Summer, Unofficial Day 75

Teddy Bear Park, Stillwater, Minnesota

Family Reunion, Part II

"The eating begins. Clams steam, corn steams, salad wilts, butter runs, hot dogs turn, torn chicken shines in the savage light. Iced tea, brewed in forty-quart milk cans, chuckles when sloshed. Paper plates buckle on broad laps. Plastic butter knives, asked to cut cold ham, refuse. Children underfoot in the pleased frenzy eat only potato chips. Somehow, as the first wave of appetite subsides, the long tables turn musical, and a murmur rises to the blank sky, a cackle rendered harmonious by a remote singleness of ancestor; a kind of fabric is woven and hung, a tapestry of the family fortunes, the threads of which include milkmen, ministers, mailmen, bankruptcy, death by war, death by automobile, insanity . . . The family has hovered in honorable obscurity, between poverty and wealth, between jail and high office. Real-estate dealers, schoolteachers, veterinarians are its noblemen; butchers, electricians, door-to-door salesmen its yeomen. Protestant and teetotalling, ironically virtous and mildly proud, it has added to America's statistics without altering their meaning. Whence, then, this strange joy?"

-- From "The Family Meadow," a short story by John Updike, published in The Early Stories: 1953-1975, copyright 2003, Alfred A. Knopf, New York.

A Family Reunion

The ghost of U.S. Grant may year in and out summon the tourist horde to Galena, Ill., but we went there this weekend to celebrate family -- with a grand reunion of a 25/32nds representation of the clan, immediate and extended. The occasion was to celebrate Dave and Carm's golden wedding anniversary.

As Mark so eloquently pontificated in his toast to the celebrated couple, the family has increased and decreased -- in each way markedly -- over those 50 years. But the spirit of kin past and present filled the room, and it was much more tangible than just the commonality of lineage, genealogy or last name. Even as we extolled the virtue and marvel of being married 50 years, we watched the future spill out in front of us as the next generation filled the room with shouting and play. As the cousins -- the oldest one 13 -- flailed about in the motel pool or scurried off to the game rooms, it was clear they were already about making the memories that we were reminiscing about ourselves while sitting around the dinner table a few hours earlier. And so the beat goes on from one era to the next.

Still car shopping

Apparently we've been too busy car shopping for me to blog lately. After an exhaustive search of our domestic options, I think we're going to go the import route. I keep coming back to this little beauty I found in Prague.

photo by jason tetzloff 3.08