Friday, August 12, 2005

Relative Time

Not long ago, I found myself doing what many of you have done this summer: heading to a family reunion.  Perhaps, like me, you’ve gotten to the age when you really look forward to these gatherings, now that your eyeball-rolling teenage years are behind you – when family reunions meant having to explain your prickly adolescent self to a string of relatives who looked alarmingly familiar, and completely strange. 

It was during my cynical teen years, in beginning French class, that I learned the phrase, “Qui se ressemble, s’assemble” – or, those who resemble one another, hang out together.  At the time, this only evoked more eyeball rolling.  Who wanted to spend even more time with one’s family? And don’t tell me I look like these people! Pul-eese.

The English equivalent of that franco phrase,“Birds of a feather flock together,” was brought home to me freshly at a recent viewing of the wonderful film, March of the Penguins.  In this documentary, these hardy birds waddle and slide their way uncomfortably to an extreme family reunion in Antarctica (so much for our complaints about far-flung family gatherings).  For the Emperor Penguins, family resemblance is so strong they’ve had to develop special calls to find mates and children in the jostling flock of black and white.  (It’s just not enough to yell out, ‘Hey, Myrna - it’s me, over here, in the tuxedo with yellow trim!’)

Now, few of us look quite so much like our relatives, but resemblance is what makes family reunions so interesting, and sometimes disconcerting.  At a high school reunion, you can say in hushed tones, “Yikes, Sylvia’s aging badly” or “Whoo – that baldy-pate looks pret-ty silly on Myron.” But at a family reunion, what you see is what you get – your life story is laid out before your eyes.  Yup – your nose will surely droop like melting wax, just as old Uncle What’s-his-name’s, and you can see every stage of the family thighs, from the nubile twenty-somethings to the spreading middle-agers. At a family reunion, time is truly relative – and, just as surely as if you’d climbed into H.G. Wells’s time machine, you can visit your past and future embodiments, for good or for ill.

Recently, while flocking with my father’s side of the family, I experienced another kind of time travel when old photos were passed around – sepia peeks into my grandparents’ rollicking courting days in the 1920s.  By the time I knew my grandmother, she was plumply round as a dome of the Bohemian bread she expertly baked. But in these photos, she’s a pert Mary Pickford in a knitted swimming costume, posing like a pin-up on the beach in New Buffalo, Michigan, on a day outing from her South Chicago immigrant neighborhood, with my grandfather as the cute boyfriend on her arm.

Peering into these photos is like hovering over the “Pensieve” in the Harry Potter books – author J.K. Rowling’s wonderful invention of a shallow bowl into which one can put memories that no longer fit into our jammed brains.  Just as Harry and Dumbledore can pull other people’s memories out of storage in crystal phials, swirl them in the Pensieve, and literally fall into them, I fall into these old photographs, seeing with startling clarity the chemistry in my grandparents’ intimate lakeside embrace, seeing in their young bodies the immigrant features – the prominent noses and dark, slashing eyebrows – that I now carry on my middle-aged person, impossibly older than my ancestors in this strangely time-frozen photo. Those young lovers did not know they would move Westward after World War II, part of another great migration of inner-city asthma sufferers to the clear air of mile-high mountains.  Or that their granddaughter would move back to the Midwest at the end of their century, unknowingly bringing my family to the very beach captured 80 years earlier in those photographs. We carry our family memories in our very skins, like an album whose pages we forget to turn.

Family reunions remind us of these connections, so different from our daily concerns.  We gather together for the familiarity, like those migrating penguins, for the reassurance, for example, that my uncle, long employed by General Motors, will check as he does every year to make sure we’re driving an American car.  We make sure my cousins and I can still reconstruct family recipes, or rehearse family events that each of us remember a bit differently, a chorus of harmonizing perspectives that make up our family story. It’s true, as teenagers often remind us, that we don’t get to choose our families, but we can make the choice to carry them as fully in our hearts and minds as we do in the long memory of our bodies.  In that way, maybe we’re more like turtles, with our familial resemblances etched on our shells, making the choice to hide our heads, or stretch out our necks, fully conscious, as we carry the story forward. 

Broadcast by April Lidinsky on August 12, 2005
Customs & Rituals • Family & Friends • Permalink • Printer Friendly
Google
WWW Michiana Chronicles

A random selection from more than 300 Michiana Chronicles -- refresh the browser to see another set:

Joe Chaney -- More essays by Joe

Louise Collins -- More essays by Louise

April Lidinsky -- Relative Time / More essays by April

Jonathan Nashel -- More essays by Jonathan

Jeff Nixa -- More essays by Jeff

Ken Smith -- More essays by Ken

Jeanette Saddler Taylor -- More essays by Jeanette