Each summer for the past thirty-eight years our family—not
my immediate family, but my parent’s family—has had a reunion. We take a
weekend; all of us camp together, eat together and enjoy each other’s company
around a campfire on Saturday night. Our parents have long since passed, but
the eight kids they raised are all still here. We have grown from a family of
ten, to a family of over seventy. My dad, our patriarch, used to say, “You can
pick your friends, you can even pick your nose, but you can’t pick your family
and don’t you ever forget that.” Like a good recipe, there are always things in
the mix that are not tolerable by themselves, but when they become one of the
family, you see how essential they are to us.
My siblings and I have remained, for the most part,
supportive and concerned for each other’s well-being, and their children’s.
Some of us have more than others, and some of us have made greater strides in
life, but when we get together like this, the playing field is leveled, and we
are once again the children of our parents. For me, it is a unique celebration
with brothers and sisters I grew up with, and learned to love sixty some years
ago. Each year those feelings rush back at me again as we meet once more, face
to face, and we get this little booster shot. The hair is gray or gone, the
faces wrinkled, but when you look beyond that—he’s the same brother you shared
a bed with just to keep warm on a cold winter’s night. The day will come when
the original eight of us will be seven, and that will be a sad day for all of
us because it will signal the beginning of the end of a generation. Being the
oldest that may well be me, and in a way, that may be the easiest way out—at
least for me.
My family’s story is not unique, by any means, and reunions
are played out each and every day of the year all over this great country, but
the trend in society today has placed less and less importance on it. We have
grown into this fast-paced society that has less and less time for each other—family
or not. We are greedier with our time and our talents. We are more
self-centered and less sharing than we used to be. This is a trend brought on
by the idea that we should always look out for number one—a “survival of the
fittest” mentality. In the process, we have forgotten that number one is not
always you. I saw a quote once, from a Vietnamese monk named Thich Naht Hanh,
which said about family, “If you look
deeply into the palm of your hand, you will see your parents and all
generations of your ancestors. All of them are alive in this moment. Each is
present in your body. You are the continuation of each of these people.”
Yes, we owe it to our founding family to never let those who taught us and
influenced the way we live and conduct our lives today, to be forgotten. To
take a vow to carry on their wishes for all of us, even though they may be
physically long gone. They passed us an important torch when they left and we
need to carry it with pride and dignity. We all have people that have come into
our families that don’t quite meet up to our expectations. But we do find out,
in time, that the boy, who wasn’t good enough to marry your daughter, has
become the father of the world’s smartest grandchild. The stark reality is that
we came into this world as part of a family, and in the end, that’s how we need
to go out. In the meantime, we
need to enjoy the trip together, as a family.
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