Miracles Are More Than Meatballs 
By Ro Reddick 

They say that at some point in your thirties, you will fall from a hole in your own hastily constructed happiness into a pit of despair and impaired short term memory. The only way out is to climb, one heart crushing loss and forgotten name at a time, up the other side. This will take you several decades. They say it’s really fucking hard and every day will feel like Christmas at home with the family.

When we meet Winona Everett, in Bailey Williams’s beautifully devastating and hilarious play The Family Dog, she is in the pit. She is a thirty-eight year old poet and adjunct professor visiting her conservative family for the holidays. In truth, Winona is home because the dog her parents bought to “replace” her, Johnny, is about to be put down and she hopes that sharing in her family’s grief will somehow bring her closer to the people she cannot understand. She’s not the only Everett struggling with the shit storm of life. Her brother Nickel is living in the basement. He has a gambling problem, the debt to prove it, and a father to enable him. Her little brother Fran is also living at home and working (for free!) at a troubled company. And her little sister Jillian is about to sell everything she owns and join a religious community in Wyoming. All of this has their poor, put upon mother, Tina, wading waist deep in a pool of Zinfandel, or whatever crisp white is selling well at the Whole Foods on Alameda. 

“Am I alone here? Am I doing this all alone? In a house full of people am I the only one who cares if we eat? When my mother was my age, we sat her down in a chair and let her peel potatoes so she would feel useful! WHEN WILL MY DAUGHTERS HAND ME THE POTATO?” 

On paper, the Everetts are nothing like my family, but their dynamic feels familiar. The exasperation, contested histories, wild framing of events, disdain for feminism, and unbridled disappointment with the reality of what the family is versus the dream of what they could be lives inside (nearly) every family on the planet. Note: If you are one of those annoying people with a perfect family, with healthy dynamics that support and affirm each member, you can stop reading now. However, if you’re a normal person, this play is for us. (Finally a play for us!) I don’t know about you, but it is the exact play that I needed at this moment. It feels like it’s being projected on the wall of my pit, so that I can have the pleasure of saying, “Yes! Exactly! I’m not the crazy one! You see?” I’m not religious, but I think the play is also warming my cold dead heart through its embrace of miracles. They abound in this play. Johnny’s tumor is not in his stomach, but beside it – watch as he eats 9 meatballs! Count them! And Tom Quattro in a parking lot with his coworker Susan, whose dead daughter is saying hello through the sudden arrival of a flock of pigeons. A greeting that realigns his understanding of his own existence. 

“And Susan says, you know that feeling Tom, when you’re thinking about your life kinda casual and you remember something specific, like crawling into your bed when the whole house is asleep and the way your sheets smelled? And how long summer felt and falling asleep on Christmas Eve and driving in a car with all your friends and you remember your mom cooking in the next room?… And you remember that whole soup of it and how you can call it up, no problem, and that jolt you get when you remember how it will never happen again, how it is all well and truly gone? It’s not true. It’s not gone. It’s happening all the time. It’s happening right now.”

Miracles are more than meatballs, they’re the little memories that assert themselves in technicolor, reminding you of a moment, a person, or a version of yourself that you thought you’d lost. Time has a funny way about it, and if you know how to slow it down, it’s revelatory. 

JOHNNY
I hope you can hold onto it, Tom. 

TOM QUATTRO
Time feels really good. 

JOHNNY
Slow. 

TOM QUATTRO
It’s moving like time ought to move. 

JOHNNY
Time, taking its time. 

One of the most moving parts of the show for me is watching Tom struggle to share his realization with his family. It was so easy to tell Johnny, but his efforts with the family are buried under a change in subject here, an argument there. Why is it so hard to articulate the most profound aspects of life to the people we know best? Why are families so hard? Why is Christmas so hard? 

Last year, my wife and I spent Christmas with her extended family. Like the Everetts, we were gathering around loss. My father in-law had died in February and my mother-in-law passed on Thanksgiving. We spent the holiday in their home, surrounded by their things, making her mom’s famous cookies, and finishing the Christmas shopping she’d started before she left us. This year, we are skipping Christmas… at home. Instead we are heading to Austria with the five cousins least likely to start an argument, where we’ll listen to Mozart and sing from The Sound of Music in Salzburg, (🎶 How do you solve a problem like mortality? 🎶). We’ll waltz and eat sausages in a Viennese Christmas market. We will not quarrel. We will not die.

Death is both a horror and a simple fact. Johnny shows us the simple fact of it with his precise presentation of the scent and manner of death for each member of the Everett clan.

“Tina Everett, 88, goes in her sleep. Olive oil and sea salt, antiseptic, gardenia and warm honey. And the smell, the smell of all her children always, all mixed together inside of her.”

We watch as Johnny calls their names, one-by-one, and they plop on the couch, greeting each new family member as they sit, Hey sweetie. Hey dad. Their shoulders drop and they relax into the fact of their demise.

The horror of death comes in the anticipation. Winona expresses this perfectly on a call with her wife Laura. She’s at the end of her rope with everyone in the house, but also keenly aware of how precious little time there is left for them to be frustrated with each other.

“I see her face and panic. I want to stop it and I want to get it over with because living in this long runway before she dies is torture. I’m never gonna figure out how to be with my mom, am I?”

This is the central experience of the pit. You know enough about loss and time to understand how essential it is to “figure out how to be with” the people you can’t figure out how to be with. You find relief in their absence, but the idea of their loss is utterly incomprehensible. The Family Dog reflects this experience back to you, but it also reminds you that there’s quite a lot of beauty in the devastation of life. Your pit is actually tiled in a mosaic of grief and wonder and small surprises.

The other day my wife and I were walking home and at our gate we saw one of the prayer cards from my mother-in-law’s funeral. It wasn’t there when we left, but somehow her face is staring back up at us not two feet from the front step. My wife said, it must have gotten mixed up in the recycling and found its way here. Gretchen in technicolor, stopping by to say hello.