Category: Tribe of One

My two-week visit “back home” is nearly drawing to an end, but at least my visit will end with a bang since tomorrow’s the Fourth of July.  I love coming home to attend my family reunion and then spend additional time with my immediate family.  Some people find it hard to believe that I’m so close to my family since I’ve lived either out of state or out of the country.  As a matter of fact, when I flew into Dulles, Mom welcomed me “To the Land of the Living” as if I were coming from a much more exotic place than Austin, TX.

I always feel that I eat too much and exercise too little when visiting my family. I was smart enough to write down some of the beginning capoeira curriculum before I left Austin both to teach my 10-year-old nephew and to make sure that I practiced while I was away.  At 40.9, there’s no way that my body’s going to bounce back well from a two-week total absence from capoeira.  Fortunately, my nephew’s a very active, energetic soul who happily practiced with me twice  in the backyard and once at a waterpark.

This particular waterpark was more geared toward much younger kids, but my nieces, nephew and I still managed to have a rip-roaring good time.  In my normal life, I usually swim 21 laps (3 sets of 7 different strokes) twice a week, but I only raced my nephew a few laps in the underpopulated pool.  We were very lucky since, as we pulled up to the waterpark around 4pm, two busloads of screaming schoolkids on summer break were fetched away! I spent most of my time in the pool, practicing several capoeira kicks.  Of course, my nephew joined me. With nothing much better to do, even my two nieces practiced each kick a few times.

Another day, we went bowling.  As soon as we entered the bowling alley, I spotted a sea of gray-haired people and leaned over to Mom and whispered, “This is where people your age hang out.”  When we walked over to the counter to get our tacky two-toned highlighter colored bowling shoes, I loudly and without a trace of shame requested bumpers.  My older sister teased me, but I didn’t care.  I know my limitations.  I don’t do well with any sport or game that involves balls; so this would be the only way I could bowl and enjoy myself.  Besides, it has been years since I’ve bowled.

Bowling has become so high tech now that they can program who gets bumpers and who doesn’t. Everytime my sister bowled, the bumpers dropped, but they were present for her kids and me.  Plus, the score was automatically done by the computer.  I had been looking forward to brushing up on my bowling math, but shook my head in slight disgust that all this automation would lead us to being a dumber society.  Nonetheless, the automatic scoring told the truth: I won the first game with 133 points!  I’d bowled 4 strikes.  At the end of the first game, I knew that my second game would be lackluster since my right shoulder was in pain. Even though I was third place for the second game, I was still the overall winner.

When my sister had first mentioned going bowling, her kids had screamed “chili cheese fries!” So after bowling two games, we got two orders of the intestinally challenging dish.  It was so warm, gooey and yummy, I felt guilty about every delicious bite. Surely I’d pay somehow for eating it.

This morning, Igot up a little too early for my taste, 8 am.  When school’s in session, 8 am is “sleeping in,” but since I’m in the middle of vacation, it’s a wee bit early.  We all got dressed to go to church, which I love attending since I don’t go to church in Austin.  I love Black baptist churches, but I’ve never had the desire to join one or be baptized. It’s not that I don’t think I’m worthy or think I’m better than any other Christian.  I’ve just never believed that those things were necessary for my relationship with God. And whenever I can cut out the middle man, I do.  That’s why I self-published my first novel.

The minister seemed annoyed by the low attendance and commented about how we would stay longer if we continued acting like we didn’t really want to be there!  Either he was joking or the energy changed enough in the room that he saw fit to release us after an hour and a half. Whatever the case, I liked his message of Independence Day being more than just our freedom from British rule. We should celebrate our liberation from whatever challenges that used to enslave us.  As I gear up to start a new school year, I’m going to see how much systemic foolishness I can emancipate myself from.

Last year, I missed the annual family reunion on my mom’s side of the family because I chose to study and in between the two summer sessions, I changed apartments.  This summer, I fought for my right to party! And since I”m a workaholic nerd at heart, that pretty much means that I’m not working, studying or moving this summer.  Pure bliss!

I flew into DC and was picked up by one of my sisters and her family and quickly whisked to a wonderfully delicious seafood restaurant. I relax my normal workout and diet regime when visiting with my immediate family since I’m outnumbered. My sister, Renee looks forward to my visit since among other things, I help them get back “on schedule” with their exercise routine.  From my perspective, however, I don’t exercise nearly as much I as normally do! Could be all the marathon TV watching I do in their company.

Two days later, we trekked about 5 hours south and checked into our hotel where we normally stay when attending our family reunion.  Thanks to the magic of cell phones, Mom was waiting for us in the lobby to greet us and give me my room key since I would share a double with my other sister.  After giving Mom a hug, I went to my room, hugged my sister and threw myself onto the bed.  I announced to my sister, “This is all the family reunion I need!”

After a much too brief nap, we all loaded up into two SUVs and headed to the fish fry, which is always held on the Friday preceding our main family reunion main event on Saturday afternoon. I was especially excited to visit with my extended family and to see how our permanent shelter where we hold our reunions had been decorated with a Hawaiian theme.  We’re not descendants of Hawaiians, but do we care?  We are a creative extended family who always have a good time when we get together.

I was rather impressed that a few relatives had asked me about my book, Tribe of One.  I knew that a handful of them had heard of it and some had even downloaded it on their Kindle, but I have the feeling that, due to the adult nature of the Tribe, my usual promoter, Mom, had not advertised to many people.  Well, the gig would be up on Saturday since I was part of the entertainment lineup.  In addition to that, I was apparently going to do a hula dance as well–a genre of dance that I’ve not actually taken classes for.

Everybody was colorfully decked out in their Hawaiian best on Saturday.  And for the first time, I noticed that someone had even thoughtfully hung a picture of Obama since there’s no doubt in my family’s mind that he’s an American!  My sister and I set up a table where I displayed copies of Tribe and she, being far more ambitious than I, had baskets of decorative roses as a cancer fundraiser, her face painting paraphernalia and a surefire kid-pleasing basket of candy and stickers. Even though I’m a self-published author, one thing I’ve never yearned to do was sit chained to a table and sell my book.  With my sister by my side and surrounded by extended family, the experience was wonderfully different.

Since our table display attracted a steady stream of interest, I periodically dashed off and take some pictures and socialize with my relatives.  I was pleasantly surprised when I first returned to the table to discover that one of my older cousins had just purchased Tribe and was patiently waiting for me to return and sign it. In the first of several signings, I began with the word “cousin.” All in all, six of my cousins bought my book, two of whom were a mother and daughter and another daughter in the same family had already downloaded it!

By the time I sat down to eat my much anticipated family reunion food: fried chicken, macaroni w/cheese, string beans, sweet corn and corn bread; I was beyond hungry and very happy that my “cousin-in-law” who emceed the program had not called me up to read an excerpt from my book yet.

I followed an older woman, who I’d never seen before (I’m not sure since she wore huge face-covering shades the entire time), recited two very moving poems from memory.  So, not only was her poems inspirational and “clean,” but she’d had them memorized! I nervously walked up to the front, quickly played with the tricky microphone situation while informing everyone that I had relocated to Austin, TX and was no longer in “Africa.” My relatives swear up and down that they cannot keep up with where I live.  I had served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Tanzania from ’92 to ’94 and had taught in Egypt from ’01 to ’03, but from ’03 to ’09, I was in Mexico and Honduras–something that most had collectively forgotten (and not a sole other than my immediate family remembers the brief teaching jaunt in Seoul for 14 months), but the Motherland is hard to forget, even if they’ve never visited.

I briefly warned my devoutly Christian relatives that my book contained “adult content” and even joked that my mother might want to put on earplugs, which of course she wouldn’t do for the world at that point. I told them that the inspiration for my book came when I dreamed the first line, “Life would be so much easier if I wasn’t a gay man trapped in a black woman’s body.” According to one of my sisters, everyone’s eyes got big for the first of several shocking moments of my ten-minute reading.

I especially chose a chapter that only had one curse word, which I didn’t get to since I didn’t read the whole chapter. Yet I read the word “lesbian” and used the word “balls,” meaning “meatballs,” but in tasteful double entendre. Since the speakers were right above my head, I heard myself a little too well and couldn’t hear my audience well enough to interact with them as much as I would have liked to.  The biggest laugh during the reading came when I read the part about how the more expensive a barbeque grill, the less inclined men are to allow women around it.  At that point, I joked a little with my relatives before continuing with the rest of the reading.  Yet I didn’t read the full chapter since I couldn’t hear their reaction to the reading and thought best not to bore them. 

Once I got to a good stopping point, which was after a flirty exchange between the main character, Salome, and her man du jour, I stopped, telling them if they wanted to know what would happen next, they would have to purchase the book, either on-line or they could buy it from me while at the family reunion.  One of my younger, enthusiastic second cousins immediately followed me out to the table where I promptly sold and signed her a book.  She told me that I’d inspired her since she had always wanted to write screenplays and had just completed her first film.  I gave her one of my business cards and told her not to let anyone stop her from doing what she wanted to do.  I even gave her a sound piece of advice, “The best way to shut up someone who says you can’t do something is to accomplish whatever you’re trying to do.”

Blessedly, the hula moment didn’t materialize and I got to enjoy listening to a group of teenaged cousins play music.  They started off with Al Green’s “Love and Happiness,” followed by an original composition that sounded familiar and a jazzy tune. Later on, one of my 5 year-old third or fourth cousins brought the house down singing a Justin Bieber song.  Thank God I didn’t follow him!

We left around 9 pm, mainly because my parents were exhausted.  I feebly attempted to counter balance some of my vacation eating by working out on the elliptical machine in the hotel workout room for 30 minutes, but I’m not too stressed out about it since I’ll shed those pounds once I return to life as I know it in Austin.  In the meantime, I’m just so happy that I’ve had a chance to reconnect with my extended family