The Cob and Log Hampster Wheel

I flew home to San Clemente this weekend. My mom had planned a family reunion of sorts with her father’s relatives.  Nobody on the Tolmasoff side of the family gets together anymore, so my mom decided it was a good idea to get everyone together, haul out the rotisserie for shashlik and get on with being sentimental about things. The entire month, I’ve been anticipating a dramatic family reunion, and though I remember these Russian relatives as drunkards and misfits, I imagined that this would be an afternoon of familial comfort, where older women would rub my hands and tell me how proud they are of me, and I would finally accept the touch and closeness that had frightened me for so many years.

Of course, it was nothing like I had hoped for.  Oh, it was interesting. And, oh, it was family, but it was not, of course, the reunion I could have imagined.

Firstly, I need to describe the points of origin of my mom’s family. They are Russian Molokans, of the Clan of the Spirit Jumper. Holy Rollers who speak in tongues during church services. They travelled together from Georgia in the early 1900s, to Los Angeles, where they continued their Old World religious traditions in a spare white clapboard church on Spring Street. I remember going to church, and I remember the roasted lamb and tea afterwards. I remember the non-church events, also — the roundtables of drinking, the singing, the highballs, the arguments, the Russian women with the watery red eyes. For some reason, everybody’s skin is paper-thin and mottled with dark spots where the blood vessels seem ready to burst through, seeping through the epidermis like a map. Or a plum.

Anyway, the Tolmasoff relatives are my mother’s father’s brothers. He had 6 brothers and a sister, but only 4 brothers remain alive. It was these brothers,  and all of their children that are around, who were invited today.  2 brothers arrived early this morning to set up the barbeque, and the one brother brought me books and Russian hymanls translated phonetically.  I need to interject right here that I am incredibly interested in my family and their religion. I imagine myself frequently in Russia, riding my bike through crumbling buildings or sleeping in haystacks while drinking homedistilled vodka. And while I realize that those dreams are fanciful romantic imaginations that are probably 27 degrees away from reality, I still feel them in my bones. I am still Russian. While I was learning Russian in school a few years ago, I felt the words click and clack through my throat with a certainty that was thick with bloodlines and memories.  And I have, in my studies, grown more curious about the religion itself, what it means, how it has evolved.  So when Alex dropped the books in my lap, I was delighted.  I thought we could talk about it. I told him that I was learning Russian, and he just looked at me, and pointed to the hymnbook, and pointed out the prayers. He gave me all the books, but he seemed somewhat uninterested in talking to me.

Was it the tattoos (which are verboten for Molokans)? Was it the tongue piercing? Was it the scratches on my legs and arms that were helpfully pointed out by my cousin Eric?  Was it all of those? None of those? I’ll probably never know, but it was subtle enough not even to feel alienated, just empty. It’s fine to never feel quite Molokan (it’s not something I beleive in), but I have to say that there are times that I wish I could read the Lord’s Prayer in Russian with my uncle Alex and have it mean something. I stood there in my mom’s courtyard feeling that same old feeling I have been feeling for years, and what comes up urgently when I am at their house and around family: I want to feel my emotions, and I want to feel them powerfully. I want to feel real.

What happened in the next few hours, though, was an awkward and excruciating paegent of family. Our cousins are themselves interesting in their own way, but one cousin in particular had some trouble keeping boundaries of physical touch. I realize that he is mentally retarded, but the unwanted physical touch was too much for me to bear. I repeatedly verbally told him how I felt, but to no avail. When I tried to tell my mom how I felt (somewhat embarassed that I, a 28 year old badass needed my mom to rescue me from a conversation about Elvis with my second cousin), she hissed at me to help her slice the pie (never mind that I had been orbiting around the kitchen like a hummingbird maid for the past 15 minutes) and slithered away before I could confide in her. It wasn’t until everybody but my aunt and first cousins had left that we all compared notes about boundary crossing and creepy second cousin vibes. My mom was, of course, shocked, but rather than feel vindicated, I somehow still felt guilty. As if it was my fault that things were awkward. As if I could have done something or said something that would have made the situation flow more smoothly?

The other cousins were interesting but banal, and I definitely felt guilty about that. My interpretion of their boringness is definitely my own chip on my shoulder, but I just couldn’t help it. I did sit down and talk to my mom’s uncle Jim for a long time about his time in the Army (or Marines?) and his service in the Battle of the Bulge. I promised to look up the Battle of the Bulge — not only to make more sense of his stories, but because his personal comments reminded me why I am going to teach high school history, and I do not want to forget the feeling of hanging on his every word, and then of hearing his thoughts and reactions to the Iraq ‘war,’ and how this situation is different than World War II.  That conversation alone is what I flew home from Boston for, except that I was so excited, and so distracted by the creepy cousin out of the corner of my eye, or my two first cousins giggling with each other on the bench next to me, and of the excitment of having a Real Family Moment of talking to Uncle Jim about the Battle of the Bulge, that I could hardly pay attention. My mind raced with the feeling of being a stitch in some fabric of history, a younger guardian of the Tolmasoff family fabric, a secret fanner of the passionate flames of the Russian Molokans (Conscientous Objectors by doctrine, but all Americanized and thus servicemen in WWII).

Where do I fit in with my family? I’m not quite sure. Perhaps I don’t have to fit in anywhere. Their social ways left me feeling awkward (as they always have, every single gathering that I have gone to) but is that partially my own fault? When does the feeling of family snap under my own weight of trying to feel someone else’s idea of family?  I have run up against my feelings about the Molokan side of my family a lot, but I thought that this event would somehow put some of those feelings to rest.  I realize now, on this damp moonlit night in Southern California, as I listen to the palms rustle in the inky breeze, that my family is wierd, and they need an entire novel written about them. And I don’t have to sugarcoat it, or feel sentimental about family that i don’t feel sentimental about, but that my feelings that I have are fine, normal, healthy, beautiful. Family is wierd, and it always gets wierder the more we know about ourselves.

As the evening had dwindled down, my mom’s uncle Morrie stayed to chat. He did his impersonation of my grandfather (whom we all adored), something that we always love. My mom gave him a samovar to make tea, and Morrie chastized me for not rolling to ‘r’ on the end the right way (something which I also loved). After Morrie and his son left, my aunt and cousins and mom and I sat around and compared notes, processing, laughing, eating more cake and scraping peach pie filling out of the crust. I felt the family that i know and love in those moments. My mom poured more wine, my cousins rolled their eyes at their mom, my aunt and mom made wierd comments about labor laws that were nonsensical but nothing I wanted to argue about, my dad did the dishes while us girls all sat around, speculating and gossiping. It felt comfortable, and for the first time all day, I felt content and happy. It is this family that I love, and even though my cousins popped up when it was time to leave and insisted that they wouldn’t be home if i came to visit tomorrow, I felt grateful and loving just to see them in person, to hear the cadence of their voices.  Interetingly, when my mom and I were walking back into the house after waving goodbye to their Mini Cooper, my mom said something to me, and she sounded just like my grandma. Her breath even smelled like Russian food, and I was overwhelmed with the continuity of family.