2003-06-23 - 9:26 p.m.
I keep forgetting what year it is, just for a second. I'm initialing and dating folders at work, a process usually so automatic, yet my pen hovers a second before writing "03." I attribute this to the weird energy of a hunkering storm that has made the summer morning so dark the automatic street lights are glowing..... and the residue of a weekend spent spinning images and stories up from my past and weaving their threads into a new present. It was the family reunion.
This branch of the family (my mother's side) has taken to reunioning every summer and even though only a handful of potential attendees actually show up, there is a strong, quiet bond at the core of this group. My mother, her sister and three brothers make up the oldest generation there, and my generation is next, our kids...then their kids. Yes, some of the passel of cousins I made mud pies and chased and played hide and go seek with are now grandparents. So many of their lives are blank spaces to me. Sure we heard family stories, saw Christmas card photos, got birth and graduation and wedding announcements. But my only real memories of them go back to childhood.
We saw each other infrequently as kids, but like most kids, when we were thrown together we would eye each other shyly for a couple of minutes, one would say "Wanta play?," the others would nod, and we'd race off together. By the end of an afternoon it was as though we had always been best friends. But when we didn't see each other for a whole year or more, the next time our whole worlds would have changed and it was like starting over.... or not. By the time we were teens, those friendships didn't automatically percolate. I took a book to the family reunion if I had to go, but mostly I wiggled out of it.
Fast forward about forty years. All these cousins I never even knew as adults are now middle-aged and I am scrambling to make connections with them. You can't say: "So... what have you done with your life?" Somehow we must find the ground to have a casual conversation. And we do.
The reunion was hosted by the cousin I always envied, in part because she was forever taller than I was, even though she was three years younger. Her mother used to take delight in making us stand up together, back to back, and measure us, exclaiming about how much taller Nina was, and this implied contest carried over into our personal relationship. (Perhaps a bit of competition between our mothers as well.) It is funny how kids don't realize that a comparison is not necessarily a value judgement, that there was nothing inherently inferior about my small size. Both she and I thought the contest was judged and the winner declared.The willowy girl who once flipped her long blond mane and haughtily informed me that she might become a fashion model, but I was much too short..... has battled breast cancer, struggled with a weight problem, and fought to keep her kids out of trouble with drugs. She is now a warm and smiling grandmother with a no-nonsense cap of grey hair and a quilting hobby.
Her brother, the kid who stuttered and wet his pants, eternally sticky with untied shoes is now.... well, you might still guess that about him, but he became an accountant and makes a lot more money than I do. So I have to give him some credit.
The slim, chatty woman with snow white hair turned out to be my cousin Dede, a math teacher, mother of three and grandmother of two. We discussed school issues and writing and being the mother of sons. She had freckles and glasses and bushy bangs as a kid, and she and her sister were the "smart ones" who brought homework to family functions. She told me she still had a picture of a horse I drew for her when we were kids. "It was really good!" One by one, they seem to bring up the memory that I liked to draw. I suppose that is the thing they have remembered about me all these years.
But really the most amazing thing for me was seeing the "adults".... my aunts and uncles, and realizing for the first time how small they are. People do shrink a bit when they get older, but still I could never have imagined that (at 5' 4") I would tower over my aunts. That only my mother's youngest brother, once 6' 5", would still have to stoop to give me a bear hug. My mother said, on the way home, that maybe it was like going back to visit your old school and being surprised at how low the desks are, how small the room. I suppose people as well at things are branded in the memory relative to one's own size and point of view at the time. I remember all of those people from a child's perspective, looked up to them, respected them.... and never once all these years suspected I was bigger than they are!
In many respects it was a typical family reunion: way too much food, all the noise and confusion of everyone trying to talk as much as they can to as many people as possible, the passing around of snapshots and memorabilia, and many cameras snapping at every new photo op. I was exhausted by a day of extroverting, which does not come easily for me.
But I also have to say this: the family is an easy crowd to work. Even if you are talking to someone you barely know, with whom you have absolutely nothing in common, there is still that basic groundwork. I am looking for something to like about you and you are looking for something to like about me. I realize, with a strange mixture of pride and humility, that I don't have to try to impress anybody. They may not know anything about my life, but in some important ways they know who I am: whose daughter, whose sister, whose mother. That, I guess, is what families are all about.
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