Make sure you're connected

During the seven hours between the two customers who visited the surf shop today, I thought about my parents. If it's true that a person's primary family structure provides the foundation on which other relationships are built throughout life, Courtney and I have been building from grass since birth. (Especially Courtney. She builds from grass several times a day, I hear.) I like to think it's green grass, but it's grass nonetheless.

It doesn't bother me that my parents divorced when I was fresh off the umbilical cord. That's fine. I suspect their marriage would've been worse. What bothers me is that I've never, ever heard a single romantic story about their relationship, aside from my grandmother's tale of the day they met at the bus stop. My mother was 12 and wore white go-go boots. That's how the story ends, so I'm left to imagine a technicolor love at first sight that may or may not have happened. They were together for 11 friggin' years and I've never heard a story that didn't involve yelling or throwing bricks or buying hookers or tossing pot out the window or ripping Dad's favorite yellow shirt or my grandfather refusing to be at the wedding because he "doesn't attend disasters." On top of this, I've never seen or heard a positive interaction between them until the day they hugged at my college graduation with their pelvises in Arizona and Maine, respectively.

Today I was thinking that it sucks to believe I was birthed from The Greatest Hate Story Ever Told. So I called my mother (the bigger culprit of Operation: Seethe For Decades) and asked her to write down five positive memories she and Dad shared at any point before I was born. It went something like this:

Me: You can take as long as you need. Okay? Will you do it for me?
Mom: We were a team the day you came along. I was hurting.
Me: No, before I was born. It can't involve anyone else.
Mom: He felt me up in the bushes behind your grandmother's house.
Me: ...
Mom: Hello?
Me: Yeah. Deleted. It can't be about sex.
Mom: I think we were having a picnic.
Me: Really? That's nice.
Mom: Maybe there was a log...
Me: Okay.
Mom: A log or something. We were sitting on something. Like a log.
Me: Focus on the log, Mom.
Mom: I'll do it, but it might take a while.
Me: That's okay. Just write it down so I can give Courtney a copy. She'll need it when she hits 25 and has her identity crisis.
Mom: I'd rather give you a kidney, you know.

She came up with one good memory while I was explaining the rules of this exercise. She said she used to go to his baseball games and watch him play. She said he used to chew his bottom lip at bat. She said she admired how friendly he was and how everyone liked him. And she said she used to root for him. I've never heard her say anything nice about Dad in my entire life, let alone sound partially happy at the mention of him, so I got gangbanged by emotion.

Thank God for the lovely things you get when you ask.