Family Tradition
In the words of the slightly-less-than-immortal-but-legendary-nonetheless Hank Williams, Jr."If I get drunk and sing all night long, its just a family tradition..."
Hank, Jr. knew full well that each generation paces on the craziness gene to the next and you can count on one of your siblings or cousins to turn out just like crazy uncle Fletcher who used to wear his wife's wig to church picnics. Or eccentric aunt Ruth, the retired school teacher who named all her dozen cats after parts of speech so when she would float through the room in her flowered housedress and fuzzy slippers, sighing and saying, 'Oh the infinite mysteries of the Comma,' you didn't know if she was referring to punctuation or the orange tabby hiding under the china cabinet.
Granted, the Junior Hank Williams was not speaking of mental illness, per se, but he and his father both knew a thing or two about self-medicating. Suffice to say that Southern families have their share of drunks, addicts, and general insanity. My family is no exception. Some of the biggest nuts I've ever seen fell right straight out of my family tree, already cracked and usually salted, toasted, and ready for the can.
Both branches of my family, maternal and paternal, have more than its share of eccentric relatives. There was my mother's uncle, who we called 'Old Weird Harold' who ended up so well-preserved with whatever booze he could find that he lived thirty years after everyone assumed he died. And my uncle, my mother's brother, who did so many drugs back in the sixties that he either became a complete idiot or an enlightened genius. There was much discussion about this in my formative years. My father took the 'pro-idiot' point of view, with my grandmother leaning towards the 'pro-genius' side. Personally, I just thought he and Old Weird Harold needed to set up housekeeping together but who listens to a ten year old in need of her own private lithium lick?
On my dad's side, we had great-grandfather John Benjamin, whose personal motto was 'a man is a fool to buy bread if there is no whiskey in the house.' Granted, this could have been because he was Irish, but my money says its because he was a drunk. Especially since one of his favorite past times was sneaking his family out of their house in the middle of the night so he didn't have to pay rent. We also had dear old half-blind uncle George (Johnny B's brother) who used to go off on drunken tears and not come home for days on end. He also used to tell his nephews 'I'm going to break you'uns legs!' as a form of endearment, but that was because my father and his brothers were not the best behaved children in the county. Not to mention my dad's cousins who once got drunk and stole a police car, drove it through a golf course, and ended up spending so much time on the top floor of the Birmingham jail they told everyone they owned the place.
I could go on, but you get the idea. Crazy/drunk, Drunk/crazy, addicted to Pabst Blue Ribbon and Swisher Sweets (my mom's dad), it's all there. Not to mention the depression, anxiety, and worry-wartedness my father's mother's family, the Quinns possessed in abundance. Now, with a name like Quinn you'd think they'd be the ones to drink like sailors and carouse all night, but no. They just sat around and worried about all the drinking and carousing and other sailor-type behavior going on around them. If you wanted anything at all worried about or, someone to get upset about something for you, all you had to do was come see my grandmother. I truly believe the woman thought happiness was a sin. Of course, her upbringing was none too stable, either. She was forbidden to attend birthday parties because that's how John the Baptist ended up with a missing head. (I kid you not.) Her idea of a good time was everyone behaving themselves and minding their manners which made visits to her house a real pleasure, as I'm sure you can well imagine.
Moving on down the line, we have my brother who's addicted to anything that can be ingested and has been diagnosed with almost every mental illness and defect known to man with the exception of paranoid schizophrenia, but give him time. He's only 43. There's much discussion in our family about whether he's crazy or whether he's a misunderstood genius, so I guess he's carrying that torch for my departed uncle. And then we have little ole bipolar me, who goes up and down like a three dollar whore at the end of the cattle trail if I don't take my medicine. However, I know I'm a misunderstood genius so there's no need for my family to debate this. They're just glad I can pass for stable and go out amongst normal people without calling too much attention to myself. Except for the 'Great Cracker Barrell Parking Lot Fight of 2003' but that's another story.
My family is a patchwork quilt of neuroses, psychoses, and few 'oses' I don't even know the names for. The fact that we also have more than our share of artists, musicians, writers, and people who can write with their toes explains a lot, too. Everyone knows that creativity and insanity are first cousins. So it came as no surprise a couple of weeks ago when my oldest daughter, an aspiring musician, was diagnosed as type 2 bipolar, which is bipolar without the manic phase. I think she got cheated. After all, what good is being crazy if you're just going to be sad and hopeless and suicidal ALL the time. With good ole type 1 bipolar you're only sad and hopeless and suicidal half the time. The other half you're a hell of a lot of fun to be around!
So I guess Hank, Jr. was right after all. Which is nice to know, seeing as how his daddy died in the back seat of a car after ingesting pure grain alcohol contaminated with lead. (At least, that's what my daddy told me and he knows all about the death of country music's greatest.) And now that my daughter has joined the exalted ranks of the questionably sane, we can start debating whether she's an idiot or just a tortured genius.
After all, it's a family tradition!
posted by Zoe Richardson @ 3:22 PM
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