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The Man with the Alabaster Heart
By Aaron Michaels
My boyfriend, Milton, comes from one of those families. You know, the ones with a room in the house that no one ever actually uses for any particular purpose except maybe to impress the Queen if she happens to make a quick stop in town and needs to use the bathroom in some random stranger's house.
I'm not sure what Milton's mom expected the Queen to be more impressed by--the fact that all the furniture in the unused room had crystal clear plastic slipcovers, or the fact that the entire room was done up in various shades of white.
Before Milton took me home to meet his parents for the first time, I didn't even know that white came in shades. I'm a simple country boy from a family with four kids, two dogs, a succession of hamsters and parakeets, and one very confused cat. We were lucky when our furniture stayed in one piece for more than a few months at a time. Between the cat hair, dog hair, traipsed-in dirt and mud, and bits of munchies that didn't quite make the mouths of the neighborhood kids sprawled across the living room furniture watching TV--if anything in our house had started out white, it didn't stay white for long. I don't remember my mom being terribly upset about it.
It's a wonder Milton didn't run screaming for the hills the first time I brought him home.
Somehow we've survived our varied backgrounds. We've been together for nearly ten years now. Milton calls me his "significant other." I call him "stud muffin." Okay, I only call him that in bed, but I've never been comfortable being politically correct, so I forego "significant other" and simply refer to him as my boyfriend whenever we're not doing politically incorrect things to each other behind closed doors.
So imagine my surprise when Milton casually mentioned that his Great Uncle Sherman would be attending his family's Easter celebration. I never knew Milton had a great uncle.
"I didn't know you had a Great Uncle Sherman," I said.
Milton, who bears more than a passing resemblance to that guy who plays the Sheriff on The Walking Dead , only in Milton's case replace the uniform and shotgun with a cute little bowtie and a pocket protector, scrunched up his nose. "I never mentioned him?"
"I think I would have remembered. In fact, I think you would have made sure I remembered."
The first time I went to one of Milton's family gatherings, he quizzed me on the names of all his various family members and their rather odd histories. While he had two younger sisters (Suzanne and Clarice), one older half-sister (Dory) from a marriage I was never to mention to his mother, one aunt (Mildred, for whom Milton was apparently named), three cousins (Patrick, Summer, and Fern; Patrick was also from a marriage Not To Be Mentioned), an uncle (Roy, who was married to Mildred and drank more beer than anyone I'd ever met), and far too many nieces, nephews, and once-removeds to remember, I was quite sure no one had ever mentioned a Great Uncle Sherman.
"Is he the black sheep of the family?" I asked.
Milton and I were sitting at our kitchen table, dying Easter eggs. We'd never actually dyed eggs before, but his mother had emailed Milton a list of things for us to bring to the shindig. Milton had boiled two dozen eggs according to his mother's written instructions, and now we were dunking cooled eggs into various pots of dye that made our entire apartment smell like salt and vinegar potato chips.
Or at least I was dunking. Milton had snapped on clear latex gloves and was holding his egg half-suspended in a pot of yellow dye.
I arched my eyebrows at him.
"Plaid," he said. "This is how you make a plaid egg. My father used to do all our eggs this way when we were kids." He lifted the egg out of the pot, blotted it gently with a paper towel, turned it slightly sideways, and lowered it halfway into the green pot.
"Huh," I said. At this rate we'd be here all night. Or Milton would be here all night. I'd
The Man with the Alabaster Heart
By Aaron Michaels
My boyfriend, Milton, comes from one of those families. You know, the ones with a room in the house that no one ever actually uses for any particular purpose except maybe to impress the Queen if she happens to make a quick stop in town and needs to use the bathroom in some random stranger's house.
I'm not sure what Milton's mom expected the Queen to be more impressed by--the fact that all the furniture in the unused room had crystal clear plastic slipcovers, or the fact that the entire room was done up in various shades of white.
Before Milton took me home to meet his parents for the first time, I didn't even know that white came in shades. I'm a simple country boy from a family with four kids, two dogs, a succession of hamsters and parakeets, and one very confused cat. We were lucky when our furniture stayed in one piece for more than a few months at a time. Between the cat hair, dog hair, traipsed-in dirt and mud, and bits of munchies that didn't quite make the mouths of the neighborhood kids sprawled across the living room furniture watching TV--if anything in our house had started out white, it didn't stay white for long. I don't remember my mom being terribly upset about it.
It's a wonder Milton didn't run screaming for the hills the first time I brought him home.
Somehow we've survived our varied backgrounds. We've been together for nearly ten years now. Milton calls me his "significant other." I call him "stud muffin." Okay, I only call him that in bed, but I've never been comfortable being politically correct, so I forego "significant other" and simply refer to him as my boyfriend whenever we're not doing politically incorrect things to each other behind closed doors.
So imagine my surprise when Milton casually mentioned that his Great Uncle Sherman would be attending his family's Easter celebration. I never knew Milton had a great uncle.
"I didn't know you had a Great Uncle Sherman," I said.
Milton, who bears more than a passing resemblance to that guy who plays the Sheriff on The Walking Dead , only in Milton's case replace the uniform and shotgun with a cute little bowtie and a pocket protector, scrunched up his nose. "I never mentioned him?"
"I think I would have remembered. In fact, I think you would have made sure I remembered."
The first time I went to one of Milton's family gatherings, he quizzed me on the names of all his various family members and their rather odd histories. While he had two younger sisters (Suzanne and Clarice), one older half-sister (Dory) from a marriage I was never to mention to his mother, one aunt (Mildred, for whom Milton was apparently named), three cousins (Patrick, Summer, and Fern; Patrick was also from a marriage Not To Be Mentioned), an uncle (Roy, who was married to Mildred and drank more beer than anyone I'd ever met), and far too many nieces, nephews, and once-removeds to remember, I was quite sure no one had ever mentioned a Great Uncle Sherman.
"Is he the black sheep of the family?" I asked.
Milton and I were sitting at our kitchen table, dying Easter eggs. We'd never actually dyed eggs before, but his mother had emailed Milton a list of things for us to bring to the shindig. Milton had boiled two dozen eggs according to his mother's written instructions, and now we were dunking cooled eggs into various pots of dye that made our entire apartment smell like salt and vinegar potato chips.
Or at least I was dunking. Milton had snapped on clear latex gloves and was holding his egg half-suspended in a pot of yellow dye.
I arched my eyebrows at him.
"Plaid," he said. "This is how you make a plaid egg. My father used to do all our eggs this way when we were kids." He lifted the egg out of the pot, blotted it gently with a paper towel, turned it slightly sideways, and lowered it halfway into the green pot.
"Huh," I said. At this rate we'd be here all night. Or Milton would be here all night. I'd
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