November 26, 2010: Jeff Buckley - I Never Asked to Be Your Mountain

Jeff Buckley - I Never Asked to Be Your Mountain

A friend said to me, yesterday, "I'm scared that he doesn't love me because my family is so normal." I couldn't help but sympathize.

When I first moved to Toronto I had to stop asking people about their parents and their families because I found more and more that parents had died, divorced, that people were adopted or their siblings were estranged, that they ran away from home when they were teenagers or else abused. I couldn't assume that people had "regular" families; a mother, a father and brothers and/or sisters. I found forms of families otherwise regarded as deviant or irregular which functioned as families fully. And I found them exciting and new and intimidating and felt insecure in the stories they told.

I come from a "regular" family. They're normal. We're normal. I have a mother and a father who are still married and very loving and supportive. I have two brothers who have jobs and children and significant others, a house and a car and a cat, one owns a business and the other is a website developer.

Boring.

But there's nothing wrong with this. It's strange that I can feel so insecure about a loving and supportive family that gets along. I guess it makes one feel themselves normal; average. There is nothing special or unusual or remarkable about being average, it's a form of gray. But then there is the family on paper vs the family in reality, the self on paper vs the self in reality. Different forms. Completely.

Katie was one of the most beautiful, kind I'd yet met and she brought me to her parents Toronto home. They were lawyers. They owned a home and had built a pond in back filled with goldfish. They had a modest art collection. I spoke with her father about The United Nations as he leaned on his breakfast nook, his pale blue dress shirt tucked into his slacks. We drank wine on their back patio. It was a few days since they had installed lights on the CN Tower and you could see it in the distance, bringing my brimmed wonder to spill.