage, I suggest you take this weighty tome and discover the joy of indulging my every whim.

Prepare the shrimp!

In 1978, my father’s parents took me on a four-week tour of Italy, Switzerland and Monaco. I was 14 and generally forgive myself for sleeping through Nice, though given a second change, I’d swill some coffee, prop my eyes open and beg Grandpa to swing around the block a few times.

We went to St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. It’s not enough to say there’s nothing like it but the point in important. It’s vast and sumptuous and gilded and endless and candlelit and every few feet the tourist finds something he or she saw in an art book or heard about in a class somewhere. Everyone’s seen reproductions because the originals have raw power and unmistakable voltage. Our tour group through the Vatican was small that afternoon. When we came to Michelangelo’s Pieta, I didn’t just stare. I felt that sculpture ripple through me, body and soul. I felt its agony and grief, its tenderness and devotion. Four hands grabbed my shoulders and lifted me off the ground. Without any conscious thought, I’d walked toward the Pieta, and the Swiss Guard moved to intercept me – with spears. When my feet left the ground, the spell broke. My grandfather shook me.

Tata: What? What’s happening?
Grandparents talking at once: What are you doing? Did you see the guards? Are you okay? What’s wrong with you?

I had no recollection of trying to touch the sculpture, but such is the power of the image that I was not standing and looking, I was moving to comfort the grieving mother. So they told me. All I remembered was a tidal wave of loss. What the hell, I was a kid, and trying to comfort a statue is the amusingly futile gesture of the century. Woo hoo! “Cheer up, Mom! He’s touring the Holy Land as a headliner!” But I won’t blush when I think about the empathy at the root of this moment. It is not weakness that permits us to consider the feelings of others but strength; it was not too long before our trip that Grandma had started talking to me about a daughter lost in infancy. The Pieta was no abstraction, and I was starting to understand there could be no greater pain than the loss of a child.

There’s some adult carry-over from this moment, razor-sharp and subtly silly: I can’t even watch Disney movies in which children are separated from their mothers. Dumbo and Bambi as a double feature could put me in the Carrier Clinic. Sophie’s Choice made me toss my waffles. TV movies about Marilyn Monroe’s childhood cause me to weep inconsolably. Everyone’s got a soft spot, and this one’s mine. So you know where I’m going with this: when I see Cindy Sheehan’s face, and I think about her losing her son, and the depth to which her pain must fill in the hollow spaces and bring her to the surface we see, I know that in her position I might drown. I might never wish to see daylight again but she does. For this reason alone, when her detractors speak ill of her, they shame themselves. For this reason alone, Centrists and the Left must embrace her, comfort her, quit the equivocating and think less about our fears. When we are afraid to be seen as passionate seekers of justice we surrender to those who obstruct it, and we are seen for what we are: cowards unworthy of our fierce history of brave resistance.

Must we shame ourselves this way?

At the liquor store in my neighborhood, the guys behind the counter display a polite interest in me as a regular customer. They see me for five minutes twice a month since 1998. They have apparently developed their own narrative for my life, which is excellent news.

Guy: Hey! Where’s your boyfriend Tony?

In retrospect, I’m Italian and never dated Italian men, but Daria did. She had a type. Daria and Todd met up in the Stone Pony one night so Todd could meet Daria’s latest tall, handsome, tanned, Italian, cologne-drenched, possessive bigot boy.

Todd: So…what’s Tony’s name?

The liquor store guy is really asking if I have a boyfriend, which is a funny thing to ask a middle-aged woman who isn’t wearing a wedding ring and whose hair was recently flaming sunset pink. He does not ask about my girlfriend Toni, but if he thought I had a girlfriend named Toni I bet I’d also have his phone number on a matchbook. You can learn a lot in ten words or less. I smile and don’t tell him anything.

Tata: Denver, I think.

I’d love to hear his version of my saga. On the one hand, I don’t want the kind of attention saying, “We broke up in October” invites. On the other, it’s hard not to sigh heavily and stare off into space.

Tata: You always have to stab people more than you think you will.

That might move things right along, or along to the Middlesex County Adult Correctional Facility, where I know the library’s marginal because I stock it myself. The antic might be worth it: Mamie left last week for a half-price shoe sale in Boston, where I wouldn’t want to be the fellow customer or unarmed salesperson when Mamie spots her fall season designer trophies. In any case, this hunting expedition occupies her full attention. I leave messages.

Tata: My mother brought me to the Falmouth Bus Station at 3:39 for a 3:40 bus and I ran into the depot to buy a ticket where I couldn’t think as the lady behind the counter said, “Round trip for two: $78” and I said, “No, one person, one way” and the ticket was $18.50 even though the bus company’s 800 number said $17.00 and I couldn’t argue because behind me Mom was working her weird verbal voodoo on the bus driver which made my brain go all swirly but I got the right ticket and dragged my two suitcases and my Dragonball Z lunchbox onto the bus and set up a cushion fort and growled everytime somebody came near but I’m on my way to get an Amtrak train back to MetroPark where Paulie will either pick me up in the World’s Largest Pick Up Truck(tm) or I’ll take a cab home for peace and quiet after two days of people talking constantly, and the voices in my head are squawking, “Mantequilla! Mantequilla!” can you tell?

Lala’s traveling the country with her glamorous car-racing son and her cantankerous ex-husband. Sharkey’s perfecting his golf swing in the Carolinas. Most of the family’s still up at the Cape or off at a trade show. Trout’s taking care of a sick friend. For Christ’s sake, I talk to cashiers for wicked banter.

Tata: Like, what?
Her: Like, like like?
Tata: Like, NO!
Her: Like, ya huh!

This dialogue takes place the same week Mom flashed her English degree at an unlikely moment.

Mom: You can really parse sentences. I never learned to parse sentences.
Tata: Did I just hallucinate a compliment? I must be dehydrated. How many fingers am I holding up? Four! No, three!
Mom: No, I never really learned until you did.
Tata: What? We’re even then because my mind’s a blank now.

While I stand around, muttering, “The fucking yellow ribbon magnets are Tony Orlando’s fault,” I worry about finding the fun, witty chatter that’s like crack for word junkies like me. But I can hush up and quit fretting. Suzette’s on the case and Mark’s got the funk.

I have no patience for this hyperemotional response to September 11th by people who were never in any danger and now go around wearing t-shirts with pictures of burning buildings. If that’s you, just fuck off. Few things are more puke-inducing than watching an idiot wearing one of those It’s On Fire shirts run into a person whose wife, husband, lover, parent, son or daughter burned to death in Windows On the World. You should be ashamed of yourself. Throw away that t-shirt and promise you’ll never give another cent to the ghouls who made a tourist industry of disaster. And keep that promise, no matter how enticing the offer of morbid commemorative It’s On Fire coins, plates, baseball caps or potato peelers, for all I know.

There are ways to mourn and remember that offer catharsis and promote healing. Unfortunately for all of us, the Pentagon has eschewed good taste and planned a party. You can, if you’re feeling especially jingoistic, sign up for the march and the concommitant background check. Let me repeat that point: you can’t just go, should you feel a rather shocking lack of revulsion for this soiree. You have to pass a screening. I guess that will weed out anyone who’s actually thinking about what they’re doing.

The families of those lost on September 11th have ideas of their own. Many memorials are local and personal, which may not be accessible where you live. Fortunately, they also favor constructive recognition and remembrances of a more locationless variety. One of the best is One Day’s Pay, an organization that asks you to turn September 11th into a day devoted to service for others wherever you are, rather than horror and loss. Or you could contribute to the care of search and rescue dogs. That’s marvelous, really. Search and rescue dogs played a crucial role in survivors’ survival and giving victims’ loved ones the consolation of burials, and the only thing they ask is that we care for them, which is not too damn much.

The last thing anyone needs is useless, revolting souvenir crap – unless you wonder why nothing in your living room gathers dust in that saccharine way only September 11th memorabilia can. And Oh. My. God. Rumsfeld’s going to give me an aneurysm yet. What an ass! This vile trampling on and profiting from the dead is undignified and disgusting, and proponents need intensive de-programming or…a rolled-up newspaper to the snout.

I return triumphant from the wilds of Cape Cod, where strip malls are replacing pine forests, beaches act as a beautiful bone of contention and tourists issue gunpoint demands of natives being displaced by the wealthy. It’s a lot like New Jersey, except with better manners and no room for garbage dumps. This trip was educational; I learned a few things.

1. I am an idiot, but I doubt the wisdom of throwing a surprise party for a 93-year-old. Your opinion may vary.

Grandpa is one of two surviving charter members of the Hyannis VFW, and though road construction and re-engineering is a fact of modern life, my nearly blind grandfather knows every street on the Upper Cape. He corrects cab drivers and scolds Mom for second-guessing his directions. He likes things just-so and Mom ruffles his feathers constantly with detours, luxurious time-wasting and gifts of stuff he swears he neither needs nor wants.

It’s his birthday. He thinks we’re going to a fish fry at the Moose Lodge.
It’s her father’s birthday. She’s conspired with his friends and they’ve all told him lies that will result in cake.

Oh dear. He won’t be pleased.

Though we’ve stalled and walked around in circles in a drug store, when Mom, Grandpa and I arrive at the VFW hall Daria’s family is still filing into the building. Mom parks and makes an MGM production of applying lipstick. Grandpa and I, cut from the same cloth, leap out, slam doors and wonder where she is before we realize she’s fluffing her hair.

Grandpa: Lucy! The kids are waiting!
Tata: Mom! Christmas is coming!

I’m anxious to get the inevitable shouting, back-slapping, and meeting of the paramedics out of the way. Mom hasn’t thought this plan through. Before we picked up Grandpa and went shopping, Mom and I stopped at the VFW and the celebrants were already bellied up to the bar and mildly over-happy. Two hours later, over-happiness spills out into huggy drunken I-Love-You-Ness, and there’s a vet with an electric organ. Damn it, we’re gonna hear old guy karaoke of White Cliffs of Dover. And then we do.

See, when this happens at my local bar, they’re my friends; I know what to expect and what to laugh off. My family doesn’t have to know that much about me until well after I’m dead. When Grandpa’s friends put balloons down their bras – yes, women served in the Great Wars – and play not-at-all-hard-to-get I stare at my mother and hope I’m hallucinating.

It does not occur to us until later that perhaps this part of his life is private, and we are intruding, but it’s too late because Mom’s joined the Ladies’ Auxilliary, Tyler joined the post as a Marine who served in Africa during the first Gulf War, and Tyler Two has figured out how to win at Keno between kindergarten and first grade just by coloring inside the lines.

2. Weirdness in the present invariably hints at a weirder past.

Mom: What’s your friend with the French last name?
Tata: Johnny.
Mom: Are you still in touch with him?
Tata: Nearly every day. He’s moved to Santa Fe and learned the tango.
Mom: Is he related to Marguerite of the same last name?
Tata: That’s his mother.
Mom: Really? That’s exciting! How long have you known each other?
Tata: Since the summer I was 14 and saw him painting a giant metal box green.
Mom: My goodness, that’s quite a while! Is he married? Children?
Tata: He’s got a hot veterinarian wife, a houseful of pets and a new tattoo.
Mom: Isn’t that interesting! I met her in radiation. Did you know she was in treatment?
Tata: After 28 years of living an eighth of a mile apart you meet her in a waiting room in the next town?

3. Around the family, peace of mind is gonna cost ya.

I don’t have small children but Daria has three, and three is the magic number at which the noise is too much for me. By lunchtime, I’ve had enough and sit outside with my cup of coffee. Each member of the family is spinning like a top inside the house in his or her own special way and talking the whole time, not necessarily to anyone else. There’s no time to do a whole yoga practice before we go kidnap Grandpa, though the exercise would calm my anxiety. This is the moment when my obsessive-compulsive nature miraculously works for me: the garden my late grandmother tended daily is inches from going to seed. I stand up. I fold in half. I weed in self-defense.

At first, I pull up weeds. As I relax into the stretch, my toes in the dirt feel strong. Upside down, I have always been fine and happy and wildly alive. I gather the weeds into a pile, tear them into shreds and pile them around the roots of larger shrubs against the house. Then I see hollow, woodier stems that once used to be favored plants or flowers and pull them up. Then I pull up grasses and shoots, tear them and place the shreds around the older shrubs. Time passes. The ground is clear and even. I give the house its due, the past its place, and muscles the bloom muscles want and love. You’d think this would quiet the mind. Nope.

Daria: What’s wrong with you? Where are your shoes?
Mom: I have gloves. You can use my gloves. Do you want gloves?
Tom: Can you stay for a week?
Tyler: Are you dressed for this? Should I get power tools? What will this do to property values?
Tyler Two: Mommy says you’re allowed to get dirty – just this once.

Daria, who was a barefoot commune kid with me, can’t stand to touch dirt. We grew vegetables. We spent summers touching the ground. Daria gets hysterical when her kids use their Tonka earthmovers to move earth. Personally, I don’t get it but I haven’t figured out why people care about Britney Spears either so the universe remains mysterious. And hey, what’s a brother-in-law for?

Tata: Tyler! You bastard! Do you know what song is stuck in my head?
Tyler: (Weary) No, Ta. What song is stuck in your head?
Tata: God damn it, it’s Sister Christian and it’s all your fault!
Tyler: (Perking right up) That’s a shame! “Motoring…”

I’m going to make him move my couch after I stick weights between the cushions. Yup, love stinks!

4. Luggage: on wheels, period.

Life is short. Run through the terminal and nap so you can see America from the bus or train. It’s wonderful, you know. There is so much of it and only so much of you.

I’m invisible! And on guard against my mortal enemy: the shower curtain! I save you time and time again but do I ask for thanks? I do not!

I stalk you! I’m stalking you!