Open Up, Eternal Lips, and Swallow Me

Quasi Daughter

When I was in high school my two best friends were sisters. They lived with their single mom and their grandmother who kept her Larks in an old-fashioned cigarette case, spoke with a Transatlantic accent, and wryly chastised us for not getting into more trouble. (FYI we got into plenty of it.)

Their dad was older than my parents by about ten years. He was very tall and funny, intellectual and iconoclastic. He reminded me of Alan Alda. When we were teenagers he lived 90 minutes north in a cabin without electricity in Woodstock, New York. It was a different world up there from the suburban one we three burners were growing up in; a free-spirited, mystical world with art and head shops and a Birkenstock store. I loved to visit Woodstock. I loved my friends’ dad. He called me his quasi-daughter, which is how I learned the word quasi.