The family circus
I realize I had promised stories from the family reunion, which was now two weekends ago. It's late, and the stories aren't really fresh, but I needed some time to think about it before attempting to share it with the class. It was a Friday and Saturday of mostly chaos and a constant effort to protect my children from themselves. It was two days trying to recognize people and figure out if I had ever met them before, and trying to mentally connect branches of the sprawling family tree.

But amid the chaos came a few snippets of things I'm still thinking about:

--My grandfather was a preacher at one time. His words commanded attention, as did the way he delivered those words. During the all-day picnic fest at the state park on Saturday, the large group gathered around at his request so he could deliver a few words. It was hard to hear what he was saying, and even harder to divine what the actual point was. I did learn that he had a sister who was married to "a no-good husband" and had "dopehead kids" and that she was institutionalized after she had her head blown off, or something. I learned that several of my grandfather's siblings died of lung cancer; he wrapped up that portion with, "If you smoke, quit." The group had gathered expecting a dramatic, touching moment to add to their memory banks. It dispersed quietly, somewhat disappointed.
--I was always my grandmother's favorite. I'm not shy about saying so, and truth be told, neither was she. It's the greatest honor I've received in my entire life. I have more respect for her than I have for any two other people in the entire world. She quit school at 11 to raise her brothers and sisters, but she's one of the smartest and wisest people I know. She brought up eight children in very demanding circumstances with no help to speak of. She lost her first child to disease at a very young age, and shortly after, she lost a brother to war. Yet she carried on, and she expected those around her to do the same. "The sun's going to come up tomorrow," she said, "whether you want it to or not." She's 80, and her hearing and her memory are ebbing. A couple of times over the weekend, she didn't remember who I was. I overheard her asking the person sitting next to her, "Who is that again?" If I spent some time to think about it -- and I'm trying like hell not to -- it would make me very, very sad.
--A staple of large gatherings in our family is music. Groups of men -- exclusively men -- get together and strum guitars and sing songs, mostly old gospel standards and John Denver tunes. I didn't bring my own guitar, but I managed to grab an abandoned one at one point. I joined one of the second cousins I didn't know. Turned out we had a common interest in the slightly raunchy music of Robert Earl Keen. We played a couple of songs, but they were songs that were definitely out of place with that group: "Sherry was a waitress at the only joint in town/She had a reputation as a girl who'd been around ... " probably wouldn't have gone over well with the "Amazing grace/how sweet the sound ... " crowd. We kept it quiet.
--I have many, many cousins, and even more second cousins, and third cousins. I don't know most of the second and third cousins -- they lived in Texas when I lived in Missouri. But many of them came to various family gatherings. I remember as a very little kid always being struck by the fact that so many cars at our family gatherings had Texas license plates. Scanning the parking lot near the state-park pavilion on Saturday, I was struck by the same fact -- and then I noted that my car was one of them.

Amid the chaos, though, I only picked up snippets. I never had the time to flesh out any of the stories that I heard parts of: a cousin who reportedly was a lesbian has reportedly switched back to the other team ... another cousin, 35, was lighting a cigarette while telling people about the "heart attack" he had allegedly suffered three weeks before. He's a little prone to tall tales, and I never got independent confirmation of the story ... another cousin was spoken of only in hushed tones; apparently she's now persona non grata ... apparently one of the second cousins from the Texas contingent had recently lost a daughter, 19 months old -- the same age as our youngest -- in a terrible home accident. Or maybe it was a day care accident. Either way, it was terrible. The reunion was her first trip away from home since the accident. ... no details, just snippets.

Despite the fact that I wasn't exactly looking forward to the trip, it turned out to be quite fun; not at all the lost weekend I was expecting. I was reminded that it's a large and diverse gene pool I come from. It's a bunch of mostly good people. It's also a few people with whom I wouldn't otherwise associate. Nothing wrong with that; that makes us like most families. I sometimes take solace in how average I am.