If I didn’t look like an exact combination of both my mom and dad, I’d have started hunting for my biological ones long ago. Going back to age four when I insisted on wearing my cowboy boots with shorts, I have been the puzzle piece that never lies flat and is instead kind of wedged. My parents have such a lengthy combined amount of letters after their names, the alphabet must feel lacking. And while I have four of my own and am no slouch, there’s just no comparison in intellect. My mother once described leaving a class at Harvard and exiting the campus to the Square as, taking the isosceles of a triangle. Whereas I would say, I cut across the quad. Though why I would be taking a class there to begin with would be anyone’s guess. While they attend to their ablutions, I take care of my bathroom stuff. Or in one classic instance upon returning home from tenth grade, I walked up the stairs and into the foyer belching and describing my ablutions as, “God, I’ve gotta piss.” Only to find my fashionista mother sitting with a friend, both struck dumb by the vulgarity that had suddenly infiltated their charming visit. Just recently, I visited my folks. They are still the epitome of quiet and civilized. And, no longer a teen or in my twentie or even in my thirties and having definitely had my share of the rough and tumble life, I do take more appreciation in the lifestyle. Nevertheless, after a few weeks of hearing offhanded quotes from the various classic authors that I valiantly had tried to read but that damned Stephen King was always beckoning, watching my Mom reach not just Genius level in the NYT Spelling Bee but Queen Bee, and listening to my Dad espouse on the history of previous wars in the world as if he had just learned about them moments before, I was feeling a little drained. One of the ways my Dad likes to connect best, when he’s not researching…everything, is through music. Typically, he plays something amazing or poignant or both. This time he played Linda Ronstadt’s 1974 live Blue Bayou with the Eagles as her back-up band. We had seen her perform at the RI Civic Center around ’78, back when you could wave your lighter and people played keepaway with beach balls and no one died. My Mom and I stood behind him and watched this walk down memory lane. After, for the first time, this black sheep of the family asked to play something for them. So I typed in Robert Earl Keene’s Merry Christmas From the Family. Nothing like a redneck holiday that lacks all pretense to take the edge off. Minus the racism, ignorance, and alcoholism it definitely captures a part of me they absolutely cannot relate to, and one my Mom would just assume pretend does not exist. “Mom got drunk and Dad got drunk at our Christmas party.” They were real champs in the watching, as my Mom paled just a little and my Dad laughed and laughed and dropped his head in his hands. “Send somebody to the Quick-Pak store, we need some ice and an extension cord. A can of bean dip and some Diet-Rite, a box of tampons and some Marlboro Lights.” When it was over, I asked, “Too much?” “No,” my Dad said. “But it was enough.”