11-26-04 - 12:18 p.m. thanksgiving was just two completely different ends of the spectrum all bunched up into one day. on one end, the morning end, if you will, you have my family, out in the country, with my cousins, who are just great. wonderful even. especially my youngest cousin, jordan, who's just so great and different and weird. we sat back in a back bedroom watching cartoons and he told me all about transformers and he's the kid i want if i ever have a son. then you've got the night. amy's family. and i'm not using morning/night metaphorically or symbolically or anything like that. i ate lunch at my family, i ate dinner with her family. dinner's fine, everyone's okay. and then, oh then the cable internet didn't work and all hell broke loose. her stepdad was on the phone being an asshole to the lady on the other end of the line (yeah. he's one of them. i apologize right now to customer service reps.). amy was getting angry, because he was completely over reacting. first he said it wasnt working because everyone was watching cable and draining the input. then he said it was the modem. then this and then that. so i told amy we were leaving. we get up, go downstairs, amy slams the door shut and i say woah, no, don't do that. you don't need to react that way. i walk outside because i'm just not going to be around angry people. i'm a good twenty, thirty feet away from the house, wandering around in the street, when i hear yelling. i stand under the window to listen, just to make sure everything's okay. i hear screaming, then i hear, "fuck you!" and that's my cue to go inside. i start heading in. as i open the door something gets thrown, i step inside, amy is jumping on her step father's back. i run over to her, pull her to the stairs. we're standing there, her grandmother's next to me, blocking amy from him, or him from amy. i try to get her to look at me and to listen to me, to tell her we're leaving, she doesn't need this, he's not worth it. she's shaking. her whole body, it's crazy shaking. i hear him, somewhere behind me, start yelling about how she always comes to him when her piece of shit car breaks down or wrecks or blah blah blah and i'm just not really listening because amy needs to get away from him. that's what i'm worried about. that's who i'm worried about. amy calms down enough to start packing up things to go, because not only does she need to leave, he's now said she has to. i'm standing between amy and him, and i will never forget this: he calms down enough to look at amy's mom and point to ground and say "there's glass on the floor." through this i haven't said anything to him. but that, i don't know, expecting her to clean up this broken glass as he's ordering her daughter out of the house, it kind of riles me up. i'm standing there, fully facing him now, just looking at him, and he says to amy's mom, "are you going to come talk to me now?" and amy says, "she's coming with me." and he says, "she's MY wife." and amy says, "so? she's MY mom, she's been my mom longer than she's been your wife." and at that greg looks around, sees me just looking at him, and says "what are you looking at?" and i say, "you're not going to yell at them like that." and he says "leave my house!" and i stand there. long story made a bit shorter: he left. he never touched amy or her mom. i'm short, light, but if he had raised a hand to either one of them, or thrown anything at one of them, someone would be in jail right now. he's across the state at his mother's. amy's mom is deciding whether or not to divorce him. if she does, everything goes up in the air: where amy will go to school, where i will go to work, all kinds of crap. her grandmother, who was in the middle of all this, broke down. she spent the night. everything calmed down by the 10 o'clock news. the first thing on the news? how everyone was happily celebrating thanksgiving with family. indeed. and merry christmas to all. previous - next