I spent the 4th of July with my family this year. Went up to stay with my grandparents in Olympia, Washington, also meeting up with my father, mother, and sister.

The 4th of July, for those of you non-Americans out there who might not know, is a very important American holiday during which we Americans celebrate our right to annoy our neighbors and possibly set their roofs on fire with illegal fireworks acquired at Indian reservations, just like our forefathers did.

Because we aren't the most patriotic people on the planet, we decided to leave the neighbors alone this year. We agreed to burn a few of their houses down next year to make up for it, but this, we agreed, was the year to take it easy.

This was to be a family affair.

My grandfather has always been a closet doctor, prescribing aspirin to friends and family for various ailments, and giving enemas to the dog when nobody else needed any medical attention. He loves the equipment, the procedures, and the jargon. When he's checking somebody's blood sugar, he has a great big smile on his face. Friends and relatives might be a little uneasy around him, and neighborhood dogs who don't feel the need to be that regular might quake under the bed at his approach, but he's a good guy, and he's found something that makes him happy, which is great. I honestly wish that I could find happiness as easily as inserting a tube into the anus of a golden retriever and then flushing the contents of its bowels with warm water. If you can be happy about that, then you can probably be happy about anything. The world is your oyster (and you can give that an enema, too).

But enough about enemas.

Somehow, yesterday's casual afternoon conversation consisting of strange political conspiracy theories gave way to a discussion of my father's weight. He's not exactly obese, but he has a few extra pounds that aren't doing him any favors. It was suggested that his blood pressure might be a tad on the high side, but he brushed it off. He doesn't like to talk medicine, and did his best to avoid the subject. Having watched his childhood pet dogs regularly walk with a slightly odd limp, you can't really blame the guy. Unfortunately for him, my sister's interest was piqued, and she immediately wanted her blood pressure taken. My mom soon joined in, and before we knew it, my grandfather was in the room with his blood pressure monitor, smiling, and rolling up our sleeves (fortunately, he had left the enema kit behind).

My mom was the first to get tested. Her blood pressure was 108/80 with a pulse of 82. We all nodded to each other, a sort of implied golf clap, silently appreciating her pretty decent score. Next up was my grandmother, but her rating is her business. Then came my sister, who scored 132/80 with a pulse of 72. Not bad, but not as good as it could have been for her age. I knew I was going to show her up when it was my turn, and I did. With a score of 108/63 and a pulse of 81, I might have been a little high in the heart rate department, but I kicked her ass where pressure was concerned. She may have high school and college diplomas, but they didn't save her from the serious whooping that befell her following the blood pressure machine's pronouncement that I had won the round.

That's when the weirdness of the situation arrived at my mental doorstep like a severed head without an explanation note. Time slowed, the pitch of all sounds dropped about an octave, and I could see individual specks of dust suspended in the air, their weightless ballet entering intermission. This must have only lasted a few seconds, but it felt like an eternity. It was one of those "Ah-ha!" moments that you have when some strange aspect of your life comes into stark, terrifying focus for the first time.

I imagined what other families might have been doing at the time. I pictured generations of cheery relatives huddled together in the family room, making macaroni pictures and playing charades. "What am I, what am I?" one of them would be saying to the others while hopping around the room. "You're a bunny rabbit!" a perceptive child would respond. Everybody would laugh, and mom would come out with another round of good, wholesome Kool-Aid. They would then compare their macaroni pictures while developing fruit-punch moustaches and hugging each other among the childlike music of giggle fits.

Instead, I was sitting in a room with five other people who had recently entered a competition over whose vascular system had degraded the most over time. In place of macaroni pictures, we were making mental notes of the systolic and diastolic figures mentioned for the others, much the same way you might try to count cards during a poker game. It was perfectly obvious that we were going to be checking blood pressure periodically through the night and that a running score would be kept. It would be useful information to have later for when I decided to tell my sister that, although we were only a little less than two years apart in age, she was much more likely to die of a massive heart attack in her middle age, while I was probably going to live to be about three-hundred years old, and that I would probably only give up running in marathons sometime around 2180. I'd go on to tell her that I wasn't going to die of anything health related. I mean, how could I with such stellar blood pressure? No. Rather, it was just a matter of time before I got hit by an asteroid or something. That would be my end.

It should hardly come as a surprise, though, that this was how my family chose to while away the hours.

I learned several years ago that my grandfather had purchased a plot for himself in a cemetery decades before he had even the slightest hint of health problems. I asked him why, and he only told me, "Because it was cheaper that way." My grandmother, who was also in the room at the time, turned to me and added, "And he would have used a coupon to buy it if he could have."

My father has a high morbidity quotient, too.

When he was six years old, as my grandfather tells it, he had a habit of lying on the floor of the kitchen with a newspaper and the phone book. This went on for quite a while, but raised little curiosity on the part of other family members. The family was large enough, and busy enough, that they didn't really have time to wonder about the strange activities of my father and his disproportionately large head, propped up by his disproportionately long arms, on the floor of the kitchen over the two publications.

Weeks later, my grandfather finally stopped to examine the process in detail. It turns out that my father had been going through the obituaries in the newspaper, finding all of the people who had died, and then crossing them out of the phone book.

And that pretty much settles it: compared to the males who have preceded me in the genetic line of which I constitute a part, I'm a mere amateur in the world of morbidity. Where I sip the skim milk of the Grim Reaper's own dairy farm, they quaff the cream.

What they don't know, though, is that I still have a few tricks up my sleeve. My game winning blood pressure scores were made possible by Cardene, the blood pressure lowering medicine that's been giving me so much trouble, and which I'll be on for another week or so. If I were in the Olympics, the use of such medication might be the equivalent of doping up with breast-inducing steroids that would help me set world pole-vault records. But this isn't the Olympics, and there wasn't a drug screen, and I got away with it. So, while they may have perfected the art of an interest in things of the dead, I've managed to compensate by not playing by the rules.

But that's OK. I cheat at Monopoly, too.