Too Many Cousins Cringe

My husband’s parents were born in Ireland, and came to America in their late teens. My mother-in-law left seven siblings in County Galway and my father-in-law left behind ten brothers and sisters in County Carlow. These aunts and uncles went on to have sixty-five children—a very large number of first cousins to keep track of.

Marty traveled to his parents’ homeland only a handful of times during his childhood, and then one more time, with me, in August 2000. So, many of the many cousins, (with names like Sean, Matty, Liam, Declan, Michael, Micheal (not a spelling error here- pronounced Mee-hall) Enda, Fiona, Aiofe (Ee-fa), Martin (lots of Martins- pronounced Maaaarten!), Siobhan (Chi-vonne), Padraig (Padrick), and a slew of Marys, Patricks, Johns, and Toms are unfamiliar familiar-looking people.

We met most on the Ryan side in a pub called Blanchfield’s (“Blanch’s”- pictured above) in the tiny village of St. Mullins in County Carlow. Word had spread in the very green rolling hills that the American cousin, named Martin (Maaarten), and his wife were visiting. Like the raising of an Amish barn, near-clones of Marty started to appear and fill this lively place one night for a meet and greet. Pints of Guinness were passed over my head, and happily thrust into my hands. At many times during the surreal evening, I held two glasses at once, and had to figure out the most tactful way to manage my gifts. The tone was light and happy, loud with fast-talking brogues, interested eyes, and vigorous head nods. Marty and I felt like royal ambassadors— overwhelmed by the good-natured excitement extended to us, and touched that so many people had made the effort to come by to welcome us.

Back in New Jersey, about one year later, one of his Irish cousins on his mother’s side, Celia, was visiting America with her husband and children. We drove to a restaurant near my in-laws home to extend our welcome and hospitality to the kin. The venue was entirely less scenic than Blanchfield’s pub. We struggled through the congestion of rush hour traffic to arrive at a charmless chain restaurant. It stunk of old french-fry oil and the lettuce looked wilted on the massive salad bar. Welcome! Welcome to New Jersey.

Marty sat across from his cousin Celia and politely inquired about her mother.

“How is your mother?” he asked. He knew that Celia was the daughter of one of his mother’s sisters.

“She’s dead.” Celia answered matter-of-factly, as she smeared butter on a pasty dinner roll.

It was a colossal cringe moment. I saw my husband’s face turn redder than if he had spent a day at the equator without sunscreen. His mouth attempted to speak, but it just opened and closed, as he held his breath involuntarily. I saw my mother-in-law look as pained as if she was experiencing equator sunburn. Her head wobbled with a grave cringe; her hands flew up to her mouth. The cringe hung in the silence after Celia’s succinct response. I felt the hairs stand up on my own neck. I heard the sound of my brother-in-law’s chair move away from the table. Mike was headed for the restroom.

“Oh, Maaarten, you must just have me confused. My mother was Kathleen, and she died several years ago.”

Marty expressed sympathy with an even deeper blush. He took a bite of his Buffalo Blue Chicken Sandwich. My mother-in-law likely pulled rosary beads from her purse and rubbed them for strength under the table. The conversation moved on to lighter things: the cousins' daytrip to New York City and their sightseeing agenda for the remainder of their American holiday.

I excused myself to the ladies room. Mike had still not returned to the table. I found him, outside the bathrooms, leaning up against a payphone, gasping for air. Seeing me caused resurging laughter tears to rocket from his eyes. He could hardly speak—hysteria had fully enveloped him.

“Ohhh…you’re mean.” I whispered, pressing my lips together to prevent a contagious reaction.

“How’s mom?....She’s dead!” he repeated, holding his hand to his stomach, gulping in hiccup air.

Marty was behind us now—he too had broken away from the table, in a state of pure mortification.

“You suck,” he told his hyperventilating older brother, before ducking into the men’s room (to splash water on his face?)

The poor guy just has too many cousins.

Short Profiling Cringe

There has been a barrage of news reports, newspaper and magazine articles, political stump speeches, protests, and infuriated ACLU attorneys sparring in the last decade over profiling. Racial. Religious. I am certain there are thousands of blogs out there that discuss, at length and ad nauseam, all sides of the issue. I can see both sides. America should not become a police state, a country that assumes you are suspicious and subjects you to harassment because of the way you look or the way you worship.

But, I must come clean. When I am standing barefoot on airport security lines for visits to Nana in Florida, trying to control boys who are playing limbo under the queue ropes, watching and collecting our stuff as it gets x-rayed, and lugging carseats on and off the belt, I do wish they would pay more attention to passengers named Faisal Shahzad. I want an officer to say, “Ma’am, come here, you can skip this line. Jump on this beeping cart. We will strap your kids in and feed them candy until the plane departs. Then we will dose them with Benadryl. We have made a determination based on stereotyping that you are no threat.”

I feel that I am at some liberty to write this because I was a victim of profiling in 1988. I, five-foot-one, Tracy Lynn Wetherill, spent time in the back of a police car due to profiling. I was short-profiled.

I inherited my Pop Pop’s powder blue Oldsmobile Delta 88 in high school. It was a powerful beast, comfortable for the senior population it was marketed to. Soft, wide seats covered in blue velour. Lots of compartments for maps, Kleenex boxes, rolls of toll quarters, and guidebooks for my grandparents’ meandering road trips through New England. Peppy power windows, seats, brakes, and steering. It was also afflicted with a problematic “crank sensor” (which I still don’t know what that is) that later caused the car to randomly shut down at highway speeds. I became adept at coasting on shoulders.

Two state troopers pulled me over on a dark spring night because they did not see a head driving the Delta 88 on Route 100 in Somers, New York. The seat was electrically shimmied to the closest position, but my short frame still required a slouch to command the V8 engine. The police lights whirled. I was scared as I looked in my rearview mirror. I wasn’t speeding. I wasn’t drinking. I was just driving along. Profiled. Short-profiled.

There was the problem that I had a junior provisional license, and shouldn’t have been driving past nine o’clock. That’s how I ended up in the back of a police car with two huge, burly, hat-wearing state troopers. They made me abandon the Olds and drove me (in silence) up Cherry Street to my yellow house on Valley Road. I asked them if I was going to be arrested, and I saw the driver pass an amused look to his partner.

“Do you think you are going to get arrested?” the driving trooper asked.
“I hope not.” I answered with dramatically enhanced innocence. I ended up with just a warning.

There certainly was a measure of cringe as I slipped in the back of the police car. Fortunately, this is my only experience in a police vehicle. The serious cringe came when my mother answered the door at 195 Valley Road and found me standing between two troopers.

“Was she speeding?!!!” she yelled, my mother as accuser.

She claims, now twenty-two years later, that she did not yell this. But I remember the cringe like it was yesterday.

Cringing On The Mothering of Boys

Happy belated Mother's Day.

People with tremendous impulse control wait for the gender of their child to be revealed at birth. They believe that knowing the sex during pregnancy results in no surprise for the parents-to-be.

Some common platitudes:

“You only have a few real surprises in life; enjoy the joy of the surprise!”
“Good health is all that matters.”

But we impatient folk still do experience surprise. It is just months earlier. Instead of hearing the doctor shout, “It’s a boy!”, when handing a goopy newborn over, we find out while a technician looks at a blurry, gray, ultrasound screen.

With our first son, my husband and I disagreed about finding out. Marty wanted to wait. See above platitudes. But since his belly wasn’t being stretched to the point of no return, my impatience prevailed. Marty presented a compromise: have the technician write down the gender on a slip of paper, and then we would ride to the beach and open it up there. If we had thought to bring background Bruce Springsteen music —it could have been a perfect Jersey shore vignette.

I stuck the folded paper in my pocket. Marty and I had driven separately to the office. In the parking lot, he put his hand out for it.

“No way. I know you will open it in the car.” He was right. I would have. I handed it over.

Marty’s patience paid a great dividend. I have a wonderful memory of opening that piece of paper (It’s a boy!) on the Spring Lake boardwalk, and immediately calling my brother, Scott, to report. The beach wind whooshed around my ears and I had to yell it more than once for him to hear me. Scott was elated, excited. My brother never had the chance to meet my son, so my persistence paid off too. Before Scott left this earth, he knew he was an uncle to a little boy named Christopher.

The second time around, we didn’t orchestrate a ceremonious oceanfront reveal. We found out in the bland doctors office. It’s a boy!, round two.

A cringe passed through me. A serious insecurity fizzle. This plurality made me THE MOTHER OF BOYS. I wasn’t sure if I could be any good at that. A theory formed in my mind as the technician zoomed in on her evidence: an excellent mother of boys should be a tall, strong, muscular, athletic woman—the kind of lady who can throw a kayak up on a roof rack, change a flat tire, drive stick shift, and whistle with two fingers in her mouth at sporting events. She is a woman who feels very comfortable in the bleachers screaming (at fishmonger pitch) things like “Good eye!” and “Now that’s getting a piece of it!” Even if my boys don’t turn out to be athletes, they might follow after their father and be interested in science. A proficient mother of boys should excel at creating science fair projects, shouldn’t she? I have a serious spatial relations deficiency; I struggle to make a paper airplane.

Even though I have not developed any rough and tumble qualities since boy #2, I don’t worry or cringe anymore, because these little males make me feel like a rock star. They are completely unaware of my miscasting.

Google-busted Cringe

Long before there was Facebook, there was simple Google-stalking. Come on, everyone has done it, especially the ladies out there. Bored, something triggers a thought about someone from your past. It could be the predictable old song trigger, or the unusual, like the sight of Cool Ranch Doritos in the supermarket that makes you remember someone’s bad kissing breath. Past romantic interests rate high on the “let’s just type his name into Google” list. Women like to engage in this type of snooping work in small groups, so we can all comment on how past partners look and if their wives are ugly, pretty, or so-so. So-so seems to be the most satisfying outcome.

I recall a friend staring, mouth agape, at the image of her high school crush.

“I swear—he used to be cute!”

I tend to be less interested in the old boyfriends I knew well. JohnBoy is married and has a nice family. I figured that. JimBob never married-- figured that too. And Lance, well, he won the Tour de France, again.

The aha moments come when we type in the name of a crush, like that guy who worked in the cube next to yours who always had a girlfriend, and you wished hadn’t. You throw in his name and his finishing time in a half-marathon might pop up. Damn, he still is in good shape. I bet he’s still cute. I wonder if he ended up marrying that girlfriend who always sounded whiney on his extension. Her voice was like Betty Rubble’s on the Flintstones when she called Wilma.

Young moms are susceptible to Google-stalking behavior. They have experienced a sudden, entire, change from the people they were before children. Thinking about that guy in the cube next to yours is really thinking about your old self and the independence you had, and didn’t even know it. You don’t want to go back to that place, but it is nice to check in with that girl once in a while. You’ve come a long way, baby. And when your girlfriend is showing you her past beaus, it facilitates interesting stories about life’s journey: funny, sad, reflective. You learn something new about your friend and what tidbits contributed to the way she is now.

So, it was cold and dreary and the kids were busy dumping bins of Legos all over the basement. My friend keyed in the name of an old high school boyfriend and told me a funny story about the time she caught him kissing another girl in a concert parking lot, and gave him a swift karate kick to the back of the knees. We don’t find much about him in cyberspace. I type in a name, the next-cubicle-guy’s name. Nothing interesting pops up. One more name. Nada.

Later that evening, Marty comes to me after using our home computer to research something like “tankless hot water heater systems” that he is considering installing in the basement with all of those Legos.

“So, Tracy, when you and your girlfriends are busy obsessively looking up old boyfriends’ names…could you remember to delete the search history? It’s only polite.”

Ahhhh….Google-busted! CRINGE.

“How would you feel if I spent my time looking up past girlfriends?”

Hmmm. My answer is not the one he expects. “I’d want to see what they look like!” An idea. I can Google-investigate his past flames.

“How do you spell that that one girl’s long Polish lastname with all those weird consonants?” I asked, looking for a piece of scribble paper.

Grateful Dead Concert Cringe

Marty in 1994 sporting a baja hoodie. All set.

Marty cringes that I have been to a Grateful Dead concert and he has not. He spent his college years enjoying the mellow sounds of The Dead, but had put off getting to a show. The untimely death of Jerry Garcia in August 1995 made the experience impossible. Poor Marty had Dead tickets in hand for Madison Square Garden dated September 1995. Sigh. On July 16, 1994, at the age of twenty-two, I was more familiar with Cherry Garcia ice cream than with the musical genius icon named Jerry Garcia. But there I was at RFK stadium in the throngs, almost accidentally.

On that summer morning, my friend and roommate, Karen, was expecting an ex- boyfriend and his buddies. They were driving through the night from Boston to Washington, D.C. to see the Grateful Dead. They had extra tickets for us. Did I want to go? An afternoon with potentially cute guys? Sure. Why not?

A foursome showed up at 9:30a.m. in a real hurry. And they weren’t particularly cute. Karen and I were whisked into their Pathfinder without time to grab a bottle of water or sunscreen. The ten-hour tailgate waited.

Have you ever been to a treeless field in Washington D.C. in July? It is soupy. We were hardly early. We rolled up to a car/truck shanty village, inhabited by followers who had set up camp for the previous shows and lingered. The air in that field smelled like body odor, pot, cigarettes, gasoline, and patchouli oil. We parked next to a middle-aged man splayed out, sleeping on the dry grass, with his head dangerously close to the rusty muffler pipe of his van.

I knew at a little after ten o’clock, that it was going to be a very long day. My combination of heredity and life experience left me unfit for the role of joyful Grateful Dead follower. I’ll explain. I was born to a woman with a host of sensory issues. I have come to realize that these sensitivities are encoded in my DNA, and I too suffer variations on them. My mother, Pam, is overly aware of smells and temperature. She is incapable of participating in an activity like camping, or camping's younger cousin, tailgating. I have no special childhood campfire memories. Pam would never be subject to sleeping in a tent, with heat, insect, and intermittently- bathed (stinky) campers in her radius. She sprints from the assault of body odor in a public place. She refused to do business at the local bank in my hometown because she sensed the carpet was musty. On a recent visit with her, she became obsessed with a foul odor of unknown origin in her kitchen, and took to throwing straight ammonia all over the place, hoping to rid the smell. Forget camping. Pam will not even watch a movie that she thinks may have “rough terrain” settings. This includes any war, jungle, or prison movie. The Grateful Dead RFK tailgate affair would definitely qualify as “rough terrain.” Pam would be running, screaming, and scaling fences to escape.

I am not a fan of bad smells and humidity (who is?), but my primary sensory issue involves an intolerance to loud, live music. I know this to be a family trait, because I have witnessed my mother’s Italian relatives at weddings sitting at their tables (which are always unluckily close to the band) with their hands clapped over their ears and excruciating looks on their faces. So I have this genetic defect. It makes me a very infrequent concertgoer.

But there I was. The Boston boys began to set up camp.

One guy, Tom, jumped out of the car and immediately stuffed his face into a Ziploc bag full of mushrooms.

“I’m GOIN’ SOLO,” he exclaimed, smacking his friends’ hands in a high-five salute, and venturing off into the Birkenstock-clad crowd.

We baked in the sun. Hot, skin-blistering sun. The humidity felt like wet blankets. The creases of knees cried. Karen and I took to walking around, trying to create a breeze. The beers got warm. People-watching lost allure above ninety-five degrees. Finally, the sun receded and we filtered into the stadium for the show. Tom was still goin’ solo. The rest of us found our seats and the guys in our group were delighted by each song, racing to scribble down the titles in a memo pad.

“CHINA CAT!....I knew it! I knew it!” Yup, knew it.” Apparently, the song list is a surprise each concert, and predicting the ones Jerry will belt out is great fun.

It was still so hot. And loud. Too loud. I had the sensation of someone sticking a knitting needle in my ear and moving it around. To the untrained Dead ear, every song sounded similar and uncomfortable.

And then someone jumps. From the upper deck. A hallucinating wackjob thinks he can fly and lands on several people about ten rows in front of us. There are screams and commotion. Security guards rush down, followed by emergency workers. Three people are carted away in neck braces on stretchers. I now feel nauseous. My minor fears of heights and crowds have been updated to include a fear of a human being or other large object falling randomly from the sky. Once the injured are out of the way, the crowd returns to happy swaying. Karen and I head for the air-conditioned car. She tells her ex-boyfriend that we will wait there until the concert ends. He looks annoyed. He has clearly wasted good tickets on us. Somewhere up in Jersey, a twenty-two-year-old Marty Ryan (who I haven’t met yet) would have loved that ticket. He’s probably cringing when he reads this, thinking of us idling in the cool car, as the concert lifts the spirits of masses inside.

Long after the concert has ended, Tom is a no-show. He is still goin’ solo, and may never find us for his ride home. I fear that he may be dead. Maybe he was the guy who jumped! An hour or so later, he shows up, exuberant, ranting like a wild man about his amazing GOIN’ SOLO experience. Karen and I are impatient, and not impressed.

“Get in the car!” usually mild-mannered Karen screams at him. I am certain Karen yells this frequently now, in the same frustrated distress, as she attempts to get her daughters to school in the mornings up in Boston.

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Cringing About The Nudie Neighbors

To protect the naked, I’ll just write that at our old house, in our old town, we lived catty-corner to a nudist couple. They were the real deal-- co-presidents of a nudist social club connected to Gunnison Beach, the largest nude beach on the eastern seaboard, located just five short miles from our addresses on Sandy Hook, New Jersey.

Marty looked out of our kitchen window curiously when the new couple bought the small cottage across the street and immediately put up a new fence. They hadn’t even moved in yet. We didn’t know about their naturism then. The original fence was a board-on-board variety with narrow gaps.

“The old fence was really nice. And expensive. Why are they tearing it down to put up that stockade fence?” Marty scratched his head.

Around the same time as this fence installation, Marty and I had been engaged in a discussion about replacing our walkway. I hated the existing concrete approach; he found it to be extremely functional. Why spend money on replacing it with bricks? Because bricks would look nice, I whined. And here come these new neighbors replacing, replacing, replacing things with abandon.

The new owners were a friendly, middle-aged, couple. The cottage was their weekend house. In addition to the new fence, they worked meticulously on landscaping projects. One spring Sunday afternoon they invited us to see the work they had accomplished beyond the fence. We found a terrific outside entertaining area with pretty ornamental beach grasses, paving stones that led to groupings of patio furniture sets, and a large hot tub.

“Wow,” I commented. “This is an awesome yard for parties.”
“Yes, we really like to entertain,” the wife replied, and we moved on to discussing the perennials she had just planted.

The parties started with gusto that summer. About once a month, cars would line the street from end to end. Party music would drift out, along with the sounds of happy summer people, ice cubes clinking in drinks, laughter. When dusk fell, steam from the Jacuzzi would rise above the fence along with an occasional group shout of “Tequila!”

One Sunday morning after an obvious shindig, (five cars were still left in the street by drivers likely passed out on lawn chairs) I relaxed with my next door neighbor, Jane, as our kids ran around the yard.

“The new neighbors sure seem like they have fun,” I said. “I hope I have that much fun when I am their age.”

Jane looked like she was debating telling me something. Jane is an artist, and much hipper than me.

“What?”
“Well, they are nudists. The parties are clothing-optional parties.”
“What?”
“They run the social club at Gunnison Beach. They are really active in it. The wife actually invited us to go to the party last night. She said if we came early we might feel more comfortable because people usually don’t get totally naked until later in the evening.”

Now this was interesting. Jane’s invite story answered what would have been my first question. Do nudists drive to parties naked? Do they wear trenchcoats in the car? Do guests strip immediately when they get to the party, and if so, are there cubbies or old metal lockers on site to hold your belongings? Apparently not. The removal of clothing is gradual. This made me consider all of the summer barbeques I have attended. Not once did I feel that my sundress was too cumbersome to continue wearing, and that I just had to remove it, at any point in the evening. This subculture right across the street was fascinating. Oh, one more question. Is there a Facebook photo posting policy?

I went to report the intelligence to Marty. I walked up our ugly concrete path that never did get replaced. I was extremely pregnant with Brendan. When pregnant, I look more like a caricature of a pregnant woman. My short-waisted physique offers no room for growing baby; my belly juts so far forward that it appears I am carrying a foal that will be born standing up.

“What do you think would happen if I went to the next naked party like this?” I ask Marty, rubbing my non-Hollywood- style mountain bump. “Do you think I would provide visual interest?”

“I am not going to any naked party.” Marty proclaimed, seeing my wheels turning, my curiosity totally piqued.

The next time steam rose from beyond the fence, I found myself cringing. The first level of cringe had to do with imagining the mottled, imperfect flesh of middle-aged nudists. The guests getting out of their cars were not generally the sort one might dream about seeing in the flesh. But the second level of cringe was that we were never invited. We were clearly too square to ever get asked to the nudie party.

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Cringing While Smoking

I guess I can blame Gina for my short stint as a Marlboro Lights smoker. She had fiery red hair and she took me to the movies in her light blue Volkswagon bug. The cassette soundtrack from Grease was turned way up as she weaved in and out of Los Angeles suburbia traffic. She was taking me to see Annie at a huge shopping center. It was the best day of my life so far. I’m ten and Gina is eighteen. She is the daughter of my grandparents’ friends, whom we are visiting in California. I had just taken my first plane ride, and now this. A movie date with a pretty teenager, and she is talking to me like a friend. She is singing along with the tape and is encouraging me to sing too. She opens the glove compartment and pulls out a pack of cigarettes. She is so cool. Later, as we pull into her parents’ driveway, she asks me not to mention to anyone that she had been smoking. Don’t worry, Gina. Your exciting secret is safe with me.

Fast-forward about seven years. I am feeling cool, transporting four girlfriends to the beach on a Friday afternoon in June, 1989. We have music blasting, cigarettes burning, earrings dangling, and effervescent chattering about our half-day off. We are so close to not being high school girls anymore; graduation feels minutes away under early summer sun. We are happily idling at a red stoplight. And please note that we are not in a cute convertible; we are in my mother’s minivan. And yes, I am flagrantly smoking in her car, and allowing four others to do so as well.

“Who’s that man looking at us?” Linda remarks. The smoke from her cigarette is pluming out of the passenger window. She taps her ash.

It’s my dad. I drop the cigarette I am holding and it burns my calf. I’m cringing, but I am also terrified. The strange thing is-- he is looking at me with amusement. He waves. My father loved pretty girls and there is a carload full. The stoplight turns green.

I didn’t understand the bemused look on his face in 1989. I understand it now, and I am not even halfway there in parenting years. My six-year-old son is just one-third of the age of that teenaged girl. I can just start to see the glimmer of a different, outside world personality that is his own. I see it when he laughs with a schoolmate, uses a weird tone of funny voice, or refuses to tell me about some piece of gossip I have lifted from another nosy mother. My father recognized in my cool, smoking moment that I was much more than the sullen adolescent girl that had withdrawn in the past few years. As I led a caravan of young women across the Connecticut state line, smoking cigarettes, dreaming about boys and the prospect of college, I was more like the confident four-year-old girl who used to meet him at the door at dinnertime and shout hello. He loved that little girl, even though now she was smoking a carcinogenic cigarette, and probably driving a bit erratically.

“I am so dead,” I moan. I can’t think of continuing on to the beach and worrying my fate until I get home. I have to take my lumps now. I motion for Dad to pull over so I can work some damage control. We both get out of our cars and meet in the middle.

“Are you cutting school?” he asks. I’m relieved that I can answer truthfully.
“No, we have a half-day.”
“Ok, then. Are you going to the beach?”
“Uh huh.”

I am waiting for him to bring up the smoking. He doesn’t.

“Have a good time then,” he smiles. “I’ll see you later.” He waves cheerfully at the girls in the car, who are slightly crouched down (in cringe mode).

If it had been my mother, there would have been a ghastly scene on the side of Route 123. Screaming, hair-pulling, general hysteria. It would have resulted in serious cringing for all involved, even passersby.

My father never mentioned the smoking stoplight again. It’s good to be a Daddy’s girl.