** Won't you please share the joy of WYFP by recommending?
WYFP is our community's Saturday evening gathering to talk about our problems, empathize with one another, and perhaps share advice. Everyone and all sorts of troubles are welcome. May we find peace and healing here. :-)
My aunt Martha and her new husband (well, of two years now) John were in Milwaukee this past weekend for the National Rifle Association Annual Meeting, and they swung through Madison on Monday to visit me and do tourist things. My mom, who had met John before, assured me he was a nice man, though she seemed a little baffled her most liberal sister had wound up with him.
We met up on the State Street steps of the Wisconsin Capitol Building. John was a big smiling bearded guy in a polo shirt with a 1993 NRA Annual Meeting logo embroidered on it. Martha was her easygoing cheery self, some years older and a little heavier than the last time I'd seen her. And I'm a 27 year old pacifist vegetarian political progressive. The sun was shining, the temperature was ideal, and--actually we got along famously.
I asked over lunch how the convention had been, and John focused on the human elements, lots of good middle Americans with their kids, meeting up with friends--it was very nice, he said. I said that did sound very nice and related it to my experience of sci-fi conventions (same thing, different weirdos, right? well, sort of?). Martha made some generally positive noises, though later she did grumble something under her breath about the NRA.
After that we joined a tour of the State Capitol Building, which is totally gorgeous and really impressed John as the nicest he had seen aside from the National Capitol. Martha is a UU and she next suggested the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Unitarian Meeting House, so we went and got in their SUV, featuring a prominent American flag and a big Bush sticker. Martha fiddled with the digital video cam in the back seat, quietly replaying what was obviously an NRA keynote, and John said with a kind of stern fearfulness, "Martha-- Martha--" and she turned it off.
The Unitarian Meeting House was pretty cool, we made a donation and a church member gave us a tour. After that we went to Henry Vilas Zoo, which is free, but this was half an hour before closing time so they were shutting down for the night. So, we went and had some good frozen custard.
Over dinner (not custard; we went to a German resturant in Middleton), we talked about family and our lives. John asked me why I loved Madison and one of the reasons I gave, a little shyly, was my progressive politics. Now, I am not ordinarily shy about this, but since this Bush-voting NRA member is family I did not want any politics to come between us. And when I looked up, he actually looked genuinely touched to see that I had accepted him when my contrary views were important to me. I took them to buy fancy cheese at Brennan's (this is Wisconsin, tourists must buy cheese), and when they dropped me back at my apartment (and met Earl) and I hugged them goodbye, it was with particular affection and gratitude between John and I. I think he was even more relieved and happy than I was that there could be peace between us.
So... this is not an effing problem, except in the sense that I do actually have an effing problem with the NRA, but more a suggestion that it's possible to get along with relatives as people rather than as political platforms.
How about you? What's your effing problem?