Friday, August 01, 2008

Getting Together

Gerald O’Hara got it wrong. It’s not “the land, Katie Scarlet;” it’s family. (For you young whippersnappers who don’t remember Gerald O’Hara, he was the father-character in Gone with the Wind. Came to an untimely end in the time-honored Southern way of combining alcohol and transportation.)

I read somewhere that the 4th of July holiday is the most relaxed holiday of the year for folks: none of the stresses of Christmas or New Year or Thanksgiving. It’s summertime, and not only is the livin’ easy, but it’s also a time for celebration of family through the age-old institution of the family reunion. Mine is no different; we had a “cousins-gathering” one summer Saturday at the farm where my mother was reared. It’s near Lebanon, Kentucky, and my older sister, the knower of these things, tells me that it has been in our Mother’s family for about 175 years. So we had an afternoon that was a great combination of “the land” and “the family.” We, who suddenly are the old generation of the family, spent a terrific afternoon getting reacquainted. (In the Southern tradition of “Who are your people, dear?” many exchanges began with introductory clauses like, “I’m Lelia’s granddaughter,” or “I’m L.V.’s son.”) We reminisced, we looked at photos, we took photos, and we laughed and ate a terrific lunch with a bigger selection of locovore food than you see at lots of markets.

“We are bound together by our stories,” according to writer Jeffrey Eugenidies. Genetics are a part of it, but the stories, the traditions, are even bigger. You may have a cousin that you haven’t seen for 20 years, but somehow the news of that person’s major life-doings filters through the family.

Probably here it’s good to insert what might, if we were speaking Biblically, be considered the section of “begats,” so you can see why we could have a cousins-reunion. My sister is Pat; our Mother was Hilda; Hilda was one of eleven siblings, nine of whom grew to adulthood (Here, you begin to see the potential for lots of the aforementioned cousins.) Their mother was Louella and her mother was Sarah. Don’t panic, I’m not gonna’ drag you back as far as Louella and Sarah, I only mention them for local color. They were Haydens, of the Basil Hayden bourbon family. If you partake of that, give a moment of thanks for at least that one intrepid, early-settler family.)

Back to the cousins: your family has had these events; you know the drill. First you greet, hug, exclaim, catch up a bit, eat and then lapse into that lovely, post-food-comatose-state where you can’t quite get up from around the table. (If you wait a bit, you just might be able to force yourself to eat just one more teensy sliver of that pie that was sooooo gooood!) Time to start reaching back to the family roots through stories. Jeffrey Eugenidies wasn’t the only one who had something to say about stories. Singer/songwriter/writer Jimmy Buffett famously said, “We do it for the stories we can tell.” You know the ones: the ones where you laugh until your face hurts. Pretty soon somebody mentions that grandmother and her sister married two brothers who had the same surname as they did, but who really were only distant cousins, so it was OK. Then somebody else recalls that their third sister trumped up a huge desire for education and left the farm for school in the city.  Everybody really knew though that she was just doing it to avoid marrying the third brother. Knowing nods and sage laughter lead to yet another story about the time that some great-great uncle didn’t like the way the election “played out,” and declared that he wasn’t going to leave his room ever again. Didn’t either; conducted all of his business out the window, which was at the front of the house. After a couple of hours of this and just a little more pie (wouldn’t want to hurt their feelings by passing it by), we drag ourselves from the table to the yard to hold forth for a while longer. Finally, as dusk comes on, we part in a giant exhibition of when-we-say-good-by, sit down, it’s-gonna’-be-at-least-another-twenty-minutes-before-we-actually-leave.

The family—“God Bless Us Every One!”—and saving the land and preserving the stories would be nice too . . .

Broadcast by Jeanette Saddler Taylor on August 01, 2008
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