A Dysfunctional Aspen Thanksgiving
“His voice sucks!” Thumper announced, breaking the spell I was under as we drove up to Aspen for the Aspen Valley Ski & Snowboard Club’s annual fundraiser, when the community gets to ski Aspen Mountain the day before it officially opens. Spoiled? Us? Nahhh!
Daring to scan the radio for something other than Nicki Minaj, I landed on Jim Morrison singing “Riders on the Storm.” I was transported back (as I’m known to be) to my college dorm room, procrastinating on my studies while staring up at my poster of Morrison in his aviator sunglasses, wishing I were the cigarette dangling from his beautiful, slightly parted lips. My twelve-year-old, with his inexperienced ear, zoomed me back to the planet I took off from by reaching his toes to the dial and changing the station back to the same old 100.5 Radio Free Aspen.
With my two older sisters, their five kids and my mother all in town for Thanksgiving and Winternationals in Aspen, I had been reverting to my youth quite a bit since they arrived.
The second my oldest sister, Melanie, walked through my door, I wanted to stick my thumb back in my mouth and follow her around like I did when we were little. That’s the thing about family: as soon as everyone reconvenes, we all slip back into behavior patterns based on our birth order. According to the birth-order profiles I read, as the youngest child I tend to behave like an only child, feel like everyone else is bigger and more capable, expect others to make decisions and take responsibility, and either remain “the baby” forever or become the speeder who overtakes her older siblings.
Wow. That’s tough to accept, but oh so true. On the lighter side, growing up I always accepted my sisters’ dares, which usually meant doing extremely stupid things for entertainment, like eating cookies that looked like dog food (which actually were dog food) or overflowing the kitty litter in the back of the Wagoneer when a sister (Michele) refused to pull over for a pit stop. I did whatever they challenged me to do, just for a good laugh, and nothing has changed. When we’re all together, especially with my mother here, we go back to being the tight-knit family we were as kids: impenetrable, ready for any adventure and prepared to laugh.
But family holidays bring dysfunctional dips that threaten to turn happy holiday highs into maniacal, melancholy lows. We didn’t anticipate that Michele would be taken down hard by back pain, that one of the children would throw up her Thanksgiving dinner from a nut allergy, or that Baddy would find his forty-something wife running up the country road in a rage over harsh words hurled somewhere between the mashed potatoes and the Brussels sprouts.
It’s all good in the end, right? We wouldn’t be who we are without a little family dysfunction and brutal honesty to keep our feet on the ground. So we got over it, and when Melanie, who has been invited to be on a reality TV show, found out Cowboy Mouth was playing a free show at the base of Aspen Mountain before the fireworks, she was all over it. The Aspen Daily News had raved about the band’s Tasmanian Devil of a lead singer and drummer and his talent for whipping a crowd into a frenzy. How could we miss it?
Before the concert, we got a pain prescription for Michele and raced our kids down the mountain on fresh corduroy between watching the world’s fastest women compete on the World Cup course.
Then we drank hot cider and layered up for the evening festivities. Arriving slightly late for Cowboy Mouth, Melanie, who loves fur (with the live animal still in it), beautiful clothes (without fur), dysfunctional men and rock stars, ran straight to the front of the crowd. I was going to hang back with my mother, but when I turned around to find her, she too had left me to meander to the front for a better view. Soon we were all up there, kids, husbands and sisters, bopping up and down as Cowboy Mouth belted out magnificent tunes under the stars, steam pouring from our nostrils in the cold night air.
That night, with Wade banished to the bed in the basement, Melanie and I cuddled up in bed together and revisited the funny stories of the day, like Tucker singing “Hey Jew” at the top of his lungs and refusing to believe the Beatles song is called “Hey Jude.”
We looked back sadly on all the changes in our lives lately and sighed big sighs. Then we looked at each other, rubbed noses and realized it was all good, because we had each other and our families, and we would always have our youth, as long as we kept playing together!
