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How to Deal with In-Laws on Holidays ~ My father-in-law was a short guy named Billy, the kind of guy you'd describe as some sort of particularly affecting male animal — a badger sometimes, other times a rooster. Not William, or Bill. Billy. A traveling salesman for a company that manufactured the architecture that hangs over gas pumps. The guy knew every crossroad in Tennessee and Kentucky. He favored the thoughtless uniform of American maleness — golf shirt, khakis, dark blue socks, and non-lacing shoes he had saved a little money on. He gained and lost weight in a single eight-pound increment, so he always either had the extra weight or had just dropped it. I never would have described him as fat, nor was he skinny.

 

First time I met him he told a racist joke. Normally this would have led me to walk away, to call the guy a prick, and be done with him. But I was in his house, at the wild fringe of a Nashville subdivision, waiting out the brisket in his smoker on the Fourth of July. I wasn't much to brag on either, a bartender, who drove an old Volvo with no air-conditioning which my own father had given me in a pinch. I had a lousy haircut. And worse, I was trying to romance his daughter. I knew even then I'd marry her someday. So I quickly discovered the essential axiom of life with the in-laws: There is nowhere to go. You cannot walk away.

 

So I would hang with Billy. The lousy patterned pants, the dopey British hats, the big shiftless Cadillacs he prowled around in, the manner in which he'd toss an open supermarket freezer looking for the cheapest cut of whatever he was grilling, his sometimes petulant silences. I knew I would see both of my in-laws at holidays for the foreseeable future. I needed some rules for getting through intensely proximate Christmases, the dinner checks ungrabbed, clumsy political proddings over Thanksgiving turkey, breakfast plates of salty bacon the next morning, and the endless, repetitive jokes about Mr. Winces, the Titanic, and Bill Clinton's cigars. Somehow I came to really like the guy, because I had my rules.

 

1) Open your ears. This is pretty confounding, literally. It simply means listen whether you're listening or not. Hang tough with the jokes, the catchphrases, the stories. Let the in-law have the stage. Never show boredom. At best, you'll learn a little something about business, running PVC plumbing, Tyrone Power. At worst, you'll learn how to think of yourself as an actor playing the part of a lithium-dosed weekend inpatient on the ward.

 

2) Develop a routine. Ask about it the minute you arrive, or right after they cross the threshold of your home. Find something that always needs to be done — daily (a trip to the supermarket, the hardware store), or seasonally (the hunting of suitable pumpkins, the hanging of storm windows). Develop a mutual history in routine, one that tricks them into a sense that you've known each other longer than you actually have.

 

3) Find a good present and give it every time. When I finally could afford it, I gave Billy a golf hat every time I saw him. This became a collection he didn't mind showing people. Later I went with a dozen decent golf balls. He had his patterns, too. For a while he tried to give me ornate beer steins, which did not in any way become a collection for me. I tossed each and every one. Eventually, he got the idea. After that, he just started paying for our rounds of golf.

 

4) Retreat. Billy used to cook brisket on the smoker all day, every holiday. He did this just outside the door of his basement garage. I spent many summer afternoons watching that inscrutable cylinder from one of his lawn chairs, listening to tree frogs or whatever they were. I treated it like a job, like a young sailor put on watch, which kept me out of the ebb and flow of senior-citizen eccentricity.

 

5) Drink the beer you are given, without complaint. They gave it to you, after all.

 

6) Don't argue. I once had a tai chi teacher I liked enough to ask how the silent, slow form-changing done in the light of dawn could relate to a martial art. He told me that sometimes the best move was the one where you stepped away and let the opponent miss. Whatever. But the truth is, I learned that if I never resisted stupid political declarations, I heard fewer and fewer of them. Don't engage. Don't go blow-for-blow, in anything. In-laws are not your office buddies. I never gave them any shit.

 

7) Don't teach. Keep your "knowledge" to yourself. Your in-laws are older than you. If they don't know more, they should know better. If they haven't learned it by the time they get to you, then there is no hope.

 

8) Work. Insert air-conditioner window units. Rake the front yard. Make life easier for them, which will keep you out of the flow, cut down on the meaningless chatter, and make you a sort of hero.

 

9) When you are bored, or angry: read. The act looks self-possessed, and grants space. Here's the trick: take a book from their shelves. They will back off. Every adult respects an interest in books they love. It promises the possibility that you will somehow think they were right about something.

 

10) Don't whine about visiting. You have to. I never, not once, felt completely at home in my in-laws' house. I didn't like their aqua carpets, their Brady Bunch kitchen, the compensatory projection of their oversized deck, not the hauntingly empty basement. But I learned not to complain. It wasn't that hard. Everything with in-laws comes in passing: their oddness, their tics, their collections, their prejudices, and their high regard. Remind yourself: These two people made that person you love. Remember: It is truly temporary. And this: People die, divorces occur, years pass. Only one thing is certain: Some day all of it will be a story.