Did I mention in all my Portland bellyaching that my mom and dad moved into Sister #2’s house? They did! Tonight was our first Family Dinner sans the 3/4ths of the Portlander’s (my brother-in-law Ben doesn’t move until the 11th). It was weird.

Really weird.

I walked up the steps to the living room like I have about 281,502,480 times since Sister #2 bought the place like a dozen years ago. However, upon turning the corner from the steps into the living room the place I was taken aback. The cognitive dissonance of being in Sister #2’s house but it not being her home anymore was a lot to take.

First of all, my parents have crammed the place with furniture. There’s a couch, two giant chair-and-half monstrosities, a fuzzy burgundy recliner, an area rug, two big end tables, a heavy, trunk-like coffee table, a giant rolltop desk, an office chair, and a tv stand featuring a giant flat-screen TV. On most of flat surfaces are shiny, breakable knick knacks, beer steins, and other worthless crap.

“It feels like an old person’s home,” I said, sitting down.
“It’s Grandma Chromey’s,” Sister #3 said.
“IT IS!” I shouted. “It literally is.”

The place seemed to morph into the Palisades apartments in Roseville, MN circa 1983.

Grandma Chromey lived in the Palisades apartments in Roseville from the time I was born until I was sixteen or seventeen, when she and my Aunt Theresa bought a house. They had gotten custody of my cousin Christopher and decided an apartment was no place to raise a rambunctious boy.

Apartment living is fine for most children, but not THAT particular apartment which was crammed with furniture and about 831 glass things just waiting to meet an errant elbow and crash to the floor in 831 pieces. Grandma Chromey’s apartment was a glass-topped, no room, bucket of anxiety and that’s just when our family of six visited. If you added in any of my 9 uncles or aunts or 50 cousins in there and, well, it was not a good situation.

Also, one time when I was like nine my cousin Karen who must have been seven or eight got her head stuck between the bars on the balcony. Talk about an adult freak out. I still remember two of my uncles trying to pry the steel bars apart so she could slip her head back through.

We talked about the anxiety produced by visiting Grandma Chromey’s and being afraid of breaking something. My mom said she didn’t care if we accidentally broke something. At that point my dad mad me help him with his new MacBook Air, which he is struggling with.

I dragged a chair from the dining room to the desk into the living room and promptly crashed into the glass & brass shelving unit my mom has in the walkway between the kitchen and living room. The shelves are filled with tons of breakable knick knacks. I was in the house about eight minutes before I started knocking shit over.

Everyone went silent while I scanned the shelf for what I broke. Oh, I said, picking up what looked like a porcelain potato, it’s not broken.

The Tibbles looked disappointed.

I smiled at them and nodded my head. “You’d feel better if I was the first person to break something, wouldn’t you?”
“Yeah,” Nolan said. “We would.”
“Ha, ha Sucker,” I said. “Not me. Not this time.”

So, really, the best part of the whole weirdness of the new Family Dinner was discovering that Joe Camel lighter on my dad’s desk. That shit is probably an antique now. Sadly, it didn’t work.