Eat the Damn Cake

This is the first time I’ve been to Ohio.

(Bear, waiting at the airport, when we arrived)

Bear and I got my brother Jake a watch for his birthday. He kept talking about this particular watch. He was joking. He also jokes about driving a Maserati, but no one is going to get him one of those. We got him the watch, because we knew he didn’t expect it at all. He was so happy, he almost cried. That watch was his baby. He took it back to Cleveland, where he wore it on special occasions, like when he played a concert (he is a classical flutist). One night, he played a concert, and then had to drive to his landlord’s restaurant, to deliver a rent check. He was wearing a tux, so he took the watch off and put it in a box in the glove compartment, because he was afraid he’d be a target. He left, and when he came back fifteen minutes later, his window was smashed and the watch was gone. He was devastated.

So that is how I think of Cleveland. Oh, and also he was robbed at knife point while carrying a pizza. He said he wasn’t sure what to do with the pizza. He offered it to the robber, but the guy wasn’t interested.

But Columbus is lovely. The buildings are big and old and elegant, and the city seems to be balanced between crumbling antiquity and sleek modernity. It seems to be in the middle of recovering from a near-crippling injury. A lot of windows are boarded up. The restaurants are hip. Jeni’s Ice cream feels like it should be in Manhattan, with its endless line, cramped quarters, and flavors like “goat cheese and black cherries.” We bought a rhubarb soda, too. It didn’t taste like rhubarb, which was disappointing.

Cleveland is also lovely, Bear’s relatives who live there assure me. His family is  in Canton, Columbus, and Cleveland. Many of them go to church on Sundays. They are all nice. They have also lived in places like Houston and Kansas City, but this side of the family, his father’s side, started in Canton, where his grandfather was an Irish firefighter. I feel especially Jewish sometimes, like in Florida, where his grandmother told me emphatically about the Jews she’d once worked for, who were very good people. They owned a department store.

I never mind when people tell me about Jews they’ve known. I think it’s sweet. It’s just funny, to be reminded of who you are, and how you look to other people. In Manhattan, being Jewish is so normal. Every other person I meet is also Jewish. Even the ones I didn’t think were.

Bear’s cousins have become some of my favorite people. The women are beautiful and short-haired and spunky. The family seems full of spunky, outgoing women who tease with straight faces and are always playing with you, and gentle, kind men, who are quick to apologize. Bear is definitely a gentle, kind man who is quick to apologize. Everyone tells me that his quirky, crooked smile has been there since early childhood.

It starts to rain as Bear and I are walking back from Short North, and we duck into a colossal conference center, where hordes of teenage girls in tiny shorts and ponytails are camped on the floor or whacking volleyballs in the gleaming, blocks- long gym.  I think about beach volleyball, where the women have to wear bikinis to compete. There’s something weird about these outfits. Something blatantly sexual that I feel like I’m supposed to not care about because it doesn’t really matter.

I can’t really understand Columbus at a glance. The old and the new are mixed together in complicated ways. Like Florida, but here it’s all about the people and not at all about the land. There’s something charming about the trendy restaurants a street away from the barred off drug houses. There’s something strong about the place, like it might be able to withstand anything. And the people aren’t sure if they want to be in Manhattan or the middle of Ohio. So they’re doing some of both. It seems to be working for them.

Oh, and they have an accent! I didn’t expect that. They have an accent that sounds the slightest bit southern to me. I like it. I want to sound like that, too. I find myself slipping the slightest bit into it, as we talk. I think, maybe if we moved here now, I’d get that accent permanently.

(setting up the baby shower, Bear and I being unhelpful)

Bear’s family is celebrating the pregnancy of one of his cousin’s. We arrived here and stumbled into a baby shower. Everyone is talking about the kids, for our whole visit. Almost everyone in the family thinks about kids late, and decides to have them late, but there are several young kids in the family now, and everyone is talking excitedly about their antics. At first I thought, “Great. We’re talking about little kids again.” But then I got into it, and felt sort of touched by how much they cared about these children.

I never felt that, as a kid– a big ring of protective cousins and aunts and uncles surrounding me. My family is small. Some people haven’t spoken to each other for years. Also, it feels sometimes like my family is full of rules. Rules on how to behave, and what you can say, and how you can act. Grown ups are definitely supposed to act a certain way. No one would ever swear.

Sometimes I realize that I’m not sure what being a grown up looks like for me  in my family, because I don’t act like the grown ups there. I am weird and I swear and I do silly voices and I still want to goof around a lot. I bring up inappropriate topics. Innuendo is funny. I love teasing people and I love being teased. My brothers are the same way. So in a way we’re kind of stuck as children. Maybe until we have our own kids and get to be immature around them.

Marriage is awesome. I have this whole new family to learn from. As long as I come out to Ohio every once in a while.

(Bear’s six-year-old cousin took this one of me)

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Un-roast: Today I love my collarbone. It’s understated, I think. I’m not totally positive.