long time coming

i am finally going to take time to write about my trip to north carolina.

the trip was an adventure to say the least. first of all, i got confused at one point and didn't know which road i had to take. a smart person would have a map in their car, and could solve this problem very quickly. i am not a smart person. so i did the next best thing. i just found a wal-mart. superwalmart keeps the road atlases in the stationery section, in case you ever need to know. i just waltzed in, checked an atlas, and waltzed back out. that got me a few strange looks from the guy looking at crossword puzzle books. also, driving through west virginia is not fun. while the scenery was fairly pretty, the state itself just goes on forever. plus, gas is freakishly expensive due to the fact that like half the state revenue comes from gouging drivers on the interstate. the only redeeming feature is that i could go about 85mph and not worry about getting pulled over for speeding.

the weekend itself was pretty much a nightmare, but that had a lot to due with grandpa not have anything planned, the fact that my dad and his sisters have this seemingly complete and total inability to communicate with each other under stress, and that, oh wait, i was there for a funeral. fortunately most of that got worked out fairly quickly, and everybody was speaking to each other again by monday morning.

the funeral home visitation monday night was yet another Fun Family Adventure. nothing we do is ever normal. to start off, you have to understand a little about my family. we are all crazy. people think i'm nuts; my family is basically 15 of me. also, whenever you have four or more of us together at the same time, we can't take anything seriously. at the funeral home, the mood for the evening was pretty much set when one of the funeral directors walked by us in the parking lot, and my dad and aunt were debating whether his face was deformed, or if he just had a gigantic wad of chewing tobacco in his mouth. (they opted for the tobacco.) then as we were walking in, my cousin rachel (who is 18 and a freshman at UNC) asked: "are they going to serve refreshments?" she was very disappointed to find out they didn't, and all evening kept bringing up the fact that the whole thing would be much nicer if there was food. when we got inside and saw that there were chairs lining the walls, my cousin bizza, who's 24, stated, "hey, we could play musical chairs". this type of attitude basically prevailed the entire night. i believe my sister mary wins the prize for funeral home decorum. first of all, we made the mistake of letting mary, carol anne, rachel, and andrew (who is 17 and the lone male cousin) all cram together on a couch, which was made worse by the fact that it was at the end of the official greeting line (or whatever you call it when they make all the relatives of the dead person stand in line and shake hands with everybody who comes). other than the fact that it is a bad idea to put two 18 year olds, a 17 year old, and a 15 year old on a couch for two hours, everytime somebody came through the line, the four of them had to smile and nod and pretend like they knew who they were talking to. that was why i positioned myself at the end of the circle of relations. by the time they got to me, most people had already started talking to the people they came with. anyway, at one point andrew, for some odd reason, ended up accidentally spitting a tic tac out onto his shirt, which was odd enough, but mary thought that he had drooled on himself. she found this extremely amusing and was laughing so hard she couldn't breathe. and every time she looked at him she started laughing again. my mother kept shooting evil looks and hissing at her.

the decorations of the funeral home didn't really help any, either. not to be disrespectful to the dead, but i just found the whole place a little tacky. i've never been in a funeral home that uses horse collars and bales of unprocessed cotton in their decorating scheme. the hallway was covered floor to ceiling with paintings. some were originals, which weren't bad, but they also had the most random prints. i think my favorite was the one of the cowboy falling off a cliff with the caption, "hang in there, ol' buddy". i spread the word about that one, and throughout the evening various family members (by which i mean everybody) kept excusing themselves to go look at it. also, the whole place was full of antiques. but antiques in the sense of piles of old nails, shelves full of glass bottles, old iron tools, etc. the women guarding the lobby (i don't know what her official job was, but she spent the whole night perched on a stool by the front door like some kind of octogenarian sentry) told us that their "collection" all came from clients who decided to donate the stuff. my dad wanted to know if the clients donated it before or after they were in need of their services. afterwards we went to uncle bobby's (my great-uncle) and ate. a lot. the women at his church had done the standard post-funeral old southern lady job of burying his house in casseroles, macaroni and cheese, and pound cake.

the funeral itself was much harder than i thought it would be. in retrospect, wearing mascara was probably a bad idea. i did get to see the ancestral graveyard, as it were. apparently my family has been going to this church since it was built (1790s), and they are all buried in that graveyard. that was kinda cool. according to aunt annabelle (my grandpa's sister), i'm related in some way shape or form to everybody in there. afterwards we all went to the steak house to eat. true to form, everybody got the buffet, and as grammer said, "they lost money on us". i don't think there was a point in time the entire meal that somebody wasn't up getting more food. the entire parks side was there, too, all 25 or so of us. it was sort of a baptism by fire for justin. one of those "so you just got engaged, welcome to the family, meet the whole clan" kind of thing. if that weekend didn't scare him away, nothing will.

it wasn't a bad day, though. i rarely ever see that group of relations. i hadn't seen jody in about ten years, i don't remember ever meeting aunt annabelle before that weekend, and i know i'd never met jeff and charlie. sitting at the table surrounded by everybody reaffirmed my theory on parks genes: they are like a virus and they kill everything else in your DNA, so that we all a) look just alike, and b) the older we get, the worse it gets. my thought is that eventually we're all going to be either aunt annabelle or uncle bobby.

at the restaurant, we ended up telling stories about when we were all little. ashley told one i had completely forgotten about, where we were all on a picnic at linville, and mary and rachel, who were about four at the time, had to go to the bathroom. we pointed them in the right direction and let them go. when they didn't come back for awhile, somebody went to go look for them. they weren't in the women's bathroom, but you could hear them talking. they were eventually found in the men's room, perched on the urinals, and asking what the deal was with the "really tall potties". and of course the infamous Labor Day Picnic '89 video was brought up, complete with mary shoving rachel off the picnic table, strangling the cat, and grammer's immortal introduction, "hey steve! this is our annual labor day picnic and we've eaten three chickens and 27 hot dogs".

on the whole, i was really glad i went (even if i did get lost on the way back and ended up back in west virginia an hour after i'd escaped it). the drive was long, and i missed three days of classes, but i think i would have regretted not going. plus, it just reaffirmed how important my family is to me. i think it's something only military brats can truly understand. because i moved so much, they were the only thing in my life that remained constant while i was growing up. my cousins are my oldest friends. for years, when people asked me where i was from, i'd say north carolina, regardless of where i actually lived at the time. no matter what happens in my life, i know i can always go back to that little town and those mountains and feel like i've come home.