Some of my best friends are terrible people: A self-examination

Our families enjoy the perverse ability to cause us to question everything, from our priorities to our basic value as a human, from the moral acceptability of our actions to our worthiness to walk the earth alongside them.

You can probably stop reading right here, unless you have a morbid curiosity about the dysfunctional family lives of others. If your relationship with your family is only meh, by all means, continue on, for you may find the following tale will bring you comfort in the knowledge that your family dynamic is a little bit healthier than mine.

For the last few days, I’ve been ruminating on a thing I did, aided and abetted by my oldest friend Jessica via text message. Jessica and I were whiling away the afternoon on wild speculation about a tiny morsel of nothing we happened upon on Facebook. We were later joined by a couple of high school friends who (rightly) appreciated our efforts, which only encouraged us. But when I invited my sister Maria to join in the hilarity, she demurred. She was not amused, or rather, refused to admit she could be.

What was our crime? It’s nothing really, but there is a backstory involving some other questionable practices. I have this uncle, bless his heart, who types everything in all caps. ALWAYS. To my memory, he has done this for as long as he’s had email, social media, and texting. But in the last six or eight years, it’s morphed from an unconventional, if annoying habit, not unlike putting two spaces after a period, to a necessary strategy for dealing with his macular degeneration. The eccentricity and occasional incomprehensibility of his messages also generally get a pass on the grounds that if he can’t see what he’s typing, how can we expect proper spelling or that his message make sense in this dimension? I had taken to “liking” all of his comments on my page and tagging Maria so we could savor the unintended comedy together when Jessica texted me to ask who this Ronald person was and WHY WAS HE ALWAYS YELLING NONSENSE AT EVERYONE ON FACEBOOK?

A beautiful if unscrupulous new tradition was born. I began taking screenshots of everything my poor old uncle Ronnie posted and texting them to Jessica. This included comments about the weather, child rearing advice, political rants (thank god he generally comes across as liberal leaning), and mystery posts with no obvious meaning or purpose. On my aunt Joy’s birthday, he posted “GO CELEBRATE AND ENJOY...IT IS YOUR DAY..BLOW IT….” About a video featuring a wildly difficult looking puzzle my sister Audra posted on my wall, uncle Ronnie commented, “NOW GO FOR IT…….WILL KEEP YOU OCTIVIDE..” He apparently doesn’t know about or doesn’t believe in autocorrect - unless his neologisms simply overwhelm the system and cannot be corrected. We usually have an idea of what he means, but the accidental brilliance of his comments are an endless source of wonder and whimsy. Clichés can be so painfully true: truth IS stranger than fiction and you really CAN’T make this shit up. I once dared Jessica to send Ronald a friend request, but she’s still waiting for him to take her.

According to legend, uncle Ronnie and his wife, my dad’s sister, aunt Bobbie wanted children but were unable to have them. My sisters and I grew up being spoiled by them as a result and we loved going to their house and going on trips with them. It was their tradition to take each of us to get our ears pierced on our sixth birthday. They took Maria and me to Chicago on Amtrak one year at Christmas time when I was 6 and she was 4 so we could see the decorations and the big tree in some fancy place I can’t remember now. A magical princess sprinkled fairy dust on us while we drank hot chocolate, Maria sampled a dirty piece of green gum she found stuck to a bench on the L train, and uncle Ronnie taught me how to make a match burn twice by lighting it, blowing it out, and then lightly touching it to my skin. I was later punished at home for teaching this trick to Maria. Uncle Ronnie got me drunk on wine when I was about two years old. That’s what uncles are for, right? I don’t think my mom ever forgave him for that one, what with her own father dying of alcoholism before I was born.

Uncle Ronnie is infamous for supposedly refusing to donate his change to UNICEF trick-or-treaters because those kids’ parents should get jobs! He taught us to play "52 card pickup," which is not very fun at all. At the same time, he knitted and crocheted beautiful creations, huge afghans, and even an amazing full length “French traveling cloak” for me, complete with an elaborate castle tableau. The quality of his Christmas stockings and baby blankets has suffered a little from the macular degeneration, but the kind, thoughtful intentions remain, and I love handmade things. Do not, under any circumstances drag your feet on writing him a thank you note, though. He keeps track of that shit and he wants his note yesterday. I remember getting inquiries about when Maria was planning to send such a note after her wedding. He didn’t understand what was taking so long because I had been much more punctual.

As is evident in his social media ramblings, the man has no patience and does not suffer fools, or anyone really. He was always that way. He is a devout Catholic, and has somehow remained married to aunt Bobbie for 60+ years. To the bewilderment of many, she has stayed with him and acquiesced to his every whim for decades. His health is tenuous at best and she is not allowed to leave his side, ever. No more fishing trips with her siblings. No weddings. Just NO. Nonetheless, in some ways, they are perfectly matched; the couple that crafts together, stays together…?

But back to the “bad thing” I did. I came across a birthday message on my sister’s Facebook page for my nephew. It was written in all caps with the bad grammar to match. I sent it to Jessica since it reminded me of something my uncle would post. She noticed that the person’s name appeared to be a husband wife hybrid and things snowballed from there.

We imagined a whole life for Bob Sue So-and-So. Sue is of course the primary person behind the account, even though she put Bob’s name first - a generational thing. Bob does not use social media, or at least claims he doesn’t. He is most likely a lurker, using his wife’s account to get access to their adult children’s friends beach vacation photos. Sue knowingly enables this behavior, leaving her iPad lying around and not changing her password because, well, it’s his account, too. To her credit, she does obliquely warn her kids to be sure their accounts are private and they don’t post anything embarrassing, but that’s it. Things went so far that Jessica and I had to know - who is Bob Sue? What are they like? What relation are they to my nephew? Were we right? (Of course we were!)

When I texted my sister to inquire, she replied that Sue is one of her husband’s relatives and Bob doesn’t do social media and they are “VERY VERY nice.” Well, I guess she thought that would shut us up, but it only made us more suspicious of this Bob Sue character, not to mention super indignant about her refusal to join our fun. She didn’t even want to know what we had deduced! How could she not at least want to know? Is being not just nice, but VERY VERY nice some kind of safeguard against being mocked by strangers? When I tried again, she said she was busy and “you two have fun.” Jessica and I were incensed.

Who is this adulty stranger declining to lower herself to our level? The Maria I know would have had her own conjectures to add to the conversation, but this Maria, this over-ripe, humorless matron looked down her nose at us as if we were naughty children caught looking at some lewd magazine.

I’m afraid I don’t know her anymore - we don’t know each other anymore and I hate that. For the last thirty or so years, we’ve called each other by the ridiculous nicknames meemaw (for me) and peepaw (for her), only it doesn’t feel as natural anymore. When I bestow a nickname on someone, it is a mark of intimacy, love, admiration. It’s a strange and uncomfortable feeling to sense that such a long standing term of endearment has lost its meaning. We became best friends around the time meemaw and peepaw were born. We missed each other intensely when I left for college and when she finally joined me a couple of years later, we lived together for two years. We worked together at several different restaurants and were generally inseparable until I moved to France and she learned how to get along without me. As time has gone on, for various reasons, she gets along better and better without me and our moments of perfect complicity have become rare and fragile.

Maria and I used to have absurd and/or totally inappropriate exchanges to the point where, more than once, I almost choked on a mouthful of baby carrots laughing. But she’s gone and grown up or something tragic and senseless like that. It’s such a let down to realize your younger sister now, for some reason, fancies herself above a good old guffaw over some “Cards Against Humanity” kind of wrongness. The worst of it is I know damn well she’s just pretending to be “good.” Not so fast! She might be a better person than me, but that doesn’t make her good. I don’t know anyone else on the planet who laughs as hard as she does at videos of people falling off bikes, slipping on ice, and generally hurting and humiliating themselves in the worst ways. (Or best, depending on how corrupted your heart is.)

Ronald’s sister-in-law recently shared a post about how wonderful brothers are - one of those make you throw up in your mouth kind of sappy gushings superimposed on a stock photo about how brothers make the world a better place. We’ve all seen them. When I looked at the comments, I was surprised and touched to see uncle Ronnie’s reaction: “A TRUE FRIEND IS MORE MEANINGFUL THEN SIBLINGS. SOMETIMES SIBLINGS WILL LET YOU DOWN IN THE DARK…..” The uncharacteristic poignancy of this comment perplexes me. Is it because he’s an only child that he is so dubious about the value of siblings? Is he speaking to the experiences of others? I believe that a true friend can be as meaningful as a sibling, after all, we choose our friends. We don’t get to choose family, and just like a friendship, family relationships can suffer from time and circumstances. In any case, uncle Ronnie’s statement resonated with me and made me a little sad, for him, for myself, for whomever he is referring to… The world is a darker place without my peepaw.

Anyway, Jessica and I were having a great time - were we being bad? We weren’t hurting anyone, at least not to their knowledge. We were imagining a fiction about people we don’t know from Adam. Theoretically, we could have invented every bit of it from thin air, including the account that inspired us in the first place and no one could complain about that. But she’s my sister and we grew up together and her judgement, even perceived judgement, gets to me. In spite of my profound intellectual conviction that we did nothing wrong, not really, I started doubting myself and the quality of my humanity. Maybe I am a monster.

Ok, not maybe. In my more honest, self-aware moments, I fully embrace and accept that I am a not always a great human specimen. I think nasty thoughts, I judge, I criticize, I condemn anyone and everyone in my mind, or sometimes with a good friend over a few dozen text messages, for the slightest transgression against my personal philosophies. The friends with whom I can do this are literally my favorite people in the world. We revel in each other’s rottenness. Of course, we’re not all bad, but everyone needs an outlet where there are no rules - a safe space where we can be our despicable selves in total confidence and without fear of reprisal. It’s easier to be human when we are accepted as we are, warts and all.

Photo by Bahaa A. Shawqi from Pexels https://www.pexels.com/photo/cute-friendship-fun-girl-569163/