grass seed warehouses to break into, trains to hop

One week at home will include:

blackberry cobblers (multiple)
Me and my g'ma mae will pick the berries from the ditch across the street where they don't spray pesticides. We'll cook them at her house and eat one before it cools. Then we'll have another after dinner. i'm going to freeze two or three and see if I can get them home intact. I am taking my first -- ever! -- direct flight across the country, so they won't suffer a twelve hour delay in las vegas, or have to spend the night in st. louis, or a long confusing afternoon traversing the trams of the atlanta airport.

nephew obsession
I will stare at aj until my eyes cross, I will feed, burp, swing, clap at, and coo for him. I will fall asleep with him on my lap. I will make sure he knows, from now until he runs away at sixteen to live in the big city with me, who his favorite aunt is.

hold back no cookies
I'll tell the cookie story later, but I'm going to stay up late at my grandma's with my cousins, their kids, and my siblings. We are going to gossip about the family, we are going to talk about whose pregnant, who went to jail, who moved and to where. We are going to laugh until my aunt snorts and slaps her leg. We are going to make my grandma blush and say "well i never!" over and over again. We'll play dominoes and chew gumballs for 30 seconds each, and throw the excess into a bowl in the middle of the table.

swimming
I'm going to swim in a pool stranded in the middle of a field and in a river, muddy with summer harvest.

the awful beauty of field burning
I'm going to drive to the foot of the Cascades and turn my dad's truck back around. I am going to bring a cheap beer and mid-90s alternative rock for the CD player. I'm going to watch them set a field on fire and watch it light up the whole floor of the valley while all those sad Northwest boys croon into the radio.

lip sync reunion
so growing up our main summer vacation was a weekend in central oregon, at a place called sunriver, for a trial lawyers conference. My parents were alternately younger , but had older kids then everyone else. It was the four of us (the little came in the middle) then, plus a few of our friends, my cousins. . . let's just say that most of the lawyers attending the dinner on Saturday night did not arrive with twelve kids. When I was younger, I truly thought it was a grand ball. It was the fanciest thing I had ever been to, women wore dresses not made of cotton and there were waitresses and bus boys who wore cumberbuns and bow ties. The other adults (not my parents) sipped at cocktails and glasses of wine served from a bar at the back of the room. My siblings and I drank glass after glass of shirley temples, toothpicks loaded with cherries I didn't even eat, but liked to pluck the stems off.

Going back as an adult, I saw what it really was -- a chintzy conference dinner with a standard buffet and petty jealousies. I realize now how awkward my parents must have felt -- young, burdened by the rowdiest kids in the room, but they never showed it. Instead, we embraced our status and every year entered the lip sync contest under the auspicious name "The Tribe." This was something we took very seriously. My father never competed in the weeks other events -- the golf tournament, the swimming competition. Once he played in the softball game, but none of us went to watch. The lip sync was our bread and butter, it was our time to show all those hairless, bloated men with red faces, those Portland attorneys, those wives who glared at my mothers perm, her jeans, her brood -- what it was all about.

Our classic routines included Chuck Berry's "My Ding-a-Ling" in which we constructed a wall for the main protagonist to climb, a pond for him to swim through (chased by snapping teenage mutant ninja turtles), and distributed 300 small bells to every table in the joint. Bette Midler's rendition of "Ms. Otis Regrets" where my brother, our neighbor Jed and my cousin Jake all more black spandex dresses, wigs, and maid aprons. We did "I Love Rock n' Roll" and I wore leather pants and we had 13 year old boys crawl on all fours around the stage. We've done western, beach boys, disco. . .my whole family cavorting around with painted faces, blacked out teeth, with stage jitters and giggles. Like all forms of camp and drag, there was something resplendent about it, some way in which we were remade by our farce, by our pretending. Our own dysfunction -- usually highlighted during rehearsal the afternoon before -- fell flat in front of the murder, intrigue, sex, and betrayal of pop music. There we are, swing dancing around one another, grinning. I think lip sync is very close to what it means to love.

So this year is the first year I've been to this conference since early college. The location has changed -- my older siblings and I are all approaching thirty, there will be spouses, and now children, in tow. But we are all going to do a lip sync together. I am going to dance with my poppa, shake my hips next to my older sister, and watch my brother break out into a wide, sheepish grin. I am so excited. And we're taking requests.