Mythbustin' Midwesterners

Imagine a head-on collision of Wild Kingdom, the Three Stooges, Meet the Press, and Ted Mac’s Amateur Hour. That’s my family. I always thought of my upbringing as perfectly normal until, as a young adult in the age of Homage to Dysfuntion, I realized how extraordinary my family was. Now, of course, I know there are no normal families. So when folks not familiar with the region muse that Midwesterners are all Leave-It-To-Beaver milktoast, I say, oh contrare.

My family, for example, is a bohemian blend of Bohemians—Czech on Dad’s side, English and French on Mom’s. Mom grew up in Omaha, where she worked as a medical assistant for my doctor-uncle for 35 years and, divorced when her youngest kid was five, raised us pretty much single-handedly, often while holding down an additional part-time job or two. She’s in her early 70’s now and lives in Vermillion, where her newest passion is performing at—and winning—poetry slam competitions.

My brothers and I grew up in a 17-room house (a family home that had been my great-great and my great-grandparents’ hotel) in Omaha, with Mom and our stay-at-home grandma—the aforementioned Presbyterian Pragmatist. In the pre-seatbelt days, Mom kept us from pummeling each other on car trips by forcing us to sing “White Coral Bells” and “All Things Shall Perish” in rounds. To this day, whenever I get in a moving vehicle, I break into song.

My oldest brother is the family’s suave intellectual, tanned South American Host-with-the-Most, and professed atheist (delightful fodder for lively family debates, which we all adore). He lives in Central America, where he’s a web editor and climbs trees with his cat (pictured, no small feat at 6’5” and 54 years old). He’s a graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, plays guitar and sings in an acoustic duo (pictured), and he’s fairly blasé about jetting off to meetings in Ireland, Paris, Ecuador, etc. We don’t get to see him enough.

At 52, I’m the tree-hugging, tofu-eating panentheist of the bunch (pictured contemplating the nitrogen needs of timothy grass). I teach composition, literature, and creative writing to college undergrads. I’m quadrilingual—I can say “Hey baby, give me a kiss” in Czech, “We’re Americans and we want to dance” in Russian, and “Louise has a little cold” in Spanish. I herd peacocks. I’m a partner in a small business that makes anatomical jewelry – www.sacredbody.com and our stuff has been given away as prizes on Public Radio’s What’D’Ya Know show and made the brunt of jokes on The Tonight Show. I write poetry, I played rhythm guitar in a folksy rock band for a decade, and I sometimes get to be the chick singer in Ray’s band (Ray’s a brilliant drummer).

My younger brother (no pics...privacy concerns) is 50 this year and the most conservative (fiscally, at least) of the bunch. We call him the family Republican, but in spite of cracks about Hillary’s bluster or Daschle’s hair, we're pretty sure he secretly votes Dem. He's an ace network specialist. He’s also the family’s computer geek and financial go-to guy, which we desperately need, since most of us are completely flaky about such things. He would do absolutely anything for family, and he’s one of those guys who really does know something about everything, compared to the rest of us, who just talk like we do. He played in a band for a while, too.

My youngest brother is the sensitive, suffering artist of the family – www.joetheartist.com – living in Texas. He’s 45, has a couple of art degrees, and teaches college art classes. Peace & contentment give him the heebie-jeebies, he loves stirring up family chatter by sending cryptic emails, and he’s an extremely gifted & generous artist who makes his own and commissioned art (check the picture of him under his park gateway - those are pottery & copper birdhouses on top of the cement posts, the arch is iron). He’s currently teaching himself banjo and guitar.

Everybody knows milktoast is only good if you’re recovering from flu. Instead, toss jungle vines, granola, a safety deposit box, books of poems, a crossbow, broken guitar strings and a box of crayons in a pot, and you'll get our hearty family stew. And hey, a little grit in the stew makes for a strong constitution.