I guess you couldn't really call them my in-laws. I'm not technically married, nor would it be recognized by the government in this case anyway.
Still, whenever I visit my girlfriend's gaggle of deranged relatives in the unbridled countryside, I couldn't feel more at home.
Maybe it's the fact that they her family takes pride in their rich peculiarities more than their income - Peg herself is a bouncer, prodigal saxophonist, electrician, and bagel slinger - maybe it's that the aesthetic taste of both the family and the town is stuck in 1982. Whatever the case, there's something unbreakable and completely loveable about my in-laws that beats all "Lockhorn," "Cathy," and "Selma and Patty" scenarios combined.
Peg's brother recently had a baby, so over spring break she and I stocked the back seat of my rusted Corolla with a road trip's supply of Milwaukee's Best and said a prayer that the muffler wouldn't fall off before we exited the highway.
In town, we took our chances in a quaint souvenir store/gun shop/ice cream parlor. I always like the feel of small shops that have not yet been slighted by the hand of modernity, whose artifacts have been sitting for so long on their shelves that their dust has formed its own appreciated value.
Framed B-list celebrity portraits from the fifties, chuckling fiber-optic Santas, drinking mugs emblazoned with scenes of Viking ships or young lovers embraced in front of rolling Swedish landscapes all hint at some sort of dark, fascinating, and terribly chintzy past.
I wondered who would possibly buy into these strange sideshows, or furthermore, who had the heart to put them up for adoption, until I walked into my sister-in-law's apartment. Then I remembered.
I guess you could say that my girlfriend's family is like a collection of historically rich beer mugs that become more intriguing with each reexamination. Her sister Penny, who had escaped from Buffalo after selling the title to her boyfriend's minivan for $200 worth of crack, was now inhabiting an apartment decorated with said Elvis portraits, dilapidated mattresses, one of her five children, and a desk area made out of an old VCR and a few Tim Horton's bagel boxes.
We went to dinner at their brother's house. Chris, who at the age of 19 had committed over 30 felonies, only to change his life and become a minister when the Bills lost the Super Bowl, now stood in his apartment holding a small wrinkled baby, whom he occasionally examined and questioned where it came from.
Peg and I ogled over the new alien child. Penny, however, was more fixated on the idea of grossing out her brother's wife's mother, whom she found to be unfairly disapproving and judgmental.
"We used to have this plant that grew penis flowers," she said in the middle of dinner.
This mother-in-law passed the time being a disapproving blob in the corner of the couch, eyeing each one of us up individually and snatching the baby out of our arms when it began to cry. She said little, but made the appropriate religiously disapproving grimace when Penny mentioned that she had to put a Band-aid over the keyhole on her bedroom door because her son was watching her have sex.
I didn't mind the stories though. Chris, Penny, Peg, they're all children of something phenomenal. Despite the cracks and the dust, they have stories, character, and the good sense to take the world for what it's worth.
Besides, you can't really make these kinds of stories up.
