Monday, 14 October 2002 | Reunion

We didn't camp this weekend. It was cold, the rain fell steadily, and the 20 mile-per-hour winds promised to collapse our feeble nylon homes. Instead we ate dinner at a New Jersey diner and went bowling with a few of my relatives on my dad's side of the family. At the diner, while standing at a bathroom sink, I encountered a woman who'd never experienced a faucet that turns on automatically. "I stood right next to it and it came right on!" she exclaimed. "Pretty soon you won't have to do anything!" She half-directed her comment at me, but only because I was the one standing there. I just nodded and smiled, unsure of how to respond.

On Saturday it was my Mom's half of the family: my grandparents' anniversary combined with an overdue family reunion.

The walls and shelves and tabletops at my grandparents' house are covered with pictures, pictures that are never retired or replaced, only added to. Most of them are the same pictures that were there when I was a little girl—dated pictures of my cousins, aunts, and uncles—hanging in pearl chain-like frames, adjacent to faded paint-by-number artwork my mom and her brother produced when they were young.

I saw more of those pictures than I did that side of the family, and much of my memory of them is frozen in 70s-style haircuts and big-print shirts, expressions that never change or tire. That must be how they know me, as well—age 12 with blond hair and a bad perm, sitting unnaturally in front of a blue watercolor canvas. All of us visited our grandparents, and inevitably saw those pictures, even if we didn't see much of each other.

So there was a little bit of pressure getting ready for the event on Saturday, knowing that whatever picture was taken of you was going to be the picture people see of you for the next ten years; likely in a few years it'll receive the tip of a finger along with the question, "who's that?"

But it was rather relaxed; I'm not sure why I anticipated otherwise. I shouldn't be so reluctant to leave my element.