God loves a trickster

Gemini Full Moon Deep Dive

“I’m here to yooo-google-ize my mother.”

This was the opening line of my Uncle Jim’s eulogy at my grandmother’s funeral. Conventional? No. Hilarious and inappropriate? Yes. Every one of us that was close to her understood that she would have loved the hooked-on-phonics-themed joke, so we laughed and relaxed while the rest of the room got visibly uptight and uncomfortable.

Which, for the record, my grandmother would have really loved.

My uncle then went on a poetic riff about the eucharist and wine in a Catholic Mass- i.e. “I am the body and the blood”- using this religious ritual as a metaphor for my grandmother’s love of different foods that she would eat on particular occasions with particular grandchildren. I got the unique honor of being the sushi grandchild, credited for expanding my grandmother’s palette to include raw fish. I know. It’s weird, but it’s also awesome. And certainly no one expected this kind of performance art at a funeral.

The eulogy was genuinely brilliant. Like, could have been published in the New Yorker brilliant. It was the kind of content that only a talented writer with a poetic, disruptive spirit can produce, particularly when one considers how he navigated the palpable grief of having just lost his mother.

Why so serious?

While I wasn’t ever particularly close to either of my parents, I was close with their siblings and my extended family. My Uncle Jim, in particular, embodied the trickster energy permeating our family gatherings. On Halloween, he would light a giant tinder pile on fire, don a joker mask, and leap over the flames before taking young children on a golf cart ride to visit his parents’ gravestones just a few yards away through the woods. Of course, he would tell them ghost stories and scare the shit out of them, using his own deceased parents’ graves as a tool of hilarious Halloween mischief. We would stand around the fire, smiling and waiting to hear the inevitable screams of the children running back.

My uncle was a master at practical jokes, Monty Python references at fancy dinners, moonings and rally caps and ding dong ditches and whoopie cushions. I believe the British refer to all of these collectively as “taking the piss”, a truly great phrase for a truly wonderful kind of humor.

And, while much of this might paint the picture of an overgrown frat boy, that’s not who my uncle was. In fact, earlier in his life, he was a professor of Medieval Literature at Loyola University Chicago. He specialized in Chaucer and Shakespeare and Beowulf, and loved more modern literature like that of Bukowski and Vonnegut. He was brilliant and verbal and relentlessly intellectually curious. He was my first foray into how smart people can still love seemingly dumb shit, like his passionate embrace of the Ace Ventura and Austin Powers movies.

He used to call me when I was in college and leave voice mails inspired by Silence of the Lambs, whispering, “It puts the lotion on the skin or it gets the hose again.”

If you know, you know;)

Gemini Full Moon

And, this past week, my uncle passed away.

As I’ve been reflecting on his life and how he influenced me, I also started reflecting on the parallels with the energy of this coming month’s Gemini Full Moon on December 7th. Gemini is ruled by the planet Mercury, named after the penultimate Greek God of trickster energy. Mercury, also known as Hermes, embodies all of the classic trickster deity attributes: verbal dexterity, magic, communication, writing, poetry, pranks, mischief, invention, knowledge, innovation, comedy, subversion, and laughter.