Weekend list

Weekends aren't the time for poetry

This is the time of lists and non fiction

Feeling the slime forming on the dank walls of a Wikipedia black whole about Hasidim

Or the family trees of Europe's various royal families

Imagine if you had to remember all those cousins

For a long time I couldn't tell apart my cousins Casey and Dawn 

I probably still couldn't, I haven't seen them in years

I could always tell apart Joshua and Gannon, thanks to one of them being my brother

But not having that cheat code you'd probably struggle, like I did with Casey and Dawn 

And maybe still do

Dawn's dad died about 10 years ago and we sort of all lost track

And Josh's family moved south when he died, so we don't see much of them now

You wouldn't believe how much his daughter looks like him, and thus Gannon,

But she lives in Michigan where he died and I've never met her so maybe she doesn't look that much like us anymore

She didn't come to the funeral because she was a baby

Not everyone came when my dad died either because of the snowstorm

I remember thinking then about Casey crying during her eulogy because no daughter thinks about speaking at her father's funeral

But I always thought that was a daughter's birthright

I read a letter my grandmother wrote to my father when Gannon was born telling my father that he was God's greatest gift to her

I never really met her, being 2 when she died

I cried when I read it

It would be so much worse to be a mother speaking, that's what no daughter thinks about

Like Patty for Joshua, before they moved south

When Uncle Richie died, all us cousins got fucked up on strawberry daqueries after the Friday funeral

That was two weeks after Joshua and Gannon's poorly timed weddings on the same weekend in different states

The daqueries were Carly's idea - I had never had one, but maybe Devin and Adrienne and Casey and Jennifer and Dawn and Lindsay and Leslie had

Once Grandma then Richie then Devin had a house we gathered in, in what I later found out was the shitty side of Scranton

It just kept getting past down as people kept dying in it

But Devin moved south and sold it