Vacation

It's not always clear to me whether to treat this blog as a repository for Important Thoughts, or just as a diary. It started out, way back when, as a tool to try to understand my marriage. Once I understood it enough to realize I had to leave Wife, I started to collect "diary" entries about times that Wife was particularly awful, in case I needed to bring a portfolio of documentation into Court. (Also I back-added the "diary" tag to earlier posts as well.) Since that time, it has bounced all over the place, with rapid tonal shifts between the superficial and the disturbing sometimes all within a single day. In fact I've talked about this confusion before.

Well if it's a diary, I should have posted three weeks ago that I had just finished spending a week vacationing with Marie's family at their summer cottage, the same one I wrote about here, and also in these three posts.* This year it was a reunion of all the siblings:

1. Marie's older brother, his second wife, and (for a couple of days) one of his sons;
2. Marie, with me;
3. Marie's younger brother, and his current long-term girlfriend;
4. Marie's younger sister, Cuñada, and her daughter Natasha.

The ones who were new to me were the older brother's son, the younger brother, and his girlfriend. So from the point of view of the four siblings at the core of it all, that means that only Marie's younger brother was new to me. Let me call him Hermanito—partly because it means "little brother" and partly because he was physically the largest of us all.

Mostly there's not a lot to tell. It was a very quiet week. I did manage to provoke a spot of unpleasantness, but only through being a clueless jerk. Nothing more malicious than that.

One day a bunch of us were going out to one of the nearby sights. Marie and I rode with Hermanito and his girlfriend. While we were under way, Marie mentioned that after we visited the place we were going, she wanted to have lunch at such-and-such a spot. Hermanito replied that he wasn't really interested in that place for lunch, but he thought Cuñada and Natasha would like it so why didn't we go with them when the time came? OK, that sounded fine. A couple hours later, when we were preparing to leave the sight we'd been visiting, I mentioned casually to Natasha that Marie and I wanted to move into her car (if that was OK). I tried to make a joke, and said that Hermanito had "thrown us out" … because I thought that was so preposterous that nobody could take it seriously. I expected Natasha to say either "OK fine" or else "Wait, what?"

Instead, she took me absolutely literally. The next thing I knew, she and Cuñada were picking sharply at Hermanito, challenging him in no uncertain terms to explain why the hell he had thrown us out of his car. I tried to explain that it was only a joke, but I wasn't very effective at it; and we drove off in different directions in a sour mood.**

That afternoon, while people were napping or otherwise quiet, I wrote an email to Hermanito, Cuñada, Natasha, and copied to Marie:

I have to apologize for causing the miscommunication today. I was trying to make a joke but out of clumsiness I totally failed to convey that it was a joke. As a result, I just ended up being an asshole, which was not the intention. To be absolutely clear: Hermanito never ejected us from his car, nor was he ever anything but gracious about driving us. I am grateful for the grace and good humor with which everyone has been willing to drive us on this trip, and I repaid that grace and good humor very badly. I'm sorry.

Thank you all for everything you have done all week. 

Sincerely and abashedly,

Hosea 

I got back calming remarks back from Cuñada and Natasha, but nothing from Hermanito, who was of course the injured party. I know he uses email, though, so I hope he read it.

Sometimes I can be a pain in the ass to have around in person. I hope that occasionally I can redeem myself in writing, but I don't dare wager money on it.

The rest of the week was quiet and uneventful.   

__________

* I thought about back-dating this post to a more appropriate position in the chronological flow. But I realized that doing so would put it before the seven most recent posts. Since this blog is set to show seven posts per page, that means it would have posted on the next page back before the front. And that might look like I was trying to hide it, in case anybody is following this blog in real time. The very last thing I want is for anybody to think I'm trying to look better than I really am in this blog. So I'll leave the post where it is.   

** Part of me wonders whether there might have been some kind of past history in the family that would make people believe it when I said Hermanito had thrown us out? Maybe it wouldn't actually have been out of character and I accidentally put my finger on a sore spot. It would just bloody well figure, wouldn't it?