I Just Wanna Grill

I wrote about my brother Ben, so I thought it was only right to dedicate a blog post to my favorite sister (my middle brother will also be getting a blog post, do not worry)

My older sister Katherine was born in Oklahoma City to Osage Indians. For whatever reason (her parents were successful in Pawhuska), they decided to put her up for adoption. In part due to ICWA and Catholic services, much like Ben’s case, our family was allowed to adopt Katherine. I haven’t thought much about this, but unlike Ben who was named by his birth mother, Katherine’s adoptive mother (my biological mom) was the one who named Katherine – I don’t know the ramifications this has had on my sister, if any, but I feel as though it’s a fact that is not necessarily “happy”.

Katherine was extremely dark when she was a baby (I’m told and I’ve seen in photos; I wasn’t born yet). This makes sense given the fact that she is Osage (also a quarter Mexican), but as she aged her complexion lightened a lot. She also has bright, bright blue eyes, which doesn’t make her look any more ethnic. However, she has jet-black hair and is often misidentified as someone from the Middle East.

She is incredibly smart and is a total social butterfly. She has no problem making friends, a skill that all of her brothers envy.

She graduated from PA school this past year and is currently in PA school. She works at OU Children’s Hospital.

To sum things up, there’s not too much to say about her (she is my favorite sister (the joke is I only have one) and I would do anything for her). Oh, and the American Dream because she’s overcome the adoption and being my sister and everything (pardon the irreverence, but she would’ve wanted it this way (she’s not dead or anything)).

Every year, the dazzling gentlemen of Delta Tau Delta embark on their biggest party of the year; Delt Recon

Recon is a military (previously Vietnam War) themed party sanctioned by the national Delt chapter with all proceeds going to our local VA. Recon has received criticism in the past, mostly from non-affiliated students who have never and will never serve a day in their lives (my uncle was a Delt and he went on to serve in the Army – he never once criticized the party).

Recon happens every year. As I said, it is Delt’s biggest party of the year, and that is evidenced by the amount of time that goes into the planning of Recon. Months before, Delts start construction on massive towers reminiscent of some sort of military structure.

A couple of days before Recon, me and my 60-person pledge class made our way to an army surplus store in Oklahoma City to buy used fatigues that would act as our attire for the night (to be fair, why is anyone who is not a college kid buying fatigues? What do middle-aged men plan to do with Army paraphernalia? Sounds like a possible doomsday-er situation – weird).

We are all very glad to support our local VA, and I haven’t felt as patriotic as I did this night in a long time (won’t feel that way again until 2024 Olympics).

A true test of the American Dream.

A couple of weeks ago, we took on the elusive 9-9-9 challenge. Basically, for every inning of baseball you watch, you must eat a hotdog and drink a beer. The tie-in to the American Dream should be seeping through the screen right now.

First of all, the challenge is centered around America’s pastime – baseball. The Sooners are really good this year, so it was a real treat to watch them play. Not to toot my own horn, but I had the pleasure of playing with some of those guys in high school (Cade Horton, look him up). Baseball has been played in America for so long and is very much ingrained in our collective culture. Baseball is also a very multicultural sport, with people of all races and ethnicities playing in the major leagues.

The second part of the three-part challenge is the consumption of 9 hotdogs. I think hotdogs and baseball are inextricably linked, with hotdogs being a uniquely American food (there’s a brand of hotdogs called “ballpark”!). Putting down 9 hotdogs is honestly the hardest part of this challenge, there is no feeling like the bloat once you get 5 to 6 dogs down.

Lastly (and hopefully not inappropriately – as Dr. Mintler says, we’re all adults), to complete the trifecta, one must drink 9 beers in the allotted time. Beer obviously has its place in American culture like baseball and hotdogs.

The European mind cannot even begin to comprehend this thing that I am calling a challenge. If you ask someone from any other country to participate, their immediate response would be “Why?”. Ask an American, they will answer “How High?”.

My dog and nothing else.

My family and I adopted Sunny in the summer of 2022 from a local no-kill shelter (we have never and will never pay for an animal). He had previously been adopted and returned at least twice because apparently he was a bad boy. His previous owners had returned him because his playful nature was too much for their infant children.

If Sunny were a human, he would have great things to say about the American Dream. He started his life in a bit of turmoil, bouncing from shelter to shelter and just when he thought he had found his forever home, he was returned just for being his playful self. He never let that discourage him, however. During his second stint in shelter, he worked to better himself and he matured a lot. By the time I met him, he was determined to work hard to fit into a family setting.

We brought him home and he immediately fit right in. Serving time in the shelter definitely rehabilitated him.

While serving his time in the pen, he even worked on graduating from puppy school!

In all seriousness, I love my dog very much. He cannot speak, but I know I speak for him when I say that we live out our American Dream together.

I owe a lot to both of my parents. They, along with their parents, have taught me virtually everything I know. I was very fortunate to have both parents raise me for the entirety of my childhood. I might be biased, but I think my parents are the best on the face of the Earth. I am not sure how I am going to tie this blog post into the American Dream, but get ready for a lot of pictures 🙂

My dad was born in Norman in 1965 to a super country white guy named Thurman (Grandpa McPherson) and a Choctaw Indian named Linda (called Joyce, née Kennedy). He had a childhood that was interesting to me but was the reality for many Oklahomans of his time. He grew up a country boy on 7 acres, which was a lot at the time, especially for a family that came from humble origins. He enjoyed spending his time outdoors, finding any excuse to go fishing or hunting. One of my grandpa’s favorite stories concerns the time that my dad was riding his horse while on a hunting trip and the horse’s eventual upheaval of my dad, bucking the stocky, corn-fed, admittedly hoss clear off his back. He can never finish the story before he succumbs to a fit of laughter.

My dad excelled in school. He was a 4.0 student who worked hard for everything he had and also managed to find the time to be a very successful 2 sport athlete (he turned down a football scholarship to the University of Tulsa (DI) to study engineering at OU). Beginning his sophomore year of college, he got an internship with the Mobil Oil Corporation (before the merger with Exxon) and spent his summers in the extremely confusing town of Cortez, Colorado. It was in Colorado that he was able to refine his hunting and fishing skills, hunting for monster elk in the San Juans and catching trout in the Animas and McElmo Creek.

It was also in Colorado that he met my mother. There are two stories about how they first met. The first story claims that my dad was volunteering at the nursing home where my mom worked and somehow got locked in a bathroom; my mom came to the rescue after minutes of relentless knocking from my dad. The second story insists that they met at a jazzercize class (my dad’s words “If I’d have had big rocks in Cortez like the Romans and Greeks had, I wouldn’t have needed jazzercize”). I still don’t know which story my dad goes with.

My mother was born in California and raised in Cortez, Colorado. She was born in the 70s to some pretty stereotypical Californians (I don’t have the heart to call them hippies – I love them too much). My mom’s dad was an immigrant from the United Kingdom, who sought asylum after his neighborhood was destroyed by the German bombing campaign (an event that was so pivotal in everyone’s life that once they settled in California, nobody would eat German sausages or sauerkraut, and god forbid somebody ever considered getting a Doberman). I really can’t say much more about my mom’s mom other than she was a stereotypical Californian (pardon the redundancy).

My parents are living proof of the popular adage “opposites attract”. My dad was a somewhat conservative half-white-half-indian guy from central Oklahoma and grew up on a farm and my mom surely was (still is) an ultra-liberal who was at least born in a big city. Despite all of this, they managed to meet each other in a small town in the middle of the Colorado Plateau.

They would eventually move to Norman and raise me and my 3 siblings, and I am forever grateful for everything that they have done for me.

I am not sure how to articulate this story’s relation to the American Dream, but at least to me, it makes sense.

This past week, I had the amazing opportunity to attend a spring break trip to Miramar Beach, Florida with the distinguished gentleman of Delta Tau Delta. Throughout the entire trip, elements of the American Dream presented themselves, in some ways only a true American Dreamer like me could possibly pick up on.

Before we embarked on the 14 hour drive from Norman – me and three other buddies drove down together – we had to load up on anything we might need for the whole 6 day trip. As 19 year old college students, we obviously had questionable priorities, but looking back we fared okay for what we brought. For some reason, we decided to disembark at midnight, and that proved to be both the best and worst decision we made on spring break. We were dead tired when we pulled out of the Couch parking lot. Because we were making the trip in my marvelous and reliable 2014 Ford ™ F-150, I had the privilege of taking the first driving shift.

This is where the first element of the American Dream appeared; we were literally flying (I think the truck got airtime at least twice) down the highway blasting classic rock (callback to Joe Walsh). I couldn’t help but smile as I thought about the time we were about to have in Florida. The idea that us college students get a week off of school with pretty much the expressed purpose of hanging out, or even chilling perchance, is so uniquely American in my eyes, even though I’m almost positive spring break is not an exclusively American holiday.

As we took turns driving, each driver would play their own music over the radio. It was interesting to see the diverse nature of all of our music, especially in light of the fact that we are all very similar and belong to the same fraternity. We arrived in Florida 14 hours after we left Norman, and immediately hit the beach. Here is where I noticed the second element of the American Dream over spring break; the culture on the beach is intoxicating. Miramar Beach was a popular destination for fraternities and sororities this year. However, on the beach, it was as if everybody had signed a peace treaty for the entirety of break. There were no problems among fraternities at all, and as a matter of fact, we played a variety of different games with other fraternities. Once we got to Florida, all of our troubles seemed to go away, at least for the duration of the break. 

The best part about all of spring break was the fact that it was rinse and repeat for 6 whole days. We got to experience the best elements of the American Dream over and over and over again. That in and of itself exemplifies the American Dream.

This past week, I took an online autism test. Although I know that I don’t have autism, autism is still something that is very relevant to me and something that I know a lot a lot about. My brother was diagnosed with Aspergers (on the autism spectrum) when he was very young. For lack of a better term, he is very high-functioning and very intelligent, but autism has still impacted his life in many ways.

My eldest brother, Benjamin, was born in Muskogee, Oklahoma to Muscogee (some might know them as Creek) American Indian parents. Our biological parents adopted him through Catholic Adoption Agencies with the help of ICWA (Indian Child Welfare Act) which provided guidance to the state about my brother’s adoption and ensured that he was placed in the custody of another Native American (my dad — my mom too, although she is white) and that he would live with a Native American family (mine).

From an early age, it was apparent that Ben was different. Before he could even speak he had an obsession with trains and cars and by the time I was born and brought home from the hospital, Ben inquired to our mother, in some of his first words, “Where are his wheels?”.

When he started preschool, he had trouble sitting at his desk all day. He was always on the move, much to the disdain of his teacher, whom our grandmother has affectionately named “that ******* teacher”. It’s a tad bit scary to fathom the lengths our grandma is willing to go to protect us.

Ben, even still to this day, tends to go through phases that have lasted anywhere from 6 months to a couple of years, in which he and his personality become completely consumed by one pretty niche interest. As I mentioned earlier, Ben was obsessed with all things wheels when he was younger. He somehow managed to take the training wheels off of his bike when he was less than 2 years old and frightened our parents when they realized he had zipped away on his bike into the savage, unchartered neighborhood (the cul-de-sac across the street) — he was a true escape autist. Also, the memory of his toy train “derailing”, flying down the stairs, and smacking my uncle square in the head is a perennial favorite amongst the McPhersons. I can remember the springs and summers when Ben and my dad took storm-chasing classes at the National Weather Center and I was lucky enough to tag along on some “chases” (I think we can admit in retrospect, they had no idea what they were doing). The best part of this phase of Ben’s was the automatic trip to Tio’s Mexican restaurant after the storm had made its way out of the metro.

Ben has brought so much joy into our lives. We have so many “Ben stories” and any time we recount them, everyone laughs like they’ve never heard a joke before. A particular favorite of my mom’s is when Ben sincerely asked for an air guitar for Christmas. Once, my dad was consoling an admittedly minorly injured Ben and he asked Ben if there was anything he needed. Ben, seemingly no longer in pain from touching a hot pan, thought for a while and with a straight face replied “I need a child-sized skateboard”. None of us kids have ever skated before, and the difference between a normal skateboard and a child-sized skateboard is unknown to me, but it must’ve been high on Ben’s Christmas list that year.

Ben’s experience hasn’t been all positive, however. His autism has been a challenge that he is constantly overcoming, but he has always managed to come out on top. He doesn’t let his autism hold him bad and I find that admirable.

Ben is now 23 years old, and although he never attended college, he has a full-time job and spends his time doing all the things that he enjoys.