Part 1, Christmas: Our Family

Christmas is my favorite time of the year. Not because of the presents or the rusted, fake Christmas tree that stood tall in our living room, but because it was the one time of the year that our family would all come together. We’d sit down at the big dining room table (that as kids we weren’t allowed to eat at unless it was a special event) and share a meal together. When I was young, it was before about half of my aunts and uncles had gotten married, so we could still reasonably fit everyone at the same table.

There was no “kids” table in our house. At least not in the traditional sense. A lot of times my uncles would eat in the kitchen to avoid the calamity of politics, music and art talks coming from the women of the family. There was one year that one of my aunts even launched a plate of food in protest to some topic. I can’t remember if it was Aunt Laura or Aunt Kathy that did it, but it really could be either of them. Something that I’ve always loved about the Pryzgodas is that they are a passionate bunch. When someone in my family believes in something, be it an idea or theology, they will argue it to the end with all the passion and righteousness of a stereotypical evangelist.

The disagreements were not always about religion, but ranged from philosophy to what order you’re supposed to use the dinner forks in. It was glorious. Around Christmas, our house was filled with laughter and pointless arguments. I always felt a little bad for the boyfriends or girlfriends that were dragged along for Christmas festivities. Some of them would sit stock still, staring with wide eyes at the insanity that was our family. Others embraced it and became part of the chaos. Those are the ones that I now call aunts and uncles.

Like Uncle Steve. My first encounter with Uncle Steve, aside from the pleasantries of initially meeting him, took place at 6 AM on Christmas morning. Sam was sitting diligently by the pile of presents from Santa, waiting for Mom to get up and I had gone into the kitchen to make Mom a cup of coffee. As an aside, my mother would pretend she was sleeping on Christmas morning until one of us delivered a cup of coffee to her. Then she would begrudgingly get up and go downstairs, with a small hidden smile, and present opening time began. I found out about two weeks ago that she had been “faking it” my entire young life. Go, Mom.

Anyway, I walked into the kitchen and I saw Steve leaning into our refrigerator, bare foot with a t-shirt and pajama pants on. There was a pot of coffee already brewing and I stood staring a moment at the stranger before he leaned out of the fridge. He had a plate of left overs in one hand and was taking a bite out of a whole kielbasa. Without missing a beat after spotting me staring at him, Steve pulled the kielbasa away from his face and offered it toward me, “Want some?”

He was definitely part of the family.

It was PINK!

This is another one of those “Sam was sick” stories. It was a normal night in the Cleland/Pryzgoda household. Our mother had decided during the divorce that she was going to keep our father’s last name. She said she didn’t want a different last name than her children. I think that gesture speaks droves about our mom.

Anyway, normal night, I think it was Friday. Sam had been sick all week, and at this time we were sharing a room and bunk beds so while she was upstairs in bed, I was avoiding the room. As I mentioned, we rarely could agree on what TV show to watch and at that point Mom had set up a TV and VCR to watch in our room while Sam was stuck in bed. Needless to say, when she was sick I always lost the argument of what we were going to watch. So, tonight I was downstairs with Grandma and Grandpa watching Fawlty Towers rather than bothering with the upstairs television at all.

Earlier in the evening, Grandpa had come home with a platter of shrimp cocktail. Sam’s favorite. Sam LOVED shrimp. It didn’t particularly matter what form it was in. If it was shrimp, Sam loved it… so obviously being presented with an entire platter of shrimp sent her into a euphoria of crustacean joy. She ate the whole platter pretty much by herself. After that, she wandered into the living room with her heart blanket and passed out on the love seat.

We were about halfway through an episode of that zany British show, giggling at Basil’s antics, before Sam appeared at the base of the stairs. She had her heart blanket clung to her chest and it was the first time I’d ever seen anyone look GREEN. She stood there a moment in silence as the three of us slowly turned our attention to Sam.

Grandma finally spoke up, “Honey, are you feeling ok?”

Sam shook her head and when she opened her mouth, no words came out. Instead a steady pink faucet of chum projected in an arch across the family room, even going so far as to cross my line of sight to the television. Not only was the arch of refuse bright pink, but the sheer smell of dead fish and bile easily could have turned the most stalwart man’s stomach. So, weird color, terrible smell and it just went on. She puked in one steady heave for, I swear, thirty seconds. It just kept coming until it began forming a chunky pile about three feet in front of my sister.

The monstrosity of a moment finally drew to an end and my sister was again standing in silence, pink goo dribbling down her chin and tears in her eyes. We all sat in silence, staring at Sam. It was our Grandfather who finally spoke up, “You feel better now, sweetheart?”

Sam bobbed her head and he stood to carry her upstairs to clean up and put her in bed, leaving Grandma and I still in a stunned and disgusted silence. We both covered our noses and stood to begin cleaning up the mess.

There was a massive pink stain on our family room carpet up until the day we actually moved out. Like a disgusting testament to the capability of the human body and will of a little girl.

The Man with the Golden Sugar Cone

As brash as our grandfather could be, and contrary to his outward appearance, Grandpa was one of the most gentle and kind men I have ever met. We lived in a very loud household, which probably was also why Grandpa always had headaches. Our grandmother, mother, Sam and I did not help. Between the four of us, we argued a lot. Though, whenever there was a blow out of yelling, no matter who was involved, you could bet that about fifteen minutes after everyone had calmed down Grandpa would sneak upstairs with his car keys in hand.

He would lean into our rooms (which we’d usually been banished to) and whisper in his deep, gruff voice, “I heard they have a new flavor of ice cream at Thrifty’s. Get your shoes.” And while we always knew there was no new flavor of ice cream, we’d hurry to grab our shoes and quietly creep down the stairs like we were super spies out of a James Bond movie.

He’d hold up the act of secrecy until we were in the car and on the road. Once in the car, usually only Sam would keep up conversation. She’d hum something to herself or tell Grandpa and me a story as he and I stayed quiet with a small smile on our lips in anticipation of the impending ice cream.

When we got there, it was always the same. Grandpa got two scoops of Rocky Road, Sam got a sugar cone of Mint Chip and I got one scoop of Rocky Road. Then we’d pile back into the car with our bounty and Sam still singing in the background . She really never stopped. She’d just keep going and going and going, but on super-secret ice cream trips it was hard to get irritated with her.

Grandpa would always drive around until we’d finished our ice cream so we could dump the evidence before we got home, so we spent a lot of time in the car as he and I both took forever to eat and Sam would have inhaled hers well before we had even made a dent into our icy mounds of chocolate and marshmallows.

After getting rid of empty cups, we’d usually run into a gas station bathroom to rinse off any remaining stickiness. In the early years of doing this, that part of the trip tended to take a little bit longer as Sam had a way of getting ice cream pretty much everywhere. There was even a trip that we had to stop and buy her a new shirt as she’d dropped an entire scoop down her front.

Once we were all cleaned up, we’d head home. This was one of the rare times Sam was quiet when she wasn’t sick. She knew as well as I did that we now had the challenge of creeping back upstairs and into our rooms without being discovered. Of course, now I know Mom and Grandma knew about these trips every time we went, but at the time Grandpa kept us under the belief that this was secret and special. So, we’d creep back inside and slowly crawl our ways back up the stairs and down the hall until slithering back into our respective rooms, pretending like no adventure had ever been had and not daring to even speak to our mother until we were sure the scent of chocolate was no longer on our breath.

“You’re Sisters!”

Our grandfather was a quiet man. A brilliant and quiet man. In his younger years he had dreamed of being a jazz trumpetist. He even graduated from Julliard. For those of you who don’t know, attending (let alone graduating from) Julliard is a big deal if you’re an aspiring musician.

He also played at Carnegie Hall multiple times. That’s a big deal too. In fact, Grandpa liked to flaunt that he had played at Carnegie Hall. It was always when I was getting frustrated playing my violin that it would come up.

He would walk into the den with a grumpy expression  and fold his arms as I struggled through scales. When I was on the verge of giving up he would speak in his gruff, baritone voice (that sounded like a mix of James Earl Jones and Clint Eastwood in one man), “Joanna Lynn Cleland, how do you get to Carnegie Hall?” He always used our middle names when he was trying to be serious.

I would roll my eyes before turning around and replying evenly, “Practice, practice, practice.”

Grandpa then would chuckle and mutter, “Good girl,” before letting me get back to my practicing with a small smile on his lips. I have heard that dumb joke over a million times and I will probably tell it a million times more.

Anyway, with having to support nine children and going to war in his early twenties, Grandpa’s dreams of music fell victim to the suffocating drone of reality. He was a door-to-door salesman for a while and eventually joined the navy. You see, my grandfather thought that he was going to join the navy and play in the navy band. He never dreamed that his ridiculous skill of perfect hearing would land him on a submarine as one of the top sonar guys of his time.

No, joke. My grandfather had such a good ear he learned to recognize the difference between the passing of a humpback whale’s song, a pack of dolphins romping by and the bay of an enemy sub looming in the depths beyond. He could hear everything.

Even in his elder years, he didn’t lose this skill. A pin dropped in the front hall of our two story home, and he heard it no matter where he was in the house. Not just heard it, but was irritated by it. Being great at hearing was a blessing and a curse for our grandfather. He was often stricken with headaches which only added to his grumpy outward demeanor.

For two little girls, this was a tough thing to deal with. Especially as two little girls that were sisters tended to fight. A lot.

I’m not talking the normal arguments of dissention. I’m talking about a war of vocal magnitude so loud that our neighbors a half block away could hear it. While in public I was a quiet child, but when it came to fighting with my sister I could scream with the best of them. Oh, how we yelled. It would be over the dumbest stuff too. Most of the time it was about what TV show we were watching. Our fights also went from grumpy whining to screeching at the tops of our lungs in seconds. There was very little middle ground.

Obviously, for our grandfather this was a nightmare. He was constantly assaulted with the high pitched harpy cries of his two granddaughters.

One day, amidst one of our fights, we heard Grandpa bellow from the front hall, “You two are sisters! You should love each other!”

This only caused us to stop briefly before the screeching began again. To us, fighting was part of how we loved each other. We never really physically hurt each other minus two times. Once Sam nailed me in the back with a massive universal remote (which dropped me melodramatically to the floor) and the other I shoved her into a wall for no reason other than I was mad at Mom and she was there.

After a few moments, while we were screaming at each other, we heard the heavy stomps of Grandpa coming up the stairs.

We lived in an older house that creaked with every step you took. We had learned over the years to be able to recognize who was walking around based on the sound of the creaking footsteps that the house made. Low and behold, Samantha and I had been blessed with our Grandfather’s gift as well. At least when it came to listening to houses creak.

This time it was rather obvious it was Grandpa coming up the stairs. He came barreling into the room after a few more heavy steps, bellowing over our screaming in a deafening roar, “If you two don’t stop this I’m going to take my belt off!”

Both Samantha and I stopped immediately. We’d never been struck as kids by an adult, so the idea that our giant of a grandfather was about to beat the crap out of us with a belt gave us both a sudden abject fear of the future.

It was then from way downstairs in the kitchen all three of us heard Grandma chime in with a warning tone, “If you do that, Tom, you’ll be chasing those girls with your pants around your ankles!”

Turns out Grandma had perfect hearing too. She also had a wonderful way of diffusing situations with random interjections. I’m pretty sure Sam picked up some of her word-weaving skills from Grandma.

Anyway, Grandpa’s face immediately went beet red. He grumbled something beneath his breath before storming off, leaving Sam and I stuck in an awkward place between receding terror and laughter. I can only imagine our Grandfather’s contorted and embarrassed expression as he stormed back down the stairs in the wake of his granddaughters’ giggles.