Chapter 144: Family Time

Sunday, May 25, 1986

Memorial Drive Lutheran continued to generally meet with my approval. I missed Dr. Ott, but I really didn’t miss much else about their former church. More to the point, Mom and Dad were getting what they needed here. They had a spiritual community that worked for them and where their children’s relationships were accepted and celebrated. That was the whole point, really.

Over lunch — at Cameron’s Barbecue, which I enjoyed — we discussed tomorrow. It was a holiday, and Dad wanted to do something. ‘Something’ turned out to be a movie.

After a fairly extensive discussion of the options, we wound up picking ‘Short Circuit’. I didn’t mention having seen it, because it would be awkward describing how I’d seen it and who I’d seen it with.

If we kept seeing Amy, she would have to be mentioned to the parents. When that happened, she would probably be ‘a school friend,’ nothing more. They didn’t need to know she hadn’t been in any of my classes thus far. We would share one this fall, after all.

I still thought the whole open relationship thing was going to come out. Waiting until after the wedding might be better, though. When we could say, ‘No, Mom and Dad, we got married knowing we might sometimes see other people,’ that would matter. It wouldn’t be their preference, I was sure, but they couldn’t worry about whether we were violating our vows or putting anything asunder if we’d taken our vows knowing we might have relationships outside of the marriage. Indeed, if it was a fundamental part of our marriage, their criticizing it might itself be a form of attempted ‘putting asunder,’ and they might see it that way.

We would obviously never allow them to think anything but the truth: that we had established this long ago, well before we were even ‘engaged to be engaged,’ and neither of us had ever felt forced into accepting it. It was what we both strongly wanted in a marriage.

And, with that in mind, we might have to bite the bullet and just tell them. Anything else might feel defensive. It was similar to our having money: it mattered that everyone knew about it before the proposals, much less the wedding.

This afternoon, we had a slightly abbreviated round of the usual weekly calls. After that, we indulged in something we hadn’t done in a long time. We broke out the old board games and had a lot of fun with them. It was very different playing them without Angie involved. She was naturally very competitive, as was (surprisingly, perhaps) Mom. Without her, Mom was likely the most competitive of us all. None of the rest of us were pushovers, though, and Mom wasn’t a master tactician.

Nor was she a sore loser or an obnoxious winner, thankfully. She crushed everyone in ‘Sorry!’, but lost badly in both ‘Monopoly’ and ‘Life’.

Jas and I volunteered to cook the burgers she’d planned on for dinner. We didn’t even do anything unusual with them. It was just nice to give Mom a break.

Monday, May 26, 1986

Except for the little American flags at the end of every driveway, it was hard to tell there was anything unusual about today. I knew it mattered to Dad, because of his father’s experiences in World War I, and to Mom, because of Ryan’s involvement in World War II. Beyond that, though, it wasn’t a big deal to us. None of our immediate relatives had been killed or even injured in wars.

Dad and Mom both knew people who’d had that experience, but we didn’t, by and large. In my first life, I’d had friends who were veterans and had lost friends that way, but I could hardly mention that. None of them had been especially concerned with Memorial Day, anyway.

Given that, we treated it like most people in America did: as just a holiday. In the early afternoon, we all got in Dad’s car and he drove us to a new (to them, anyway) movie theater that had just opened on Westheimer, not far from Ninfa’s. I remembered going here at some point — likely around now, really. I also remembered driving along here much later and seeing that it had been demolished.

It was here, now, and it was new and nice, and that was what mattered. I had no emotional connection to it from my first life.

Everyone enjoyed ‘Short Circuit’. It really was a fun and generally inoffensive comedy. Oh, there were a few slightly risqué jokes and some fighting and explosions, but none of those were enough to annoy Mom. She was, most likely, the hardest of us to please. And there was some brownface, but I’d made my peace with that, and neither Mom or Dad would be concerned with it.

After the movie, Dad proposed going to a new Italian restaurant not far away. We all thought that sounded good, so off we went.

Jas called Camille and Francis from the restaurant. She didn’t want Camille making extra dinners for us, though it would just be leftovers if she did. We decided to simply delay heading to their house until tomorrow. It was really nice spending this time with Mom and Dad, and we didn’t want to change that.

The restaurant turned out to be really good. Honestly, it felt as if this was more of a double date than anything else, which surprised me when I noticed it. Both the age difference and the parent / in-law relationships were ... well, not ‘set aside,’ but more ‘irrelevant,’ perhaps. We were two couples out on dates together.

It felt good, and I hoped we would do more of it. I loved that they were my parents, and Jas loved them being her in-laws. That wasn’t going to change. We both greatly respected them. At the same time, we were four adults and two couples, and we could just be that sometimes.

There had never been such an opportunity with my ex-wife. I’m not sure if we had ever seen a movie with Mom and Dad, but I suspected we hadn’t. Mostly, we’d gone out for meals with them. That, by and large, was it. That, and sitting around and talking.

We’d already changed that, of course. Over, and over, and over again. But the feeling of double dating was brand new and quite welcome.

While looking at the paper, I noted the coverage of ‘Hands Across America’, which had been yesterday. I had felt no need to participate this time, and didn’t feel like I’d missed anything.