Called Aunt B yesterday to thank her for the copy of Small Graces she had shipped. Only read the first chapter, and it wasn't anything I didn't already know; but the language was delicious. She said it was more poetry than prose, and I don't exactly agree...but I don't exactly disagree either. Good to have a relative to talk books with. She kept getting excited and going, "Wait 'til you get to the chapter on--oh shoot, spoilers! Oh, but I can't wait to talk to you about...rrrrr, can't say it!"
Promised to call her back next week when I'd had a chance to finish the book.
She'd taken her husband out to see the new Barbie movie and said it was incisive in its feminism, and made her feel lucky she'd had a career in education where the pressure to perform that kind of femininity had been less. I was a little surprised to hear her talk about performative femininity--she's nearing in her eighties, an economist by training, though she'd had a full career as a public school teacher. Always been a very concrete thinker, according to her husband, who can never resist adding, "First wife was a physicist, second was an economist. Guess I've always had a thing for smart blondes."
Her husband, Cousin C (I don't know if he's my father's oldest cousin or my grandfather's youngest, he hovers between generations like that) called me straightaway after and wanted to talk about the Barbie movie too. He said there were some really smart details about Ken, and it got him thinking about how he always felt like he couldn't quite fit into the man-box. Interesting to hear him call it that--can't help wondering whether he's been reading Brene Brown (by the time you read this, she may or may not be relevant among shame researchers, but she has a whole TED Talk on the ways social shame constrains men and women differently, at least in this time and place). Alternatively, it could be the Barbie movie has a literal man-box that Ken comes in. I asked Cousin C about it and he said he didn't want to give away any spoilers.
I told them I'd take my girlfriend out to the movies and call again after we'd seen it.
(Strange to have a devout Christian in my family who remains fundamentally disinterested in the culture wars. Splits his retirement between refugee resettlement and disaster relief, and anyway he's married to a woman who has exactly zero time for anything she can't stub her toe on. But he's never been anything other than supportive of my name and pronouns, and he's never batted an eye when I mention having a girlfriend.)
(Strange that this seems strange to me. I remember what my home community was like before the culture wars quite got their hooks in. I suppose there are people old enough to have lived whole lives before the poison set in, who decided not to touch it and to continue living and practicing as they always had.)
It's good to have them in my life.