Fat & Drunk: Prologue

Fat & Drunk is a serial essay-based memoir by Andrea Lien. To read the full entries, become a paid subscriber at remappingmyself.substack.com.

Prologue

The last time I was in this place, I’d been cleaning up my father’s blood. I’m in our family cabin near Brainerd, Minnesota. It’s been my refuge my whole life. It’s also a holder of history.

Our family cabin is a place where life happens. Though I’ve moved many times, after my parents’ many moves, this building has been a constant. Built by my great grandparents in the 1950s, it is shared between their descendants in what could be the only peaceful sharing of a family cabin in the history of cabins. We are all so fortunate. Three family branches have split the time by thirds for decades, from Thursday to Thursday, spring to fall. The only expenses are for upkeep and taxes. It is my inheritance. And I’ve joked that it’s my dowry...you just have to share it with dozens of other people.

If this were a preview for a television or streaming show, we’d see a little white structure on little hill in Minnesota set on the edge of the woods on a white sand-ringed lake. While sped-up people walk in and out of it with luggage, fishing gear, swim floaties, groceries, and dogs, we’d see the building get a coat of white paint that has stayed to this day. We’d watch it expand once with the addition of a porch and indoor bathroom, once with a new deck, and once with a boardwalk and steps down to the beach. Other than that, it gets a new green roof, a ramp for accessibility, and then a few structures are built around it. Those buildings are major parts of other family members’ stories, not so much mine, though I appreciate them.

The people in the preview, though, change in all the ways that people generally do. We get older, bigger, smaller, and less able. We change our clothing, our sizes, our companions. There are more of us, there are fewer of us. Each time the sped-up footage shows a winter that covers the cabin in snow, it’s followed by a group of family members opening up the building, putting out the dock, getting the boat lift into the water, and eventually putting the pontoon on the lift. Some years, the people repair and clean up the damage wrought by winter when the lake has turned to ice and then pushed at the sandy shore. Such shoreline damage is nothing compared to what the summer storms can do, though.

Then, just like that, the cabin does its job and hosts us as a temporary home for the summer before the sped-up people reverse the process and button the whole thing up again.

I have loved this little building my whole life which, at 49 years old, is the longest relationship I’ve had, short of family members. I guess it is a family member. It’s where I want my ashes to be sprinkled when I die. Let me be specific: Dump my ashes in the marsh out back, not in the lake. Nobody needs to swim in my cremains.

In the preview, there’s a lot of busy-ness at the cabin, but we don’t see what’s happening inside. We see what we can, what’s visible, but we have no access to what’s going on in that little building. So, like this project that I’m calling a serialized memoir, I’m going to invite you inside. Not much of it will involve the cabin because not much of the cabin even involves the cabin. It’s about the people, the relationships, the world it exists in.

We’ll zoom in on me, my family, my life. Somewhere in the late 1970s, I’m carried into the cabin as a baby by my parents. For years, they brought me...then I brought them. Then I only brought my dad. At this point, though, he’s tagged out of the trips. It’s just too much for his routine-reliant brain to handle since the onset of vascular dementia.

Now, as I’m looking around for traces of blood that we might not have gotten out of the carpet, I remember the scene from last fall. His last trip here. It was dramatic. It was even more dramatic than when he sliced himself on the propeller of the boat’s motor while swimming past it. Then, knowing he tends to faint at the sight of his own blood, I only had to worry about him seeing red and going under the water. I draped his arm in a bath towel, got him to my Tiguan, and took him to the urgent care in Baxter. Mom stayed with my first dog, Grendel, at the cabin. It was just easier this way, which is a prevalent theme in my life.

This time, at least a decade later, Dad was bleeding because he fainted before even seeing his own blood. He just did it. He turned too quickly as he was talking to me and sometimes that’s all it takes. Down he went like a felled tree. Such a thud in such a hollow and small structure. His face landed on the coffee cup he was holding in his hand. His lips were both cut in half—a continuous gash split each lip on the perpendicular. The gore was incredible. And the number of first responders who showed up on a holiday weekend was impressive. Also remarkable was our dog Griffin’s instinct to stay out of the way (and the blood) while my partner, Dan, and I recounted what happened to the EMTs. It was a surprisingly peaceful scene. Something that could have been painted by Michelangelo. Or Cassius Marcellus Coolidge.