You Will Be As Weird as Your Weirdest Relative
And watch out, because sometimes it skips a generation.
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I remember the first time I kissed him.
I knew he wouldn’t be ready for it. That he had no idea what was about to hit him, once, of course, the traditional handshake was out of the way.
Based on our shared history this was a totally inappropriate act, reckless even, and I gave it the same care and consideration I would have given any questionable act at that time - I just went for it.
His cheek was soft and fleshy, and as I pressed my lips against his skin I caught a whiff of aftershave. I don’t know much about aftershave, and by that I mean I know nothing about aftershave, but I know old school when I smell it. Whatever the brand, it was no doubt a choice from his youth, likely endorsed by a lover, and thereafter forever set in stone.
As I withdrew, I was confident that I made the right call. That I had the moral high ground. It was the kind of cocksure attitude that can only belong to a 16-year-old who holds the title “world’s smartest person,” a self-bestowed honor I’d won annually since age ten.
Still, had he protested, I was ready to blame the season; Christmas spirit getting the best of me, or perhaps too much frankincense and myrrh in the eggnog. But no protest was forthcoming. Instead, he stood there in shock, silent, his face betraying the confusion inside his head as he did the emotional math.
Did he like it? Did he hate it? Or God forbid, did he love it?
I wasn't going to wait around to find out, and quickly moved down the line, repeating this treatment on my grandmother, who, of course, was expecting it. Then I shot out the door as fast as I could, stealing off into the crisp December night with the rest of my family trailing close behind.
I’ve been trying to remember my first memory of my grandfather - Kenneth by law, but just Ken to me - and you know, I can’t. Not because he’s always been there, but because he’s always been a bit player at best. So low down in the cast of my life that he doesn’t even garner an IMDb credit.
An understudy to the understudy who I only saw on holidays. In fact, aside from the random marriage here or funeral there, I never saw my grandparents outside the holidays. The one exception being a particularly traumatizing event that historians now refer to as “The Disneyland Deception.”
As is the case with most tragedies, there was no warning of what was about to take place. Like 9/11, it was a beautiful summer morning, and my buddies and I were engaged in a vigorous game of street hockey. As I turned to chase an errant puck, I caught a glimpse of something that had no earthly business invading my prosaic world.
The 1972 Cadillac Coupe DeVille is a sprawling ode to American excess, more a mobile monument to Detroit's hubristic aspirations than a car. It’s a symphony of chrome and steel, all sharp lines and angular elegance, a testament to the design philosophy that bigger and bolder is always better - a point driven home by the vast prairie of sheet metal that constitutes its hood, underneath which resides a monstrous 7.7-liter V8 engine.
And which was heading right towards me.
For those who didn’t know better it could have been mistaken for a boat, a great big baby blue land yacht, which in some sense it was, but I immediately clocked it as the unmistakable delivery system that would momentarily deposit my grandparents to our door.
(Though I had no way of knowing it at the time, it was also the car I would inherit in a few short years - a story for another day.)
Cognitive dissonance spiked and my mind began to race, searching for an explanation, a reason for their visit. It couldn’t be a wedding or a death because my mother would have already dragged out my wedding/death suit, forcing me to try it on to see if it still fit.
Studies have shown that the mind can take great leaps of logic when trying to process and comprehend stressful events like this, and with my young, fertile mind being no exception, I landed upon a theory.
My parents had converted.
It was the only thing that made sense.
My pals the Cohen brothers were always missing school for holidays that didn’t show up on my Schoolhouse Rock calendar. My grandparents must be here to celebrate our first as newly minted members of the Tribe.
“Eh,” I thought, “I’m cool with it.”
Sure, I’d have to make some adjustments, but my understanding was that Hanukkah penciled out as a net gain over Christmas in the presents department, and that my chances of becoming a doctor had just increased, besides, I was already circumcised.
Just then, at the apex of my semitic fever dream, my mother appeared and yelled, “Brian, come inside, your grandparents are taking you to Disneyland.”
The 20 minute drive to the park was a blur, my head having exploded at the idea of spending a day at “The Happiest Place On Earth,” the intensity only increased by the serendipity of it all, like finding $20 in your pants pocket, or having your mother-in-law’s weekend stay canceled last minute due to a case of the gout.
All I remember was sitting in the back seat and staring at my sister, knowing we shared the same thought, is this really happening? But it was, and as I walked into the park I was filled with excitement about the day ahead.
Less than two hours later we were on our way home.
I’d like to tell you that someone acted up or out, perhaps a meltdown by me or my sister, forcing my grandparents to throw in the towel early. Or maybe that a sudden storm had appeared, or a power outage shut down the park. An acute event of some sort. Something that would at least make sense.
The reality was far more mundane, though no less bizarre.
After going on three rides - one of which, the Mark Twain Riverboat, an agonizingly slow, boring, and circular 30-minute voyage, strains the definition, and chosen by Ken because it featured a Dixieland band, a style of music he was particularly fond of - he just decided it was time to go.
In an elegy to his best friend, Lord Alfred Tennyson wrote, “It is better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all.” However, I can assure you that to a 12-year-old-boy, it is not better to have gone to Disneyland for two hours than to never have gone at all.
At first I thought he was joking and laughed at the suggestion. The blank stare I received in return told me he wasn’t. I still remember that look today because of how straightforward, how matter of fact it was, absent even the slightest hint that he understood how unorthodox, how peculiar, how breathtakingly strange this all was.
While I can't recall my earliest memory of Ken, I distinctly remember this as the moment I first understood why my parents often used a particular term to describe him.
Odd duck.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines this term as simply, “A strange person.”
Merriam-Webster is more expansive: “An unusual person, especially an individual with an idiosyncratic personality or peculiar behavioral characteristics.”
Finally, The Angry & Bitter Grandson Dictionary weighs in with, “Someone who takes their grandchild to Disneyland, only stays for two hours, and spends a quarter of that time forcing them to listen to Dixieland jazz.
Personal biases aside, the term resonated. Ken was odd, and so different than the central male figure in my life, my father.
Whereas my dad was outgoing and wore his heart on his sleeve, Ken was reserved, emotionally distant.
He liked to surround himself with books, and my father, people.
Ken was an aficionado of classical music, opera, and as we’ve painfully seen, Dixieland. My dad was into Steely Dan, The Doobie Brothers, and Willy Nelson.
Ken had a shelf full of journals filled with handwritten notes, thoughts, and reminiscences that nobody would ever read. The last thing my father wrote was a college term paper - and only because he had to in order to graduate.
There were even physical differences.
My father’s hair was so thick you couldn’t find his scalp with a flashlight, while Ken’s wispy hairline had been in full retreat since his late teens.
The net result of my grandfather’s quirks, preferences, and peculiarities was that he was unable to relate to others; his wife, his grandchildren, even his own son.
As far as I could tell there was no obvious animosity between the two of them. No long-buried grudges or resentments. Yet, despite the winking admonition of famed New York Times journalist William Safire to, “avoid cliche’s like the plague,” it would be fair to describe their father/son dynamic like that of oil and water.
Water molecules in each fluid instinctively recognize their counterparts and try to unite.
They want to be together.
But no matter how hard the pull, an invisible barrier stands between them, and they can’t connect.
They can’t breach the divide.
They’re unable to bond.
Shake a bottle that contains both and you’ll force them to mix. But only temporarily.
Societal expectations and family obligations brought Ken and my father together, but as soon as the occasion was over, like the settled contents of the bottle, they once again separated.
I can’t remember a time in which I didn’t kiss, hug, or tell my father I loved him as effortlessly and often as breathing. He was my best friend, my protector, my confidant, my hero. So many people loved and admired him and he was everything I wanted to be as a man.
Looking back, I’ll admit that my Christmas Eve kiss was delivered with some arrogance, the type born from a scant few orbits around the sun and an untested worldview. But more than that, it was delivered with hope - spawned from that same naïveté - along with a healthy dose of what Joan Didion calls “magical thinking,” in this case my belief in the most cliched of tropes, that with one kiss I could break the spell, release the curse, and my grandfather would miraculously become more like my dad.
To be honest, it wasn’t a fair comparison. Ken really never had a chance. And because you can’t compete with a memory, any chance he did have died along with my father a few years later.
On subsequent holidays I continued my practice of planting a kiss before I left. And each time I did the shocked lessened and the confusion diminished, but the silence never broke.
For another fifteen years I pursued this fantasy, but nothing changed. My grandfather didn’t change. He was still an odd duck, and I, now a full-grown man of almost thirty, no longer had the time or patience for fantasies.
So, on the next Christmas Eve I decided to stop, offering Ken the traditional handshake as I left - and nothing more.
I immediately regretted it.
As I unclasped my hand and started moving towards the door, I noticed that he was leaning in, his face turned ever so slightly in anticipation.
“Oh no,” I said to myself, “you’re such an asshole,” making a mental note to reinstate our kiss at the next holiday get together. Unfortunately, I never got the chance.
Though Ken never knew he was in competition with my dad, a few months later he did the only thing he could to make it a fair fight - he died.
It was an epic death, the kind I wish not only for myself but for all those I love.
Still in possession of a body that had yet to fail and a mind that had yet to fade, he met a group of friends at his favorite Chinese restaurant, had a fine meal, went home and went to sleep. In the morning, he sat up in bed, looked at my grandmother, said, “Oh,” and passed out.
He was gone less than four hours later, never having regained consciousness, an abdominal aneurism having done him in a few months shy of his 89th birthday.
Fortunately, I got to the hospital shortly before he passed, just in time to plant one final kiss upon his cheek.
The one I owed him.
Conventional wisdom, meaning Google, says that the term “odd duck,” though never explicitly used in this form, is derived from the Hans Christian Anderson fable, “The Ugly Duckling,” in which a baby duck, owing to his strange looks and awkward behavior, is unable to bond with those around him.
The plot twist is that as he grows older, he goes through a transformation, which reveals that [SPOILER ALERT] he’s been dead all along. Wait, sorry, that’s the reveal for The Sixth Sense.
The plot twist is that as he grows older, he goes through a transformation, which reveals that he’s been a swan all along, and now everybody loves and admires him.
In this story, Ken is obviously the ugly duckling and my father the swan, but it’s still the same creature transformed. I never knew my father or grandfather at my current age - one never having reached it and the other reaching it before I was born - and I sometimes wonder if they had transformations of their own?
And if it works in reverse?
In the years that passed I thought of my dad often, and of Ken rarely. When my kids were born, I knew instinctually that I’d be more like the former than the latter.
Now that they’re older they need me less. They’re into their friends, their devices, and their own lives, which means I’ve got a lot more time on my hands.
As I’m not a very social person, I spend a lot of it in my home library, reading my books and listening to KUSC, the local classical music station.
Recently, I came across a photo of Ken when he was about my age. The resemblance was shocking. Particularly his hair, or lack thereof.
Yet something about it intrigued me, so I framed the photo and placed it on my bookshelf, the one that holds my journals, one of which contains this story.
Sometimes, late at night, when everyone’s asleep and the house is quiet, I’ll stare at his picture and think to myself, “Oh Ken, why were you such an odd duck?”
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Love it! Glad to have this back on my Saturday mornings. Goes great with coffee. If I could kiss your cheek right now I would! :)
Great story! Brought me to tears.