All In The Family If You’re Going To Your Reunion, Now Is The Time To Craft A Strategy
They’re comin’. The good ones, the bad ones. The weird ones. Your relatives and they’ll be at your family reunion this summer.
There’s no problem so big that you can’t run away from it. Sure, you can tell them you’ve got to stay in bed with a ruptured aorta or get yourself arrested and don’t post bail until they’ve all gone back home.
But if you’ve got a shred of family loyalty (buried under all that guilt), you will attend the reunion and there will be a “decent interval” between your arrival and departure from the gathered fruit of the family tree.
On Memorial Day, year after year, the 13 children born to my Grandmother K. (and that unsung sire, Grandpa K.) with their children, and their children’s children ad infinitum, gather at the same park on the banks of the mighty Spokane River to share our common heritage and mountains of greasy chicken (the cooking oil puddled about after these dinners brings to mind the breakup of the Exxon Valdez).
We grandchildren have always been required to attend these yearly events unless serving overseas in the military or stateside in a correctional facility. So you see, I know reunions and I’ve got a few tips to help ease you through your upcoming ordeal. There are advantages to be gained at these family cluster-ups.
The first thing you need to do when you enter the reunion site is to mix in quickly so that you may discover if any of your relatives have come into “big” money since you last met. You can best accomplish this by baiting your kin with a remark about how somebody you know has lately struck it rich. Then listen carefully for someone to top your story with one about say, your Aunt Myrlie winning the Iowa lotto last April. Search out Aunt Myrlie. Don’t talk about money. Talk about her. Get her to talk about her. Bond with her, she is flesh of your flesh. Get her address so you can keep in touch. Set up a visiting schedule.
The next thing you might want to do is search out an uncle or aunt (that would be your parent’s brother or sister) who have toasted the family’s honor until their own is in jeopardy. At that point, they usually find themselves being ignored when they have so much yet to slur. That’s your cue. Be a listener but guide their conversation to the subject of your parent’s conduct as a young adult. Your reward may only be amusement but should a dark embarrassing secret slip out, it may pay for the day’s impositions when you discuss your inheritance with the guilty parent. That pretty much exhausts the advantages of attending a family reunion unless your freshly divorced uncle brings “that hat-check girl” whom your aunts all hate. Then there may be an unpleasant scene that will become a family legend, told and retold long after the snapshots are curled and faded.
But I would be remiss in my reunion counsel if I did not warn of the pitfalls. At large reunions, there will always be some attendees who should be avoided. He is usually laughing too loud, and strangers meeting this person are almost immediately afflicted with a parched throat and interrupt him to ask for directions to the punch bowl.
The other type to avoid is the chronic complainer. Not so easy to be rid of as the previous. This type will follow you to the punch bowl (even on crutches) in order to keep your ear. They’ll stand outside your stall in the bathroom and drone on about their woes. They’re tough to shake. Your only hope is to find the complainer’s spouse and draw him or her into the conversation. The spouse has usually developed a technique for silencing the grumbling.
In large widespread families, you need to take care not to refer to a lately deceased relative as though he or she were still alive. The pain of Uncle John’s recent passing is reawakened when you announce that you’ll play softball only if he umpires the game again this year. As your extended family grows older, the rule is: See the face before you say the name.
And finally, if you remember anything that I’ve told you about reunions, remember this: Don’t stay until the end. As the event dies down, the old hands are prompted to look around for new hands to plan for the inevitable next gathering, which will be bigger and better than ever. They could draft you onto the committee and you could end up stirring pieces of chicken in a boiling vat of grease at sunrise on the day of the next Mother-Of-All-Reunions.
MEMO: Darin Z. Krogh is a Spokane County-based free-lance writer.