In April, my sister-in-law Becky flew out from Morro Bay, Calif., to help Lala with her work and spend some time with Poppy and London. When Lala and Becky get together, it's best for a guy like me to keep the fridge stocked with beer (for Becky) and stay the hell out of the way. The wacky Carroll sisters love to cook up ideas on how our house and yard could be more artistic in ways I'll never even pretend to understand. Where I see a wall, they see a canvas. Where they see opportunity, I see exhaustion.
One afternoon, I came home from trying to teach teenagers about the dirty south of Flannery O'Connor, and Lala and Becky were painting the dead maple tree in our front courtyard.
The arboreal corpse had already been trimmed, sanded and primed, and the twisted sisters were bitch-slapping blue acrylic on the remaining trunk and branches. I knew better than to ask what the point of painting a tree was, so I paused and admired the surrounding areas where Becky had nicely done some courtyard husbandry. On the ratty boombox designated for outside use, a classic country music station was offering up a slew of twangy guitars. On my way inside, I saw London dash by me, dressed in a recently acquired Batman costume, complete with muscled breastplate, mask and cape all made from different recipes of petroleum products. I put down my messenger bag and walked back to locate Poppy, hoping that she hadn't been lacquered to the wall as part of Becky and Lala's re-imagining of her bedroom. Lately, Poppy's life soundtrack has consisted solely of the band Green Day, which was claiming the available airspace above her head. She sat cross-legged on the floor, happily playing with her growing Bratz collection, ghettoized Barbies with full glossy lips and accessories that make Nicole Richie look like a Quaker. Batman darted past me into Poppy's room ready to fight crime, which, by the look of the dolls Poppy was playing with, had more to do with vanity than violence.
What I really wanted to do at that moment was to lie on the couch, but I knew as soon as I lifted my feet off the floor (a) London would ask me to make him a peanut butter and jelly sandwich cut into fours (b) Lala would say "how nice for you" and snarl at my lazy arse (c) Becky would kindly ask for help in trimming a dead branch because it didn't "go" with their dendriform design or, most likely, (d) all of the above. Meanwhile, I was also trapped in the middle of two genres of music that go about as well together as Axl Rose and Tommy Hilfiger in a crowded bar. Outside, the older ghetto blaster was blasting Lee Greenwood's overtly patriotic "God Bless the USA," which made even Becky sing, "I'm proud to be an American" in an accent straight out of
Hee Haw
.
Down the hall in the campy village of Bratzburgh, Poppy was braying from Green Day's pop-punk anthem songbook: "Don't wanna be an American idiot. Don't want a nation under the new media." Luckily for her parentals, she knows how to swallow the F-bombs around her little brother. There's nothing more disturbing than a three-foot-tall Caped Crusader with the mouth of a drunken sailor.
Swimming in the middle of these two warring genres, I was reminded of how divided the country is right now. As I watched Batman zip back and forth, I wondered how my kids would navigate between these two distinctly different ideological parts of America. How would it be for them (eventually), like many of my former students, leaving a town where the bumper stickers ask, "Who would Jesus Bomb?" for other area codes that would view such a simple question as both treasonous AND blasphemous?
Of course, only a superhero could solve such a tricky partisan puzzle. "I'm proud to be an American idiot," London sang, behind a black mask, uniting both songs (and my home) for one brief moment.
Robert Wilder's recently published first book is
Daddy Needs A Drink
,
.
