“Where is Joe?”

Jill asked me this question as I was downing my Hungry Howie’s Sausage Pizza in the Detroit Airport. She wanted me to get the cheese one like she did but I have a weakness for sausage pizza even when she says it looks like rabbit pellets. I told her I was fine with poop pizza. My stomach can’t be fooled with fecal associations.

After looking at her blankly for a long 10 seconds I said, “I am not answering your question.”
She looked at me as if I had just responded in Portuguese. It was a look I am somewhat familiar with. After a short time of staring at me in bewilderment she finally looked as if she understood my Portuguese response. She remembered that I don’t respond to any questions about Joe.

Not responding to questions about Joe is a rule I learned growing up just like the one about taking my dirty dishes to the sink. There were times I would forget and leave the kitchen a mess but someone was always there to remind me of the rule until I just did it out of habit. The first few times someone in my family asked me about Joe, I would respond with a “Joe who?” which was always followed with the swift, humbling consequences of such a folly. It wasn’t long before I had learned my lesson and, out of habit, would never answer a question about Joe again.

Jill did not grow up in the same family (for which I am grateful on a number of levels). She was asking about a guy named Joe that we met in the Boston airport a few hours before our pizza feast in Detroit. He was headed back home from New England to Nashville like we were. Jill and I were sitting there waiting for the plane when he walked up and said that he knew who we were. I had actually met him less than a year ago at Union University in Jackson, TN. He is a recruiter for the school and had spent the last few days at college fairs in the Northeast. He sat down with us and chatted for a bit until we boarded the plane and he went to his seat 20 rows behind us.

It was an honest question. She was wondering if I had seen him in the gate area for the Nashville flight. I hadn’t. I could have stated that fact but my habitual non-response to questions about Joe (or Sue for that matter – which traditionally brought about the same joke but in Spanish) took over. When I realized that she wasn’t trying to trick me I started thinking about the huge differences in how the two of us were raised.

In many ways our childhoods were very much alike. We were both taught to respect our parents and other people. We were always told that we were special and could be whatever we wanted to be. We were both expected to get good grades in school – and did (with the exception of my 1st semester in college). We never had reason to doubt that we were loved. If life IS a highway like Tom Cochran said it was in his one hit wonder song, Jill and I spent most of our lives on that same road growing up. Occasionally, though, I would take an alternate loop around the city.

While Jill was learning through a consistent life routine that you can always trust your family, I was learning never to ask my dad how long it would take to get from one destination to another. If it was a few miles away he would inevitably insist it would take hours. If it was hours away he would say it was right around the block. This practice extended to just about any question of little consequence that was posed to my father and eventually any of my family members.

To be fair, I really didn’t mind that little detour whenever we took it. In fact, that is one aspect of my family that I am strangely proud of. No one could accuse us of taking anything too seriously. It became like a game of “slug bug”. When you spend all your carpool time looking for Volkswagen Beetles you develop a keen awareness of how to spot the next one. It got to the point where I was not only catching myself before lobbing a question out for my dad or brothers to slam back at me, but I was actually on the lookout for the lobs that they would innocently send my way. Years of this training helped to make me the sarcastic man that I am.

In contrast, sarcasm was never on the menu at Jill’s family dinners. When she asked questions, she actually got the correct answer. This might explain her first encounter with my dad not long after we started dating in college. After taking my advice and refusing a “breath mint” from my father which was actually a chili piquin pepper (one of the hottest peppers out there) they got into a conversation about politics which really caught Jill’s attention because she was an avid watcher of shows like Meet The Press and Hardball with Chris Matthews. My dad works in politics and started telling Jill an inside story about a certain female politician who had a face lift and made a pair of boots with the left over skin they removed from her neck. Jill was dumbfounded. She responded with something like, “I didn’t know they could do that.” No sarcasm. I quickly told her it wasn’t true before my dad started getting creative with other pieces of clothing made from other parts of the body.

Sitting there in Detroit with a personal pizza box on my lap I realized that while Jill’s natural tendency was to take someone at their word, mine was more of a guilty until proven innocent approach. For example, if someone said “Nice guitar solo” after a show I would immediately assume that they were joking whether they were being earnest or not. My response would be along those lines with a “yeah, whatever.” I think this fact about myself prompts the people I know well to just feed me what I am expecting. Whenever I tell my pastor that I am playing a show in town he will usually say something like “why would I want to waste my time listening to crappy music.” If Jill was the one extending the invitation his response would be more along the lines of “I would love to come if I can.”

I can remember a friend of mine telling me that one of the things that annoyed him about his father was the way his dad would instinctively frame his beer belly with his hands when communicating an idea. He would say something like, “I think we should go get some Chinese tonight” while using his stomach as a resting spot for his weary limbs. Even worse to my friend was the realization that he made the same pose whenever suggesting a night out for dinner with his wife.

Similarly, once I got married I found myself exasperating Jill in the same way my dad exasperated me. I started to answer her questions with an exaggeration in whichever direction that would cause her the most stress, anxiety or anger. If she asks me what I am watching on TV, I usually go into some elaborate story about Nancy McKeon in a made for TV movie about women who are forced to wear shoes two sizes too small. If she calls to check in on the kids when I am watching them, I usually act like I accidentally lost one of them. I also occasionally ask her questions about Joe.

“Did you talk to Joe today?” “Does Joe know that we are going to be late?” “Sorry I am late. I was over at Joe’s house.” “Where does Joe live again?” “Joe said that we should definitely watch Gymkata.”

It took a while for Jill to stop asking “Joe who?” around me and my family. It was kind of like shock treatment for a lab rat. She would go to that water feeder thinking it was a water feeder only to get a cruel dose of electricity. Eventually she stopped going there to drink. She even tried on occasion to trick us into drinking from it. In the end, I had successfully turned a trusting and kind subject into a skeptical and conniving one. Job well done? Only Joe knows.

Joe mama.