illustration by artist calida (www.artistcalida.com)

My family is the real-life version of the Griswolds from National Lampoon’s. More space cadet than rocket scientist. The kind of people who are really good at getting in their own way.

You’ve seen us before. At the rest stop wondering how we drove 40 miles in the wrong direction. At the movies bragging about how we’re smarter than everyone else with our store-bought sodas and garbage bag full of homemade popcorn. Hours late to all the events we didn’t RSVP for.

So, several months ago, when I started suffering from chemo brain — short-term memory loss and a decline in cognitive abilities due to chemotherapy — I wasn’t sure whether the drugs were to blame or my Garcia genes. Let me provide a sketch of the patriarchs of our family for a little context.

My dad, Joe, has belt-attached holsters that sit on both hips. One is for his cell phone and the other is for his glasses. That in and of itself is pretty funny, because my dad wears his pants so high that his belt is typically above his belly button. But the real reason I bring this up is because he purchased the special holders to keep track of his phone and his specks, which he loses all the time. Invariably, though, one, if not both, of his hip-slung carrying cases winds up empty, and helping him retrace his steps goes something like this:

Joe: “Did you see where I put my glasses?”

Me: “Nope. Where did you have them last?”

Joe: “On my face.”

Those older ATMs, the ones where you insert your card in the machine, were a cruel joke for my dad. For some reason, he never caught on that the loud, methodical beeping at the end of the transaction was a reminder to grab your card. I can’t count how many times he’d go out to get money only to return with no card, cursing under his breath, because the machine sucked it up.

And it’s not just memory loss that gets the better of the Garcias. We have an uncanny knack for offending folks just by being ourselves, getting all the family gossip wrong, and landing in the most bizarre situations.

Take my uncle Tony, my dad’s younger brother. He’s gotten peed on by a Tiger, once choked a cab driver in Italy he thought was trying to cheat him, and is convinced that a rooster on the farm where he and my dad spent their summers as kids wanted to kill him.

This is the same uncle who wears a one-piece adult-size snowsuit indoors during winter because his historic home in Germantown, Pa., is too costly to heat. Get Joe and Tony together and forget about it.

When my cousin Calida and I moved to New York more than 10 years ago, our dads volunteered to drive the U-Haul. Why this was even allowed is beyond me.

this is exactly what my uncle's indoor snowsuit looks like