Meet my two suriving great aunts on my paternal grandfather's side, the youngest two of what had originally been six: Aunt Arless (born 1947), and Aunt Roxanne (born 1945).
I learned something new about Aunt Arless yesterday. I've been spelling her name wrong all my life. I asked Dad to confirm how it was spelled, and Dad went to look it up in Sherri's phone. Aunt Arless happened to be walking past him from behind, so I said from the chair I was sitting in, "Hey, we can ask her!"
And she said: "A-R-L-E-S-S." Wait, what?
I have all this time been spelling it
Arliss. Literally as I was writing this, I went to my Flickr account to correct the "aunt arliss" tag to "
aunt arless." As it happens, I now have 38 shots of her, dating from as far back as 2009, though that includes a few scans shared by Valerie, of scrapbook pages with photos from her childhood.
What kind of weirdo spells the name
Arless, anyway? If you google that instead of "Arliss," you know what comes up? A village in Ireland. Hmm, maybe that's why? We do have the last name McQuilkin, after all. Or Aunt Arless would have before she got married.
Anyway. Moving on—to Aunt Roxanne. She lives in a psychiatric facility somewhere. I didn't know where, until Sherri read the first draft of this post that I had shared and then texted me she lives in an "adult family home" in Lakewood. People keep saying it's some kind of mental institution, which is not what "adult family home" sounds like. It must just be an assisted living facility, which would work just as well even if Aunt Roxanne is clearly a little out of it. Anyway, The last time I saw her was at the scattering of Grandma and Grandpa's ashes, at
Twanoh State Park, in September 2016. This just occurred to me: there were at least five people alive and at that event who are no longer with us: Uncle Lynn (Grandpa's brother); Auntie Rose (Grandma's sister); Uncle Imre (Auntie Rose's husband, just passed last year); Aunt Raenae (Dad's sister); Uncle Paul (Dad's brother).
Les, who is technically Dad's cousin but is much closer to my age (Aunt Arless was technically Aunt Raenae's aunt but only one year older than her; she and Roxanne were basically in the same generation as my dad and his siblings—so brothers Les and Larry, who were birthed by Aunt Roxanne but raised by others; and Tobin, who was birthed by Aunt Arliss, were more in the same generation as us grandkids even though they were our parents' first cousins), brought Aunt Roxanne. I heard yesterday that Larry apparently also lives in a psychiatric facility, the same one Aunt Roxanne does—but, again: a correction came from Sherri: he lives in Vancouver. I need to stop listening to family members who don't know shit! Anyway, he didn't make it yesterday, either. (For about a day I thought it was Larry who came yesterday and Les in the psych facility—or rather, Vancouver Washington, but how different are they
really?— but I just looked up old photos and it became clear I had that backwards.)
I'm just learning all kinds of things this week!
And although I already posted the
image digest adapted from my New Year's email last night, there are some things I need to add about the holiday today. Most notable, the requisite
New Year's Day Party Roll Call!
1. Dad
2. Sherri
3. Gina
4. Beth
5. Matthew [me]
6. Jennifer
7. Matthew [Jennifer's boyfriend]
8. Ian
9. Bella [Ian's girlfriend]
10. Toni
11. James
12. Hayden
13. Kylar
14. Thayer
15. Selwyn
16. Gabby [foreign exchange student from Madrid staying with Toni and James]
17. Aunt Penny
18. Tammy
19. Erin
20. Aunt Roxanne
21. Les
22. Aunt Arless
23. Tobin
When I first counted them up, I told Sherri there were 25—but I was mistaken as I had accidentally put her and Dad on the list twice. So, it was 23. Had Brandi and Nick made it as planned, their 5-person family would have taken the number to 28, but Brandi posted to the event page on Facebook, "Nasty sickness going through the house." I relayed that to both Dad and Sherri, who had not yet seen it, and they were both like, "Yeah. They can stay home." Evidently Britni had hoped to make it too but couldn't get out of work; that would have made it 29, and Dad had said he was expecting "about 30." Oh, there's also Angel! I have no idea why she didn't make it. She didn't make it to the last one of these New Year's Day family holidy gatherings either.
That had been
in 2023. Dad hosted a New Year's gathering in both 2022 and 2023, for two key reasons: we had started having the Christmas gathering over at Gina and Beth's, and this way we could have at least one holiday still hosted at Dad and Sherri's house. Also, with other major family holidays generally limited now to Dad and Sherri and their descendants (I just figured this out: if you count the 28 that make up Dad and Sherri, their four children, their 10 grandchildren and their 12 great-grandchildren, but add current romantic parters or spouses, that number goes up to 35), Dad uses New Year's to still extend invitations to more extended family relatives: his aunts, his sister, some of his cousins, some of my cousins, etc. Dad skipped the New Year's thing last year after hosting Christmas shifted back to his place, but even though he and Sherri hosted Christmas again this year they went ahead and did the New Year's thing again.
I think there's still some settling in to routine and expectation when it comes to who is hosting family holidays. The first couple of years after we could gather again after the pandemic, Gina and Beth hosted both Easter and Christmas, but weren't hosting Thanksgiving. In the last couple of years, Thanksgiving at Gina and Beth's became more of a thing, and I suspect they weren't as keen on hosting both Thanksgiving and Christmas, which is probably why Christmas shifted back to Dad and Sherri's last year and this year. Come to think of it, this year was the first year ever that both Christmas
and the New Year's get-togethers were hosted at Dad and Sherri's house—a somewhat ironic thing, as the shift to Gina and Beth's was in part because of Sherri's increasing anxiousness about having to host, and being perfectly good with handing off that particular baton. I think Dad is taking care of the hosting duties by and large, although I'm guessing Sherri is fairly relieved every time the mass of people that invade their home finally leave at the end of the day, much as she loves them all (or most of them . . . you know how it is with extended family).
And here we have Tobin, who came with
his mom, Aunt Arless.
There was much discussion about Tobin, particularly on Christmas Day, and whether he'd be coming to this New Year's gathering. This is because he's the one who recently finished serving eight years in prison
for manslaughter, after having fired a gun 12-15 times at someone stealing his Jeep, with one of the bullets hitting and killing a woman napping in her home.
After some discussion about this at Christmas, the question was asked: "I just want to know, why are we inviting this person?"
The response at the time was that Aunt Arless had been invited when it was not known that Tobin was home from prison, and we couldn't exactly follow up to say that he wasn't welcome. This struck me as perfectly reasonable, and to be perfectly fair, his presence yesterday worked out just fine.
Also, I'm kind of thinking now that maybe I should have refrained from
making fun of this whole thing the way I have. In retrospect, given my definitely liberal attitudes about the prison industrial complex and belief in providing opportunities for both rehabilitation and successful re-enter into society (I think denying ex-felons the right to vote is utter bullshit, to name just one issue among tons), it doesn't really make sense for me to be so quick to judge.
I mean, it's tricky. He
did kill a woman. So the argument goes, he didn't intend to. Yet, he was shooting a gun at an alleged car thief who you would reasonably assume he
was aiming to kill. Maybe in his mind he was just trying to scare him, or whatever, who knows? To me, this is a prime example of why we need far stricter gun control laws, instead of living in a society where someone who's in a panicked rage has quick and easy access to a loaded gun.
After having another day to think about it, this is the part that I'm getting a little stuck on: aren't we supposed to be regarding people who have finished a prison sentence as having "paid their debt to society"? If that's the case, what's the sense in continuing to judge and punish them? Of course, there could be spirited debate as to whether eight years is a long enough sentence for manslaughter. I don't have a clue what the magic number is there, but it's the sentence he got, and he served it. And it's not like he came to the gathering yesterday as some raving lunatic; he struck me as pretty polite and docile, perhaps even humbled. The prison experience sounds fucking terrifying to me; there's no telling what it was like for him in there—unless I were to ask him, I suppose, but I wasn't going to bring it up. I never even spoke to him yesterday, although he did nod an acknowledgment when I walked past him at one point. Honestly, even though I was never hostile toward him, I still feel like I should have been kinder, and I should have thought of these things earlier. Instead, I kept feeling uncomfortable because I knew there was someone who had killed a person in the room. But that's a gross oversimplification of something that really needs a great deal of context.
Okay, what else? Toni and James were there yesterday too, with not only
all four of their children—ranging in age from 22 years to 8 months—along with a 15-year-old foreign exchange student from Madrid named Gabby. Hayden, the oldest, has his own place with a girlfriend, so he came on his own, a bit after James arrived with the other four kids. Toni arrived quite a bit later. The baby has an unusual name: Selwyn. The others are Hayden, Kylar and Thayer. Toni explained the Y in
Selwyn when she noted that all the kids have a Y in their names.
I thought I was being ridiculously facetious when I asked Toni, "So how many more do you think you'll have? Two? Three?" But she replied, with a straight face, "Maybe one." She and James then told us that they had been thinking about how far apart in age Selwyn is from the other kids. Only Kylar and Thayer are close in age, and they are 15 and 12, respectively. If I remember right, Toni was already 41 when she had Selwyn; Shobhit and I were pretty shocked when she shared on Facebook that she was pregnant. I was nearly as shocked to hear she's actually open to a
fifth child. She seems to enjoy being a mom, though, and to their credit, they really are raising good kids.
I did get a pretty great candid shot of Toni with both her oldest and her youngest.
Anyway, I suppose there's more I could share about Jennifer, Matthew, Ian and Bella coming up to Seattle for New Year's Eve beyond the post from last night, but not a whole lot. I miscalculated how long it would take them to get here when she messaged me that they were "leaving town," because I mapped it from Union and it said an hour and 50 minutes. I later learned she texted me that when they were actually leaving Shelton, which is closer than Union. I had been planning on leaving work an hour early based on the idea of them leaving from Union when she texted, which I thought might give me time to stop downtown and do a price check on a coat Shobhit is thinking of buying in India if it'ds sufficiently cheaper. But then Jennifer told me at 3:23 that they were already at a rest stop in Federal Way! So, I high tailed it out of here, really at the same time I had already intended but now with no time to stop downtown.
I walked to the Monorail and took that downtown, then transferred to a bus thinking it would be faster than transferring to Light Rail and walking the half mile from Capitol Hill Station. Jennifer and Matthew reached my neighborhood a few minutes before I did, and just drove around in circles while they waited for me. They actually pulled up next to me only seconds after I got off my bus, but they decided to still drive around until I could get into the garage and move Shobhit's car to street parking (where we get unlimited street parking as neighborhood residents) so they could park in the garage space.
Shortly after we got everyone settled in, we ordered pizza for dinner. They were all hungry, especially Jennifer, who had not had anything but one small snack and coffee all day. She and Matthew had been given permission to start their work days an hour early, which they wanted to do so they could attempt to beat any bad traffic on the freeway, and this meant they both got up at 4 a.m. on Tuesday. We all did not get to bed on Tuesday night until about 1 a.m. (technically Wednesday morning), which meant Jennifer and Matthew had been up that day 21 hours.
By the time we were eating our pizza, it was still barely past 5:00. We had a lot of time to kill, and apparently Ian and Bella had been working through the
Alien franchise. The next one on their list was
Alien 3, so that made an unexpected movie watch on Tuesday evening: I don't think I have ever watched that movie when it was
not part of a marathon watch of the entire franchise. I must say, it works a little less when taken on its own without having seen the others around the same time. But, I still like it.
I already wrote yesterday about us all driving down to my office to park—we all loaded into Jennifer and Matthew's car, with Jennifer getting in the back with Ian and Bella, so I could be up front and give Matthew directions—and then walking from there to Seattle Center, where we hung out in one spot until the clock struck midnight and we got to see the delightful show, which I always think is absolutely worth the wait. Yesterday morning, though, we debated going out for breakfast, and in the end scrapped that idea for just heading straight to Olympia, as not everyone was ready to go by even 10:30 or so. With Dad's pasta bar scheduled for 1:00, not even sitting down to breakfast until probably 11:30 at that point just seemed silly.
This worked great for me, as I had paid for the pizza with my card, got two mediums that each cost something like $34 and with tip it came to $78.73. Neither Matthew or Jennifer use Venmo, so Matthew went to give me cash, and at first he tried to give me three $20 bills. That felt like too much, although in retrospect it was probably, if I wanted to be strict about it, fair. I only ate three slices out of those two pizzas in the end, but I still gave him back one of the twenties and told him he could give me a $10 later if he managed to break it.
I considered saying he could just cover my breakfast, but we never went out for breakfast. I had budgeted $50 for possible expenses with Jennifer's visit, and after being given the $40 in cash from Matthew, all I actually spent was $38.83. Granted, I ultimatley spent that much on three slices of pizza I actually ate myself, but that's fine. I was hosting, after all.
I had ordered from Palermo Pizza, by the way, and the delivery guy had a bottle of wine. I was a little baffled at first and he just said, "This is on the house, for New Year's Eve." That was pretty cool, even though I've got countless bottles of wine in the condo already. (We didn't drink wine. I made a hot buttered rum each for Jennifer and Matthew and myself—which, for the record, we drank hours before we drove to my office.) I did look up the wine to see what the value was, and it was about $12. I place no judgement on that, though; I even noted then that I've had cheap wine that was delicious and expensive wine that was gross—price is not an indicator of taste quality at all when it comes to wine.
Anyway! I think I've shared enough about New Year's now. On to the next thing! Movies, movies, movies. I'm going to a movie with Laney tonight; doing a Tim Burton animated triple feature with Alexia tomorrow; doing a double feature with Laney on Sunday. And the Golden Globes are on Sunday too! So much for slowing down just because the holidays are over. I guess I'll slow down when I die.
[posted 12:27 pm]
