Reunion Fading

I skipped the family reunion this year. My mom, the family matriarch, turns 99 in a few months. She lives about 150 miles from the reunion site, and for a number of reasons--most having to do with other people's convenience--the rest of the family doesn't seem inclined to move it any closer to her. (That, of course, is their prerogative.) However, since Mom wasn't able to make it this year, Michele and I chose to spend the weekend with her on the theory that future visits with the rest of the family were likely to be easier to come by. It also gave my sister, Mom's primary caretaker, the weekend off. Attendance was way down. The usual crowd of fifty or so was reduced to thirty-six. That doesn't surprise me. When these gatherings began 70 or so years ago, everyone lived within fifty miles of Lake Wales, Florida, where both my mom's and my dad's families settled originally back in the early 1900's--hers from Minnesota, his from Kentucky. Nowadays, although there is a core group still in the Lake Wales/Tampa area, we are spread across the state from Pensacola to Tallahassee, across to Jacksonville, down to West Palm Beach, and over to Southwest Florida. This is a big state. If you start in the Keys and drive to the Alabama line via Jacksonville, you will have traveled nearly 900 miles. It's 320 miles, give or take, from our home in Boynton Beach to where Mom lives with my sister in Chiefland, near Gainesville. While none of the immediate family live more than a few hundred miles from Central Florida, there is another issue: the last two (or three) generations have grown up separated thus, and barely know their aunts, uncles and cousins in the other areas. What with the many distractions in family life today, it's hard (in some respects) to take a weekend off to drive for a day (or more) and spend a few hours with people that most of the attendees barely know. I understand that. But it makes me sad. When I was a kid, visiting the cousins--or being visited--was literally the high point of the year, some years. The family reunion used to be the same. It was arise before light, load the old pre-war Chrysler with food prepared days before, and drive to wherever it was being held that year. I was always so exhausted at the end of the day that I don't remember the trips home. As a result of that and other visits, I have relationships with a couple of my cousins that are nearly as close emotionally as with my own siblings, despite the fact that we hardly see each other any more. Bonds forged in childhood last a lifetime, and a few years missing here or there hardly matter. We fall right back into the same easy camaraderie that we had fifty years ago, almost as if our last meeting was at dinner or after church the previous week, instead of however long it may have been. My kids have that with some of their old friends from childhood, but none such with blood relations, as far as I am aware. That is partially the result of having been raised by active alcoholics who opted out of the family for some years at one period, but it is also a function of the distance, lack of exposure, and the absence of certain common cultural references. My daughters attend Duran Duran concerts for free, because they are friends with the band; my cousins' kids attend Rotary meetings. That's neither bragging nor a value judgment, but it assuredly indicates a difference in perspective. People are so mobile, nowadays. I read somewhere that, on average, a US household unit moves from one neighborhood to another once every seven years. Often, the neighborhood is in another city. People move from small towns to large, across the country following jobs, from metropolis to suburbs or other boroughs, move again and again and then, when they retire, move to the Sun Belt (which is becoming so crowded that other prospective retirees, like Shel and I, are thinking about moving out). Close-knit families are so rare these days as to be anachronistic, yet we keep the myth of "family" values as our ideal. I don't know. Perhaps it's time to begin looking at reality, and attempting to come up with some viable substitutes--but I'm darned if I know what.