We went to Killen’s Steakhouse, which is ordinarily closed on Sundays but …Mother’s Day, and how can you not be open? The bubby was in good spirits, pointing and babbling and walking and eating and throwing stuff, but not crying or being difficult. We played peek-a-boo and cover your head with a napkin and surprise-face and he genuinely laughed out loud and then pounded the table with both hands like a boss.
I love that kid.
These family events are about shared history. My mother tells stories about my childhood, and my wife and I tell stories about our children, and in telling the stories, we reaffirm our links to each other.
The flip side to this is about the people not at the table. When I was in fifth grade, around 1973, my family moved from upstate New York to Texas. Until then, we gathered at one family event or another for the holidays - my grandparents, my aunts and uncles, all of my cousins - and we made memories.
While the adults sat around the kitchen table sipping coffee or beers, the cousins would gather outside and act like the idiots we were, playing football or throwing snowballs or wandering around the small towns we visited, entirely safe in our recklessness. We all played our roles - I was the skinny nerd, my sister was pretty and athletic, my cousin Doug was stocky and reasonable, my cousin MaryAnne was fun and spunky and her brother Frankie was annoying and sarcastic. We opened presents, gorged on sweet corn and freshly pressed apple cider.
And then we moved. No more extended family events. Just the five of us in Texas while things continued without us in upstate New York. We were the ones not at the table.
Years later, after my father died, I reconnected with my aunts, who had missed us. My aunt Vicki pulled out old photo albums and we looked at pictures from long ago.
“This is your seventh birthday party,” she said, pointing to me in a form-fitting turtleneck sweater and thick plastic glasses, a cheerfully punchable face leaning forward to blow out candles, surrounded by cousins.
We flipped ahead through the album, through Christmases and Easters and summer weekends and winter vacations, until we got to about 1973 when we were erased from the pictures, as if Marty McFly had gone back in time and broke up my parents before they could meet and eventually get married.
On Sunday, the person missing from the pictures was my father, who I miss every day, and who would have loved the bubby with the unqualified passion of a proud patriarch, surveying all of his progeny and finding it good. Dad was the glue, the one person everyone loved and respected, and he would have made sure that my brother and sister and my nephew were there, either in person or in spirit.
At 62, I try to be the glue now, but it is harder than you think to be that guy. We live our separate lives, my siblings and my children and my nephews, separated from each other by hundreds of miles in some cases, separated from each other by personalities and pride and ancient resentments in other cases. We are not as willing to compromise for family harmony and have all become more inclined to be the center of our own stories rather than being parts of a larger family saga.
But we do what we can. When the bubby grows up, he will look at these pictures and ask who’s that, and who’s that, and in telling him the stories, he will become part of the story himself, the story that continues on and on and on.
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Today was a good gym day, pushing sleds and sprinting on the exercise bicycles and treadmills and stair climbers, then doing leg extensions and wall crouches and lateral shuffles and not much lifting. My trainer seems to be taking it easy on me as a recovering invalid, easing me back into more stressful stuff.
Then it was a Mom day, replacing air filters in her townhouse and spreading mulch and dropping off cookies with the nice ladies at the tax office who had been so kind to her last week.
It’s powerful stuff, giving cookies to public servants. The clerk who had helped us was there and she was genuinely confused for a second as my mother handed her the box before realizing that it was a gift and she then just melted with gratitude. Collecting taxes has got to be the ultimate thankless job. I think it might have been the first time anyone had ever brought cookies to the tax office out of appreciation for a job well done.
Dinner tonight was leftovers - a mystery sandwich wrapped in foil in the outside refrigerator and a burrito with unknown contents. The sandwich turned out to be chopped beef my son had brought home from his job, and the burrito was chicken and cheese, which reheated nicely.
My wife watched me eat these mystery entrees with a combination of disgust and fascination. “I know you’re trying to be frugal and I’m not trying to be mean, but I could never do that,” she said.
I grunted and took another bite of the burrito. Leftovers are free food, and I have an iron stomach. I’ll probably be fine.
Tomorrow: more exercise and poker night!
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