Grave Digging is Hungry Work
I have a morbid sort of fascination with birthdays. And I don’t mean that in the narcissistic, party-hat way. I, too, look down awkwardly when subjected to the birthday song. I mean that in a one-step-closer-to-death way. There’s a ripeness to birthdays like they always happen at 4:30 in the afternoon, in that fuzzy place where the day has slipped by and there’s still so much to do but it’s nearly happy hour.
That’s why a few years ago I decided I needed to clear the air. We went to Oklahoma for my birthday. I was curious about my hometown, which is weird to say and feels marbley in my mouth. “I’m from Oklahoma.”
Travelling, for me, is a bit of a neurotic exercise, and one of my healthier outlets for it. It’s not enough to have just an itinerary - the FOMO that’s collected in my heart has settled at the bottom like sediment, clouding everything up when I’m given a strong shake. I worry I’ll miss out on something, so even the shortest of trips are meticulously planned. Food is a big part of that list, too. Large chunks of my early life were very food-restricted, and I plan on spending the rest of my life making up for being a hungry kid.
So, we went to the heart of the Bible belt to do a little grave digging, fully expecting to subsist on prepackaged supermarket veggie trays with the ranch thrown out. One of the problems with being a food-obsessed vegan is that pickings can be slim in certain regions, particularly in an area known for chicken-fried steak. I was doubtful I’d find quality options that did not include ashy carrot sticks. No matter, I wasn’t there to eat, I was there to meet.
About six years earlier I had discovered some biological family, still situated in Oklahoma City. Four years after, I nearly tripped over a biological brother via an ancestry message board. It always felt like eventually, I’d get around to going to my birthplace, and 35 seemed good as time as any. I wanted to meet my aunt (having met my brother a couple of years earlier). I wanted to see the kind of place I might have been raised in had things not happened the way they happened. It was like that was the thing to do, like 35 was the official mark between adulting and adulthood. Of course, that idea is completely arbitrary and I do take responsibility for it. Doesn’t make it any less true for me.
I numbly stood in the lobby of the maternity ward of the hospital ward with its oddly recognizable smell and later ate vegan chicken-and-waffle cupcakes with maple frosting. I had a hipster sandwich for dinner with my biological brother and aunt in the up-and-coming Pearl District of Tulsa. We sat a windowpane apart from Jamie Lee Curtis in a converted house with roosters running loose, forking tofu scramble, and planning our stroll through OKC. We propped ourselves up in a bar in a town so small it was the only bar, across from a Walmart, sipping their top-shelf option (Guinness, for perspective), and bought the only other patron there a double Jack and Coke. He had just returned from Afghanistan the night before to find his wife with another man. Crazy Mandy would be meeting up with him later, and he had his dancing boots on. Every morning started with work because we still had a business to run.
So that’s how it goes in this life for me, and this site (as of this writing) will follow suit. Trying to suss out the “right” starting point is like going around your elbow to get to your asshole (a handy phrase from my time peddling perfume that stuck, you’re welcome to it). This story, repurposed from a different article I wrote a while back, is where we start. Work and travel, which I’m over-simplifying occasionally poking around the nether regions of my own past. And all of it is plied with food. After all, grave digging is hungry work.
