This is something else I love about Basho: he won't let me bully him. If I try to go all alpha dog on him he just gets obstinate and won't stand for such antics. Good for him. If I am kind to him and tell him I love him and talk to him throughout the day and take him outside and run with him, he agrees with me about most things. Like barking and coming when called. He only doesn't agree when he knows I'm being a jerk. Most serious dog owners would say I've done things all wrong here, but I would say this is one thing I got right. Mostly, Bash got it right, I just let him be. I'm glad because Basho on his own terms, unbroken and unbidden, is about the most awesome creature I ever met.

And this is something else I love about my folks: they are really married to each other. They have been together since they were 18 and 19 years old. Forever, really. And each night they have a standing date, an hour for just them where they talk. They have never, in all my life, slept apart except when one or the other is away from home and even then they talk on the phone like teenagers. They hold hands. They are kind to one another. They also each have their own life, completely apart from the other, which I think is the only way to go. Don't get me wrong: they've worked hard and paid in blood for this harmony, I think. I remember the horrible fights they had when I was a kid. Screaming and throwing things and stopping the car fights. But they never left each other alone--they fought it through to the end and in the end they found this strong ferocious love for each other.

My dad came from this kind of family: Irish Catholic in the mother country sense. They had 11 kids in nearly as many years. My father's parents were/are not kind or nurturing. The kids were left to fend completely for themselves and all they got from my grandparents were beatings and a place to sleep. My grandparents would eat steak and the kids would eat spaghetti with ketchup. My dad was the second oldest and his older brother was a born criminal, therefore my dad took it on himself to raise all his younger siblings. Later, he took in my aunt Theresa when she lost her mind to schizophrenia at age 19. He and my mum married after she turned up pregnant with Oliver and my mum was rather mad herself for years and years and didn't work and my dad had to earn money for the family to live on. My mum, Oliver, me, my crazy aunt, and then more kids, Dan and Joe, and then Theresa started having kids: Keith (oh Keith) who my mother cared for as her own but who my grandmother (a woman I harbor no love for at. all.) made my crazy aunt give him up for adoption; and then my loveliest of all loves, Shawn. Who I cared for almost solely his first year of life because my mother was still so broken after Keith left. And then my bleeding grandmother convinced Theresa AGAIN that should give her kid up for adoption, but I fought body and soul, and thereby rent apart any relationship that may have once existed between me and my extended family, for my brother. My dad, through all of this, has been solid. He is the rock hard foundation of my whole family and he has never treated me like a girl, even though he came from such old school people, never been unkind, never hit us (well...he did spank me once, but he felt so bad even as he was doing it that I think we can all forgive him) even though he knew practically nothing else from his parents, always played with us, told us the most fabulous bedtime stories you ever heard, taught me everything practical that I know, and still calls me up every couple of weeks to make sure I know that he loves me because his parents never told him that they love him. He is a good and decent and funny man, my pops.

My mom came from this kind of family: Horror. Really, there is no other description. Her father was evil and sadistic. Her mother married a string of deadbeat drunks who messed with her kids. She moved constantly. Her older brother beat her senseless and put her in the hospital many times over. The other stories I have heard, which are nobody's business but me mum's and hers to tell if she so chooses, are even more chilling. She was near crippled by rheumatoid arthritis at age 12. She was severely depressed, not a little mad, and poor as dirt, from people poor as dirt. When she left home to go to college, she didn't have the money to pay for a dorm room. She camped out in a lounge in a dorm, in the green room in the theater, at friends' houses. She shoplifted for food. She met my dad and he was smitten (he's clearly got that savior complex, no?) and she moved in with him. She never moved out. My mom has had as hard a life as any I have ever heard of. She has been beaten down and battered through and through by bad news and even badder people. Instead of becoming a hard person she is the most full of love, honest love--not that selfish, insecure love that I see so much of, of anybody. She still feels pain so keenly--I think one's experience of pain only deepens the more you've been through--not the other way around as so many claim. She is also deeply religious. There's no getting around this with me mum. It is as much a part of her as her own skin. She's like a whirling dervish in her faith, a fanatic and a freak, but so right on and pure. She doesn't do well in churches because she's also a serious thinker and scholar and radical leftist babe. I think god and my dad are the two reasons she's still alive today. My mom--there's no describing how I feel about my mom. She is a magical person. Mercurial and sharp and conflicted and at peace and loving beyond reason and crazy good. Crazy joyous good, in the face of a life like you never heard of.

And also in the face of a pack full of heathen children. It's funny that, so far, none of us have turned out religious. Well--actually Joe may be. He doesn't go to church or anything, but he does read the bible with great frequency and prays a lot and considers himself a Christian. A thinking Christian (how I hate that I have to always qualify this. Damned Christian Right.) Oliver is positively Dionysian up there in San Francisco. He is a pagan through and through. And Dan, him I'm not so sure about. I think Dan is probably a lot like me--I believe in god and I imagine that I'm a christian with a lower case c and anything else I have to say on that matter you'll just have to talk to me about if you're interested. I get so damned irritated by both sides--the holy rollers and the logical athiests who think they can talk you out of god. My mom has taught me this much: god ain't got nothing to do with your intellect. Religion? Maybe so.

I don't know how I got here. I didn't mean to get here. I mean, talking about religion, here. Well. So my parents. They are married like I want to be married someday. They fought they're way through with and at and to each other and I think I learned enough from all their fighting and all their love to know that I won't stand up for anything less. No sir, not me.