Jed Wolf

Though everyone else thought my parents were beguiling and attractive, to me they were Martians. Everything about them was challenging, beginning with their names. I cringed hearing the name “Dick” for obvious reasons, and “Ruby” sounded painful like a rueful, bloody stone.

Their ominous presence caused brooding book titles to mysteriously appear in front of me on shelves, objects suddenly needed repair and bad news came on television.

But their waterfront houses were furnished with breathless good taste. Objets d’art clung to the walls where watery reflections danced on cue every teeth-clenching afternoon. Unable to appreciate the ambushing beauty of the places I grew up in, I realized only after caring for my two parents separately when they grew old, how their need for interesting décor camouflaged their equally puerile natures. Shocked and somewhat desperate facing their final days, as equipped to talk about feelings as farm animals, instead of saying they loved me on their deathbeds, they inanimately claimed they did the best they could.

I acknowledged the benefits of being their offspring while hugging my oddly feral parents. Lacking proper nurturing themselves, I’d learned they’d forged lives and suffered existential hungers much like mine and my sister’s. After discovering the influence wars, rumored incest and possible inbreeding had on their roots, I expected alcohol was the uniting feature that twisted my family the most and kept generations before us in perpetual need.

Hybrid weeds of my father’s guilty generosity and my mother’s legendary stinginess, my sister and I were spared “lessons” other parents deliberately teach children, and drank and smoked pot with them instead. Unincumbered by religion, morality, or good manners, we were grateful for shared insecurities which bonded us in ways nurturing couldn’t have.

After their passing, I pitied what was barely left of my family for a while. I never wanted children and my sister’s cerebral boys don’t seem thus far like procreative types.

Failing to resolve things between my parents and I bothered me at age thirteen. I seemed as much a Martian to them, as they did me, but trying to alter lifelong patterns by confronting them screaming resulted in my being sent away to boarding school. My BO and matted hair made me appear as human to my schoolmates as my parent’s decor made them seem to their peers, and the sooner we all got inebriated the better.