Family Reunion

John Family Reunion, 2018

My Dad's family hosts a reunion every summer. He was one of nine, eight of them boys, all of them had children For some years now, the duty for hosting rotates among the families - this year's event was this past weekend. I try to get up there every other year or so - I enjoy spending a few hours with my cousins and catching up a bit on their lives. It's a long drive for just a few hours, but I always find it was worth it.

For me, the hardest part is trying to make my way around the room to talk to everyone in the short time allotted for the reunion. Everyone gathers just before noon, and by three, they're packing up the leftovers and getting ready to head on home. There were over fifty people there this time. Once you take out the time needed to overfill your stomach eating the potluck lunch (I don't know who brought the baked beans, but they were to die for!), there's just not enough time to get around the room.

It's funny. I haven't spent much time at all with my cousins as an adult, but it turns out that if you know someone as they're growing up, they don't really change that much as grown-ups. Nancy still has that quirk to her smile, the twinkle in Mark's eye hasn't changed a bit.

The reunions are smaller these days; our children are grown with children of their own, and most of them don't want to make time to go sit around with a bunch of old people they don't know just so their parents can point to them with pride, and say, 'that one's mine'.  (There WERE a few of the kids there, with their kids in turn. My son Joe and his wife Rita-Marie were among them - and yes, I pointed them out with pride many times during the course of the afternoon.)

These are the ties that bind us and hold us and support us. I have many friends I am closer to than I am to the crew pictured above. We have more in common, they know more of the details of my day-to-day life.

But they weren't there the day we had the epic king-of-the-mountain game in my Uncle Eugene's hayloft. They don't share the memory of our moms, sitting in Aunt Diane's kitchen, the air blue with cigarette smoke, conversation screeching to a halt when any of us kids walked into the room - they'd kindly see what we needed and usher us back out the door.

 I know the reunion tradition will eventually fall by the wayside, but I am grateful it hasn't happened yet. These are the people who knew me when, and love me anyways. You can't beat that.