Amelia Earhart

Last night at dinner my dad was telling the Butcher’s girlfriend about how my dad had counseled my friend E. to either marry my friend J. or break up with her so that she could get on with her life–over ice cream. My mom kind of rolled her eyes. She did not believe my dad and E. had some secret bro-friendship where they ate ice cream and talked about marriage that my mom didn’t know about.

I was pretty sure that it wasn’t true, either, because I thought it was supposed to be a parable for my brother’s sake. My dad wants him to shit or get off the toilet.

But I suppose there’s the third option where my dad does think this happened.

Years ago, like when I was in college, my dad told me that my great-grandmother (last name Fisher) had gone to high school with Amelia Earhart, had a locker next to her, and hadn’t liked her and, in fact, one time punched her for not being “feminine.” Which I thought was a weird story because everything else about my great-grandmother that I know involves her finding ways to do her own thing, fuck the haters, so why wouldn’t she like another woman that was like “fuck the haters, I’m going to figure out how to do this thing?”

But I liked this story because it was kind of funny and reminded me that otherwise great people can have some boneheaded ideas and miss the greatness in their midst and be assholes.

The last time my parents were in town, I mentioned this story and my dad flat out denied he ever told me it. He even laughed and said what I said here–that my great-grandmother might not have been friends with Earhart, but that Earhart was the kind of person she would not have had problems with.

And it kind of shook me. Did I just make up this story and then come to believe it? Something like the Shazam/Kazaam thing?

But I feel like I kind of know me, right? And I sure as fuck did not know independently of him telling me that Amelia Earhart ever went to my great-grandma’s high school. I also rarely wear make-up and can’t get my act together very often to act “feminine” other than to the extent that I naturally seem that way, so why would I want a story in which “my side” gave comeuppance to the person not properly enacting femininity? My dad is the one with the hang-ups on people playing their proper gender roles.

Plus, if I wasn’t told this story, if I somehow discovered that Amelia Earhart also went to Hyde Park High School on my own, I would have known that my grandmother graduated three or four years before Earhart went there. They weren’t the same age. Their lockers never would have been next to each other. They weren’t there at the same time.

But he flat out denied ever telling me that and I felt kind of crazy about it. And then I saw him telling this elaborate story and I checked with E. and he said it never happened and I felt a tiny bit vindicated.