Reunion

It is the morning of our family reunion, a big barbeque out on the lawns of a formal mansion that my cousin Peter operates as a conference center and event locale. He is both exceedingly professional and impressively low-key, my cousin, and he has flawlessly arranged both our stay here in Holland as well as this party.

The kids have started building a primitive hut, and architectural services are called for. That’s my excuse anyway to go play with them. They need no help whatsoever of course, and I let them boss me around as we gather sticks and leaves, the hut taking shape rapidly.

The family arrives in threes, fours, and fives, aunts uncles cousins, in-laws and new wives and new kids and old kids and many married people with children who I only remember as kids: we are all recalibrating and taking stock, even of ourselves. I have never felt older. We have had these reunions whenever my family came back from “The States”, more than 40 years worth of visits, and as a child I assumed these parties were typical. The family to my mind was monolithic, my father’s side bound to my mother’s side doubly by the marriage of my mother’s sister and my father’s brother. Only slowly have I come to understand and appreciate some of the fissures and alliances that define this family, the details that make this family so interesting and also so important to me. Those 40 years of reunions I now know only happened when we came to visit, but I also know for certain that they were not just for us.

It is all over too quickly. My sister’s family needs to pack and in the morning is gone, evil Tommy of wrong directions fame headed to China for a month. A day later I drive my brother’s family to Brussels to catch their flight back to Tucson, and then we say our good-byes to an aunt seen rarely since her divorce from my uncle, headed for a hospice for the last weeks of her life. We will not see her again. Once it was weddings that precipitated our visits, but funerals are frankly more common of late.

I spend a day with Peter, walking through the estate he operates and discussing his expansion plans. We visit similar estates in the area, all of whom sadly built expansions quite badly, new construction destroying any of the original elegance. He will not make the same mistakes. Peter drives us to the airport, and we are off to Iceland.

Doorn, Netherlands