HOME for the HOLIDAY...

I drove up to my mother's for Easter. These events can be stressful, as my mother insists on taking on more than she can handle in preparing for the mob, and sometimes gets pretty frazzled. That often translates into sulks or angry radiation of discontent. My eldest brother and his wife have a way of generating tension no matter what they do; he gets drunk, she remains loftily aloof.

Or is that redundant? Well, at the very least, they and their children provide a caustic soundtrack on the other people in attendance.

This time, things weren't as bad as I had feared, aside from the caloric intake, which was prodigious. It helped that Big Brother wasn't there, and his wife, with whom I also occasionally lock horns, was on her good behavior. So was I.

(It's too bad the Goat wasn't along for the ride, as this was a low-stress Family Dinner, as such things go, but he was busy shepherding his boys to church on Sunday. Can you imagine that? He goes to church, and I stay home. What's going on here, anyway?)


On the other hand, my youngest sister brought her two boys, who made absolutely no attempt to disguise the fact that they were there under duress and would in fact rather have been almost anywhere else. The younger of the two ate more like an animal at a trough than a human at a family gathering, and his mother said nothing. That would only have been a small problem, involving a few old farts like me who disapprove of parents who don't correct their children's bad behavior, except for the fact that my mother was furious; I don't know whether my sister was oblivious in general or not, but she certainly managed to overlook the increasingly obvious fiact that my/her/our mother was on the edge of explosion.

After dinner, I tagged along with the local teen-agers to see "Monsters vs. Aliens" at the multiplex [Time: "Another crowd-pleasing, expert-babysitting vaudeville turn." For Metacritic's choice of reviews, click here], and then came home to clean up and play cards. My mother was left with none of the leftovers she wanted [Big Sister-in-Law always removes her offerings as soon as other people stop actively eating them--it's almost as though they were not a contribution to my mother's dinner but merely a strictly time-limited offer...] and with a lot of leftovers she did not want, including a cheesecake that redefined "heavy." Despite a lifetime of trying not to waste food, there were a number of items she tacitly agreed to simply put in the garbage, much as she couldn't bring herself to do it herself.

All in all, it was a trying day for my favorite octogenarian, and then I beat the pants off her at cards. That was sweet, because she has beaten the pants off me the last several times I've been to visit...

So, between my work out of town and the Easter weekend, I had not seen the Goat for four days, and more to the point, four nights. This was a common occurrence last year, when I was personally burning a hole in the ozone layer commuting in and out to the Big Woods, but isn't so common now. And now that I don't have to do it all the time, it's gotten a lot harder to do. I miss him; he claims to miss me. ["Hit me! I'll miss you..."] Anyway, by the time I finally arrived out in the Big Woods at Goat Central, we were both ready to roll, the hay was ready to roll in, and the rolling in the hay was nothing short of spectacular. It was great not to be at his school apartment, too: not only does he live in a dorm with a lot of teen-age boys, which presents certain problems about privacy no matter who's involved, but I make a fair amount of noise--some people have made unkind remarks about car alarms...

It never ceases to amaze me how in synch we are in terms of our bent and kink; it makes love-making something of a volcanic event. And the event does remind me why I am here.

I have pouted and flounced a bit here recently over various elements in the Goat's make-up that seem less than ideal, especially when nostalgia for my former life overtakes me, but there is no gain-saying the kind of heat generated last night. In fact, Easter has been good to us in general; two years ago, it saw a similarly mind-boggling event, which provided me with a number of things to experience for the first time... I just consider it a lovely birthday present, even if it's either way too early or way too late for my birthday, depending on the date of Easter. It's one of our possible anniversaries...

Hang in there, everybody.
No matter how they're hanging...
C