Just returned from a two-week "vacation" in Florida.
Whether it was a vacation was questionable, as I brought my wife and daughter down to spend time with my mother and grandmother. My mother is one of those people who speaks only in discourse--there is no communication, only an endless stream of explanation and unsolicited and unuseful factual information. My grandmother chain-smokes Salems and favorite activity is telling me what a "slut" my 65+ year old mother is.
My relationship with them is complicated. I feel drawn to my mother because she has ignored me most of her life and to this day doesn't actually listen to me when we speak. Thus, I find myself endlessly restating even the most basic facts and circumstances of my existence (e.g., how old I am, where I work, what I do, etc.). My grandmother has a intense hatred for all things foreign to her, including men. Nevertheless, I was raised by her and will always feel indebted to her. Typically, they hate eachother and yet are oddly reliant on one another.
Thus, I spend most of my time in Florida running interference between the two of them, listening to my mother recite her plans for institutionalizing my grandmother and the seedy details of her consultations with lawyers and social workers over her secret tape-recordings of her conversations with my grandmother. Similarly, my grandmother relates her suspicions regarding my mother's sexual relations with the elderly men in her retirement community, my mother's plans to "do her in," and her intense loneliness. I also spend a great deal of time driving them back and forth to their respective homes and eating inordinately large amounts of heavy Italian food--my favorite sort of cuisine when the weather is intensely hot and humid.
Generally, by the end of the visit, either my mother and/or grandmother are angry with me; usually for some perceived act of betrayal. This time, it was my grandmother for my alleged disbelief in everything. Devoutly Catholic and somewhat of a simple thinker, my grandmother attends church several times a week--although more often for Bingo than for mass. She has never forgiven me for announcing my atheism at Thanksgiving dinner when I was 16 years old. Nearly 20 years later, when I announced my engagement to a Jewish woman and told my family that the ceremony would be presided over by a Rabbi, my grandmother looked at me with tears in her eyes and proclaimed, "Thank God you believe in something!" (Incidentally, my mother also looked at me with tears in her eyes, but only because I was marrying a Jewish girl.)
At any rate, for this visit, my grandmother decided to disown me for my disagreement with her very thoughtful and reasoned analysis that "the world is trying to screw her." She screamed at me across the dinner table while I held my infant daughter in my lap, "There's no sense talking to you because you've never believed in anything." Apparently, she was advocating that I abandon my atheistic beliefs in favor of her intensely cynical and often bigoted paranoia.
I'll hold on to my godlessness for a little while longer. Next time I visit Florida, I'll visit Disneyworld instead of my family. I prefer pagans to roman catholics.
3:44:16 PM 
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