Pictures On a Thumbdrive

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He’s baaaaack!

I confess to mixed emotions.

From Vienna he told me he’d scored a bottle of absinthe and wanted to be picked up and immediately dropped off in Ithaca so he could get smashed with his friends.

From Freeville I told him he was Out of His Mind, that he would be jetlagged and travel-weary, and that, however progressive the EtOH regulations in Austria, here in the US of A we know best and it is against the law for almost-17 year olds to drink absinthe with their lowlife pals.

Then I wrote a stern email to Uncle Spy-Who-Stayed-Out-In-the-Cold, upbraiding him for abetting underage drinking and received a cool email back: The absinthe had been purchased as a gift for Ben. O-kay… But, of course, the absinthe remained in RTT’s sticky little hands because his conflict-adverse parents didn’t want to precipitate World War III the moment he stalked off the plane.

Don’t judge unless you’ve been the parents of a difficult 17 year old, y’all!

The alcohol battle is a losing battle. I fight the battle of no-you’re-not-getting-in-a-CAR and no-you’re-not-doing-anything-but-ALCOHOL.

RTT reports in between expeditions to Prague, Budapest and Saltzburg, he spent the entire two and a half weeks getting drunk with Uncle SWSOITC, smoking cheap American cigarettes and watching as the present Mrs. SWSOITC threw wine glasses at her husband and cursed at him in her native Georgian. I imagine Uncle SWSOITC’s report would be somewhat different. Mrs. SWSOITC is an extremely attractive though-not-in-an-American-way young woman who has seen a lot, I explained to RTT. Chiefly what she has seen is military tanks moving through the place where she grew up and inflicting massive damage. That has got to be a heartbreaker.

“There you go again,” said RTT. “She wanted to get out of Georgia! She loves the West! One night she came to the clubs with me! She got into a brawl with these Welsh guys! They had to call security on her!”

“Well, of course she loves clubs and the West,” I said. “She’s young.”

“She’s really young,” said RTT. “She’s like half his age!”

“Don’t judge,” I said coolly. “Love is a complex emotion and takes many forms. None of which you have any personal experience with.”

He rolled his eyes.

“Until you’ve seen your home country overrun by soldiers, you cannot possibly know what she goes through. And the guilt she must live with because she got out but her friends did not.”

“Whatever, Mom,” he said.

He wanted Justin to come over. I said, Sure. I love Justin, his best friend here. Very polite, well-spoken kid. Has his own turbulent family history that ended up with him being transported from Hayward, California to the tiny town of Ithaca, Alabama. Justin is black: RTT uses this to justify peppering his conversation with My niggah this and My niggah that.

"You know, Robin, the first time you use that my niggah shit outside of the protective circle of your adolescence, someone is going to beat the shit out of you,” I said. “It’s really offensive.”

“Whatever, Mom,” he said. He says that a lot.

Justin just smiled at me.

I just peeked into the newly refurbished Robintorium. The bottle of absinthe sits unopened on RTT’s desk. Whatever, Mom…



I love this photograph of Keti! So very Queen of the South

I got swag. A silk scarf with Klimpt’s The Kiss. A tiny music box. A painted candle holder. A box of Austrian hazelnut chocolates, each one wrapped in a foil portrait of Mozart.

The most interesting gift by far was something I’m sure Uncle SWSOITC intended for Ben. But RTT stepped off the plane and shoved it at me – “Here. From Uncle SWSOITC. He wanted you to have it. It’s pictures and shit.”

Pictures and shit, it was. Like every picture and piece of shit associated with the historic Trumble family in western upstate New York from the last 150 years, including several of Ben as a boy.

“I’d like to copy those pictures,” Ben said eagerly.

“I’ll think about it,” I said.

But the answer is no. He got his past back when he hooked up with the mealymouthed, passive-aggressive, eagerly smiling Jayne LeGro as far as I’m concerned. He can ask her what he used to look like. He ain’t getting’ nothin’ from me. Though I did feed him dinner – a wild rice and sausage casserole that tasted quite delicious.

The photographs are mesmerizing. Not my family, of course. But then I never had a family. The Hares and the Trumbles are my family, I suppose, if only because I mixed blood with their F2 lines:



This is the infant Ben, Ben’s father, my erstwhile mother-in-law Nancy, and Nancy’s younger sister Lucinda. I’d never seen a picture of Ben’s father before. I’d always thought her three sons sported veritable reproductions of Nancy’s exact face, but in looking at these pictures of Fran – named “Francis,” never nicknamed “Frank,” just that oddly effeminate “Fran” – I can see traces of him in the shape of Ben’s face, the gentleness of Lew. It’s surprising how much Nancy looks like Bette Davis in this picture – when you only know people when they’re older, you forget they spent half their lives being young. Lucinda has always been my favorite member of Ben’s family – she’s the least judgmental. Surprising fresh-faced in this Kodak moment.

None of them look like Robin. But Robin doesn’t look like me particularly either. Who he does look like are my two improbably handsome DiLucchio half-brothers, Dale the crackhead who sent me some “fiction” to read a few months back that was so inherently repulsive that I felt like Cthulu had taken over my hard drive, and Dane, the alcoholic. Pretty boys both who now in their late forties ain’t so pretty. I certainly hope Robin doesn’t take after them in other ways.

This snapshot made me a little teary. Nancy hated me with an intensity I never quite understood. But as the mother of her only grandson I had palace privileges, kind of like a Chinese concubine.

Enough reminiscing. Back to work.