It was a week ago, and I was at the Home Depot garden center, attempting to navigate the aisles pushing one of those flatbed carts while balancing the phone under my ear. I’d called Mama to ask for her advice about my flower beds. Not to diminish anything I’ve accomplished up to this point, but she made it pretty plain that this was the proudest moment of her life.
“Oh, Barbara,” Mama cried out to her sister. “Topher’s buying plants!”
Aunt Barbara let out a little whoop of approval and instantly suggested azaleas.
Our friend Leslie decided her life needed a little shaking up, so she’s moving to China for a year, where she will teach English to children. I’m not really clear on the logistics of this, as Leslie doesn’t speak Mandarin, but apparently there’s a successful system already in play.
My travel rule has always been that I never visit countries where I don’t speak the language, out of courtesy to the locals. But watching her plan her voyage to a mysterious foreign land is causing me to question that.
I can easily see her moving on from teaching her students English to showing them how to craft clever hair accessories and make really great Bloody Marys. Then the Emperor of China selects her as the tutor for all his children, and they fall in love and sing “Shall We Dance?” and then we would visit her at the palace.
At some point in every relationship, you have to learn how to fight. The stereotype is that women talk about feelings and men talk about issues, but I don’t think that’s true. In a guy-girl pairing, that just means she’ll talk about the feelings she has about the issues, and he’ll talk about the issues he has resulting from his feelings, so ta-da, now everybody’s on a level playing field.
In our house, I’m the one who likes to discuss how I feel about things, because I think feelings are fascinating, and also because they’re handy when you’re totally in the wrong. If you can’t argue based on fact, you can always argue based on feeling. Because a feeling is never wrong. And I prefer never being wrong.
But discussing the minutiae of your relationship can be a bit like describing individual blades of grass — while each is a marvel of creation, no doubt worthy of close examination, you could exhaust yourself with the task for months without covering much ground. After you’ve settled into a life with someone, you tend to look at the whole yard and determine whether it’s time to do some serious work, or if you can wait ‘til the weekend. Or maybe the weekend after that.
Jesus and I celebrate our birthdays 12 days apart, which bugged the heck out of me as a child. My sister’s birthday hit in September, unfettered by other distractions. Me, not so much.
I got presents wrapped in Christmas paper. There’d be a card attached that read, “Merry Christmas and Happy Birthday,” which would have been fine if it was a car or something, but a Magic 8 Ball simply cannot be called two gifts. And then, around age 10, my mother got the bright idea to combine my birthday party with my friend Alex, because his birthday was at the beginning of the month, and “everyone gets so busy around the holidays.”
It was hard enough being the opening act for Jesus. Now I’d been demoted to playing on a double-bill. I felt like an aging cabaret star, slowly losing all the choice timeslots. I hadn’t even hit puberty, and I was already turning into a late-career Ann Jillian. “Who’s Ann Jillian?” you ask, proving my point.
Four years ago this week, Preppy and I closed on our house. Two days later, someone broke in, trashed the place, and made off with a good portion of our electronics.
At the time, we blamed hooligans, but seeing as we never had trouble with the criminal element in the years that followed, I have decided that the real culprit was probably our 60 year-old schizophrenic neighbor, Crazypants. She was just trying to scare us off, like an old coot on Scooby Doo trying to make everybody think the amusement park is haunted.
We were still a little shaken from the experience the following week, so I decided we needed an event on which to focus that would give us happy home memories as quickly as possible. I announced we would be hosting an Old Fashioned Thanksgiving.
Topher Payne recounts hosting his first Thanksgiving dinner in his new home
Going through an old box of keepsakes last week, I found a card from my grandmother I received at boarding school. She’d enclosed an Ann Landers clipping with advice on how to make friends. She’d circled “Be confident, but humble.” I’m still working on it.
Grandmama was an Ask Ann junkie. For the uninitiated, Ann Landers was a helmet-haired syndicated columnist who dished out advice for half a century. She was opinionated, socially progressive, and not shy about taboo subjects.
The avocado-colored refrigerator in Grandmama’s kitchen always had clippings from “Ask Ann,” sometimes with a paragraph circled for quick reference. This was the 1980s equivalent of sharing on your Facebook wall.
I was a prissy little fat kid in a small Mississippi town, whose only defense against the hostility of my peers was a premature flair with cutting remarks. Consequently, I spent a good portion of my childhood learning to embrace the pleasure of my own company.
This is how I ended up spending entire summers at the county library, curled up in the stacks, reading books not intended for children. The children’s section was of no interest to me. Even at age nine, the precocious adventures of Ramona Quimby felt cloying and contrived, and the Narnia series seemed ripped off from stories I’d already heard in Sunday School.
When I wasn’t clear on what exactly was happening in a book, I would cross-reference in the World Book Encyclopedia, which led to an inconsistent but shockingly detailed knowledge base on subjects like menstruation, spousal abuse, and thanks to “Flowers in the Attic,” arsenic and incest.
The in-laws came to town for the opening of my play – we’ve all discovered that getting together for theatrical events is way more fun than weddings and funerals — and the next night, we took in a very different kind of production: The Stone Mountain Lasershow Spectacular… in Mountainvision!
Okay, y’all. Seriously. Do you have any idea how many people go to this thing? There were more people there than at the last Scissor Sisters concert I attended. I tried to focus on the laser-rendered narratives of “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” and “Sweet Home Alabama,” but my attention kept drifting to the people around me. Particularly when laser Martin Luther King appeared on the side of the mountain, and the man behind us booed.
He actually booed Laser MLK. Preppy shot me Look #32: “I am begging you not to use this as an opportunity to cause a scene.” Out of respect for him, the family, and the dignity Laser MLK would likely have supported, I maintained my composure.
“There are just so many questions I have about this show,” I tell Preppy as we sit on the sofa, absorbing the latest episode of “The A-List: New York.” I can’t really say any of us are watching it, as Preppy and I are both catching up on work, and Daisy has her red ball, which really demands her full attention.
“The A-List: New York” is simply the thing that happens after “Rupaul’s Drag U,” in much the same way as poots happen after eating beans. It’s mildly offensive, but you accept it as part of the process.
“You’re not going to ruin this for me, Topher,” says Preppy. “The A-List is not supposed to inspire questions. Just let it go.”