This July my husband's parents will celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary.  Though my husband is only three years older than myself, his parents are twenty years older than mine, children of the Depression, whereas mine are Baby Boomers with a vengence.  Dan is the youngest of five chldren, while I am the only spawn of a boy and girl barely out of high school when they had me.  Some of Dan's sisters are closer in age to my parents than they are to my age.  I think this may account in some way for the terrible terrible ideas they have come up with regarding this summer's family reunion at the beach.

The first problem is that they are Yankees.  I'm sorry, but they are.  This doesn't mean they are from New England, they are in fact from the great Midwest, but to a South Carolina born and bred belle like myself, they are Yankees.  When I first moved up North (as my family refers to all states past the Mason-Dixon), my father said, "Why do you want to go up there and live with all those Yankees?"  To me, my in-laws' leading Yankee characteristic is that they are all card-players.  I grew up Baptist, seriously Baptist, and cards is gambling, unless you are five and the game is Old Maid.  I don't play cards, I don't want to play cards, I've tried it and it bores me.  Why would I want to do math now that I'm not in school?  This is the first hell that awaits me this summer, the endless invitations to play cards.  And it might be different perhaps, if they also weren't all sharks and bad losers, but they are.  They can even fuck up a game of Scrabble.  My mother used to play Scrabble when she was a young Navy wife away from home for the first time, and she played with another young Navy wife in the afternoons over a nice glass of cheap white wine.  The game itself was mostly an excuse to get together with another woman and drink and complain about husbands.  My mother-in-law plays the same game of Scrabble over and over, scrabbling in fact for short words that give the most points, and even that might be OK except it's laborious, cheerless,  and without conversation, a game sucked dry of all sense of play.

You might think I don't like my mother-in-law after all that, but I do, she's a gem of a woman, whose most sterling quality is that she speaks her mind without any petty silent treatments and long-held resentments intefering with her self-expression.  I just don't like playing games with her. But the card-playing and vicious Scrabble gaming is as to nothing compared to the nightmare they are gearing up to make mealtime, and for me that is a much more serious matter.

I love the beach.  To me, that is a vacation, going to the beach, just about any beach, to sit on the beach and walk on the beach and play in the ocean and to sit reading English mystery novels under a bright striped umbrella.  Meals are supposed to be careless and easy, cereal and toast for breakfast, or a cup of tea on the porch, lunch is a ham and pimento cheese sandwich eaten in front of a Spanish soap opera and dinner is whatever sounds good, a salad, a pizza, another sandwich.  I'm not much of a cook at any time, but at the beach my idea of cooking dinner is watching my husband nuke a Chinet plate of nachos in the microwave.  So imagine my horror when Dan's sister called last night to "plan" the upcoming trip to the beach.

 Each night, they think one family should be responsible for planning and providing dinner.  First off, this just isn't fair.  My "family" is Dan and myself.  Two of Dan's sisters have five children apiece and the other two have two each.  Second of all, they are just not good cooks.  They just aren't, bless their hearts.  It's an oddity but a fact that I have never eaten a meal at Dan's parent's house that wasn't comprised wholly of leftovers.  I have nothing in particular against leftovers, but I have honestly never seen his mother start with a fresh anything -- even the pre-bagged salads are usually on their last legs, or worse, just starting to grow legs -- which of course begs the question, where the hell do all these leftovers come from?  What meals are they left over from?  And his sisters aren't much better; I don't see how they could be with all those kids, really.  Thank God my husband is one of the sanest people I have ever met, and his reponse to this crazy talk was, "We don't want anything to do with that bullshit."   Dan's sisters are fucking up.  Meals should not be planned at the beach.  When a kid comes along hungry, give it something not too junky and move on.  The adults can fend for themselves, go out, order in, fire up the grill for burgers and dogs.  Open a bag of chips, get some deli slaw, Jesus, you're at the beach, settle down.

So.  They also want to pool up for groceries, the staples, etc.  Dan's response to that was, "Well, you know, if somebody drinks my milk, I'll just have to cut their hands off."  What he really means is that he doesn't care, he'll just go buy more milk.  My husband's most endearing quality to me is that he is not stingy or cheap and that he would just as soon pick up the check as not.  In fact I have a good idea that most dinners will be provided by Dan, the supplies, the actual cooking, or grilling I should say, and all the margarita mixing.  Dan makes a wonderful margarita.  If you don't stand up before you finish your first, it will be some time before you can stand up again..  What we need to do is make sure everyone is so hammered with tequila that dinner just doesn't seem that important.  I think I'll tell Dan to make the Knock-You-Naked maragaritas we had at our last party.  That ought to do it.