I had to ask my parents when the last time we were all on an airplane together was. From what we can remember, it was the summer after 8th grade when my parents, brother Caden, and I flew to Baltimore to vacation around the Northeast. In a week, we went to Baltimore, Washington DC, Annapolis, and New York City. Probably some other cities as well, but it’s been a while.
I’ve flown a few other times since with only my dad. Every summer until my sophomore year of college the two of us would fly out to Sacramento to visit my grandma and his siblings. It was always just my dad and I, and we would either go skiing in Tahoe or hike at Yosemite one day we were out there.
Since flying to California with my dad after my freshman year of high school, all other planes I’ve ridden have been completely by myself. The initial flight to Madrid, flying to different European cities while in Madrid, then back to the States, and my trip to and from New York City in the summer, all by myself. My mom always flies out to see me in whatever place I’m living in at the time, she calls me her destination. It’s been a while since we’ve flown to a third-party destination together.
I have developed a pretty sound routine when I fly by myself. I’m not the biggest fan of flying, any kind of turbulence or unexpected problems completely throw me off, so having a routine before and during official airtime is important. I get to the airport early, I do as many laps around the airport as possible to help my nervous energy, I go to the bathroom about 10 times in an hour. I’m a nervous pee-er. When there are assigned seats on the plane, I’m always the last to get on. I don’t like confined spaces and want to be in the plane for as short a period of time as possible. If there aren’t assigned seats, I try to be one of the first on the plane. I have pretty bad motion sickness from the remnants of my concussion a few years ago, and if I’m not able to look out the window at the ground below I get pretty queasy and the worst headache. I never talk to the people next to me. I’m polite if they speak to me, but I never initiate. I don’t like take-offs, I grip the armrests and put on noise canceling headphones to drown out the thoughts of me hurdling higher and higher into the air. I don’t need to try and hold a conversation with somebody as that is happening.
This week was different because I traveled out to Northern California with both of my parents. My dad’s whole family lives in Sacramento and my mom’s only younger brother, who turned 60 this week, lives in San Jose. My mom and four of her other siblings decided to fly out to celebrate. She has eight siblings.
Having other people with me while flying is completely different. Waiting for them to come through security, leading other people through the airport to the gate when my father insists we are going the wrong way despite signs being posted everywhere. Fielding questions of, “Are you okay?” as I tell my mom I’m going to the bathroom again.
I am also quite used to, by this point, getting on an airplane and having it drop me off in a city that is completely new to me, with nobody waiting for me at the arrival gate and nobody I know living in the city. It was odd when we departed the plane and I saw the familiar, large bunny hanging down in the Sacramento airport and we immediately took the rental car to my grandmother’s house where she hugged me and told me how grown up I looked.
My grandma is an interesting woman. Up until about five years ago she would still dress in her hot pink bikini to go swimming with us at my aunt’s house. She’s 91 years old and still lives alone, and is very content with it. When my dad’s sister mentions putting her into assisted living, my grandma will give her the silent treatment for a couple days. She still does all her own gardening work, which is a lot when you’re a Little Miss. Perfect like her. Just like her hair, makeup, and outfit, her grass, bushes, and flowers are always perfectly manicured. She loves the squirrels that come with keeping her trees and bushes alive. To the point in which she lures them into her house. She started out by setting food on the back porch for the squirrels to come up and eat so she could watch them from her recliner in the living room. Slowly she started moving the food closer and closer to the house, until she decided one day to put the food in the middle of the living room, leave the patio door open, and see which squirrels were brave enough to come inside for a snack. There were two squirrels that would always run inside, eat it, then run back outside. She only is friends with these two squirrels – one boy and one girl – any other squirrel that tries to come into her yard, she shoos them away. I asked her how she knows which squirrels are hers and she responded, “I just know.” Eventually the rats of the neighborhood started learning of her setting out the squirrel food, for an entire summer she struggled to keep the squirrels in and the rats out. When I visited last, she enlisted me to help catch a rat that wouldn’t leave her squirrel feeders alone. I found a trap in her garage and ended up catching the rat after much paranoia that he was watching me and would come after me in my sleep in an act of revenge for trying to catch him. My grandma always told me over the phone that when she caught the rats, she would take them down to the river park a few blocks down and let them go in the park, hoping it would be far enough away that they wouldn’t know how to return to her house. I ran inside to tell her I had caught her rat, and she hugged me so graciously. I took her outside to show her the rat, which was still in the cage near the side of her house next to the gardening supplies.
She said, “That’s so great Calihan, you need to stay around longer in case more decide to come. Time to bring the rat to the park now.”
Then she picked up the large shovel hanging on the wall with her perfect French tip nails, and without the gracious smile leaving her face, cut the rat’s head square off its body. I was modified! Maybe this was a rat, but it was still a living thing. I couldn’t believe that my sweet grandmother wearing pearl earrings, a pearl necklace and thousand dollar shoes on her feet had just unquestionably decapitated this rat, then used the shovel to pick up both parts of his body and throw him in the trashcan. I told my dad about it later and he laughed saying, “She grew up in Iowa, not California. She’s an Iowa farm girl at heart.”
When I was there the summer before I picked a college, she told me not to worry much about it. When she was 18 she decided to forgo college for a year to ride around Arizona on the back of her boyfriend’s motorcycle. This was the summer after I had just gotten back from living in Arizona, and I had to regretfully inform her that I did not meet a boyfriend with a motorcycle. A couple years later when I told her I was going to fashion school over the summer, she revealed extra lore about herself, that when she was in high school all she wanted to do was go to college to be a fashion designer. She learned how to sew when she was nine years old and would always wear custom made dresses to all of her friends’ birthday parties. When the parents complimented her dresses, they were always astonished to find out she had made them herself. Her parents didn’t let her go to design school in Chicago, but she did end up meeting my grandpa and continuing to make and mend clothes for many years later.
I couldn’t believe there was someone else in my family who was interested in fashion. I thought it was something I was alone in. After spending the past 10 days with family members, hearing stories about when they were little and attempting to speak with them about my future plans, though I have none, it became clear that when I look back through the generations that came before me, there isn’t really anything about my life that is random.
The morning after we flew into Sacramento to visit my father’s mother briefly, we drove to San Jose, where there were even more people that knew me and were welcoming me into the city. It felt strange to not have only myself to rely on. I felt like I was a high schooler and as I walked around the city with my parents, I became insecure that people probably thought I was far younger than I actually am, just because I was with my parents.
Halfway through the birthday dinner for my mother’s youngest brother, one of her older brothers turned to her, and therefore to me as I never stray very far away from her during family events, and said, “Mom would have loved that we all came together to celebrate her baby’s 60th birthday.”
The comment made my overly emotional mother start crying, and sent me skipping through the field in the little world inside my own head for quite a long time while robotically eating the pasta in front of me. I’m sure that when all of my uncles sitting around this table right now were my age, they could not fathom a time in their lives in which they would be turning 60 years old, and now they’re all celebrating their youngest sibling making it to that mile marker. My aunt pulls out some old photographs she brought from when my mom and her siblings were young and we pass them around. I hold onto the school picture of my mom for a bit longer, a professional photograph taken of her when she was probably in the fourth grade. I try to fathom how the little girl posing is the same woman who is sitting next to me at 61 years old, and how that little girl had no idea what to expect. The latter thought is not too hard to imagine. Although I’m not in fourth grade anymore, sometimes I feel like I should be, as I don’t feel old enough to start making those decisions about where my life will take me and I have absolutely no idea what to expect.
I also spent a lot of time during dinner thinking about my older brother, who did not come with us as he is still all the way across the world. My mom has eight siblings, my dad has two, and we only have each other. To be honest, I’m not sure if this fact helps or hurts our relationship with each other. You would expect that we would be closer since it is only us, I cannot understand how my mother knows every single one of her siblings in the manner that she does, but there are also no breaks from each other. There are no other people our age in the family to go to and ask, “Caden is the one being an idiot, right? It’s not me?” When we were young and would ask our parents this question after a fight, they would always respond the same way.
“I don’t know who is right or wrong, but it doesn’t really matter. It’s a silly argument, you guys just need to make up. You’ll be siblings for life, but the time you have actually together goes by too fast.”
Which, at the time, seemed like one of those rehearsed adult answers but now that I am some semblance of an adult, I realize that it’s true. In the greater scheme of our lives, we really only got to live together for a snap of it. The notion that I am the baby of our little family did not get away from me either. It has been a while since Caden and I have been able to spend either one of our birthdays together, and it makes me wonder where we will both be in 39 years when I turn 60. Will we be gathering, telling the possible spouses or children at the table with us how much our mother would have loved us getting together to celebrate her baby’s 60th birthday? I’ve already written 5,000 words on my older brother in the past 30 days, so I’ll refrain from writing even more and just state the obvious that he is constantly on my mind ever since he left.
I tried my best to sleep in late the morning after that dinner, because that’s far too many existential thoughts to have at a fancy Italian restaurant with a bunch of extended family I haven’t seen since I was 11 and I was tired.
After a late breakfast, we drove to another city in California to meet up with another one of mom’s brothers, his wife, their daughter, her husband, and their child. I had seen my cousin and her husband at dinner the night before, but my aunt and uncle couldn’t make it. We went over to their house for dinner and upon walking in, we had to sidestep a giant trunk that was sitting in the middle of the living room rug.
When my uncle saw me looking at it, he said, “I got that out of storage for you, open it.”
I opened it up to find three old medium and large format film cameras, one of which was a Graflex camera, and a whole envelope full of negatives and slides. All of which turned out to be my grandfather’s. When my uncle found out I’m a photographer, he had pulled the old gear out of storage so I could look at it. My dad and I spent the next hour playing with the cameras, both of which still worked, before my mom and I looked through all the photos. Our necks hurt the next morning from holding the negatives up to the light to see what the picture was. It made me want to throw them all in my backpack, drive back to my university, and spend two days straight in the darkroom developing all of them into real photos.
A majority of the slides in the envelope were wedding or honeymoon pictures from my grandfather and grandmother. When they got married, they asked one of their friends to be the photographer, and he shot the whole wedding before realizing there was no film in his camera. To compensate, he took posed and candid shots of them all dressed up the day before their honeymoon. While they were on their honeymoon, my grandfather used this camera, and a tripod, to take a slew of self portraits of the two of them at the Grand Canyon. Seeing a slide of them standing together at the rim of the canyon was an incredibly odd experience, as I felt like I recognized exactly where they were from my previous trips. I had probably stood in that exact same spot. I asked my mom and uncle why they decided to honeymoon at the Grand Canyon.
My uncle responded, “they were talking with one of their friends about where they should honeymoon, and the friend said he had a cabin in the Grand Canyon National Park and he would let them use it if they wanted to honeymoon there. They said ‘why not?’.”
I turned to my mom who was already looking at me, laughing, as she also saw the parallels to when I decided at the last minute to move to Phoenix my freshman year of college because my friend needed a roommate and I said, ‘why not?’
There were a couple other photos in the envelope that my grandfather hadn’t taken, but he was in. There was one of him with the owner of the camera store he had worked at when he was a teenager. He was wearing an army uniform but looked awfully young, and my uncle said that he had lied on his army registration and joined the force when he was only 17. He proceeded to train to be a SEAL during the end of WWII and was a medic in the Korean War. I also regularly lie about my age to get things I want, although I am not delusional enough to think that those two things are even remotely the same.
At dinner I talked more about photography with my cousin and her husband who are also both into photography and who follow my Instagram and like every single one of my stories that has to do with photography. My cousin also told me that, as a UI/UX designer, she’s working on creating her own website for a blog because she wants to write about her travels but also feels like she just has a lot to say about the world at large. I interrogated her so much on what she would write about that I’m surprised that she didn’t catch on that I was asking because I, too, have a blog in which I write about the world at large. As she talked, I pondered whether I should tell her about this website, but ultimately decided not to as I’m still not sure how I feel about anybody I know reading such intricate details about my life. I did write down the domain name for her website though and she promised to tell me when it was up and running. Maybe after reading a few of her posts I’ll feel more inclined to share my own.
After spending the first half of the week with my mother’s family we traveled back to Sacramento to spend the latter half of the week with my father’s family.
I have always felt like my mother’s daughter. I think part of that is because I see her side of the family more, as she has three siblings who live in the same city as us. My uncles on her side are also more communicative with me and regularly tell me how much I resemble my older cousins when they were my age. We are both also very type A while my father is the farthest thing from it, we both have had extensive eating problems, and we are both scrawny girls. However when I travel to Sacramento, I feel more like my father’s daughter. The way his family interacts makes more sense to my mind. I realize that all the times in which I felt displaced or out of it when with my mother and her family is really just the part of me that is more like my father. So all those pieces that don’t fit right into my mother’s family fit perfectly into my father’s. Traveling to Sacramento has helped us a great deal to bond, especially during my high school years in which he didn’t know what to do to help me and I didn’t want to have to tell him (mostly because I didn’t know myself).
Lately my grandmother has been really into asking, “Well are you happy?” whenever someone tells her a life update. It has just started in the past couple years and it still catches me off guard even though I should know it’s coming. It has made me realize that as I am analyzing everything about my life and a future job, I don’t regularly sit down and ask myself what would make me the happiest and I have come to the concerning realization in the past week that I have no idea what actually makes make me happy just in the act of doing. I know that I enjoy getting articles published in the newspaper, but does writing them make me happy? I try to apply this same logic to a future job and have the same difficulties. I have realized that the part that will make me happy is committing to a job, but I haven’t thought much past that on if the actual work or industry will make me happy. For some reason I think Grandma already knew this about me, because she always stares at me without speaking for an uncomfortably long time after I answer her question quickly with an enthusiastic “yes!”
She asked me lots about future jobs and what I actually want to do in the next couple years while I was at her house, but she has also asked me about my happiness in correlation with more menial, embarrassing things. “When did you cut your bangs? Do you think they look good on you? Do they make you happy?”
How am I supposed to respond to a question like that? It feels very passive aggressive. I have to reassure myself that my grandmother is a very strong-willed 91-year-old who doesn’t really care what anyone thinks of her anymore and therefore if she didn’t like my bangs, I am confident that she would just flat out tell me.
She also made a point of asking me if I currently have a boyfriend, or if I have had a boy in the years since I saw her last. I embarrassedly shake my head no, even though I’m really not that embarrassed about not having a boyfriend in college. I just know that she always had boys lining up around the block for her and if I’ve never had a boyfriend then maybe we aren’t so much alike after all. When she asked me about boyfriends and I responded ‘no’ without further explanation, my dad turned to her to explain that I just wasn’t really interested in dating during college. Except he said it in a peculiar way that made it seem like I was gay. I’m not a lesbian, and although there is nothing wrong with being a lesbian, my grandma might disagree with that sentiment. I don’t think she’s fully anti-gay but she is a bit judgmental when it comes to those kinds of things.
“Calihan’s not really interested in boys…” was all he could say before she quickly turned her head to me and I had to cut him off.
I explained I am indeed interested in boys, I just wasn’t too interested in dating them during college because I didn’t want to use my time to prioritize a relationship when there were so many other things I wanted to do. Grandma smiled and said, “I need to get something from my office,” and walked away.
I thought she was going to come back with a photo album and show me pictures of all her various, attractive, boyfriends from college. Maybe a picture or two of her on the back of their motorcycles wearing only a bikini. Instead, she brought me a document taken out of a book one of her cousins had written about our family heritage. This particular page was a life summary about my grandmother’s mother, Amelia. It was an interesting read, and once I got to the second to last paragraph I realized why my grandmother had brought it out to me after the conversation we just had. It read:
“[Amelia] commented that she hoped her grandchildren never married, because ‘you just become a man’s slave’. She felt she had to keep pushing her husband and that he didn’t appreciate all the work she did. She stated that he was much like his father. Amelia says she and his mother ‘both put up with lazy men’.”
This was followed by another paragraph which included a section on Amelia and her husband buying a car together:
“[Amelia’s] husband wasn’t anxious for Amelia to learn to drive when they purchased the new car but Amelia insisted the dealer teach her as a condition of the sale, and he did.”
There were other sentiments in the page that made me feel extremely close to this woman I had never heard of before, like how she left home at 20 without her parents approval and made it in the world by herself. When she moved into a home she did all the painting and varnishing herself. At 72 years old when her husband passed, she finally got the opportunity to travel and went to all 50 states and to Canada twice, usually via bus, usually alone.
When I finished reading my grandmother, with a smile on her lips and in her eyes, said, “You would have loved her, you two are a lot alike.”
Later that night I showed my own mom the letter, which she had read before at Amelia’s funeral. My mom seconded the claim that I would have loved Amelia, saying that she herself was always so fond of the woman.
It has become a quite often occurrence in which I feel like the odd one out in my day to day life. I tend to feel very different from the people around me, even when we seem very much the same on paper. Even during something so menial as a recreational softball game, my brain always finds an opportunity to point out some way in which I am different in comparison to my fellow teammates, which makes me seem somewhat offputting. Always thinking you’re different from everyone else can feel very isolating because sometimes, I start to believe that there really is nobody else like me out there among the eight billion in the world.
Reading these life summaries and talking to older relatives who tell me stories about my grandparents or great uncles doing the same things as me makes me feel like maybe I’m not that different from everyone else in the world. It seems that I’m incredibly similar to all these people who came before me, which I think might be a little bit more important than being similar to the people on my rec softball team.
Yours truly,
Calihan
Little Girl, Big World 
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