I can only write about my family reunion in hindsight, as if my memories need to develop slowly like a photo in the dark. I look back and the reasons for going seem obvious, but initially I resisted.
But the world is shifting beneath our feet: a catastrophe of political will and confusion, which is never a good mix when men and might are involved. The personal effect has been even larger: an almost feral need to connect or reconnect with those I love.
Upon arriving, I was stunned to see my past in my family's eyes. From then on I was transfixed every step of the way. So much so, I immediately began scribbling notes on my cocktail napkin. But instead of feeling like a writer, I felt like a spy. Not the sister, daughter, cousin, niece and aunt I needed to be between breath-catching silences.
You see, it's been years since I returned to the fold of my family. Living in Seattle can do this to an East Coast transplant trying so hard to re-root. I still have a clear mental picture of me, all those years ago, tie-dyed frame of mind, hitchhiking across the country. It was not a decision I needed to mull over. Ever since childhood I knew it would be my way to do the necessary work of finding myself, which meant forging away from the expectations of family and convention. Only by letting go of the reins could I realize who I was by shedding, mile by mile, who I was not.
Yet, there was absolutely no denying the familiar faces filling the reunion suite were the proud people who were there for me before life settled in on us and our roads forked. And with every step I took across the carpeted lobby, my world stopped, like a good listener, to let me walk with confidence over the threshold into my family's world, the world of my past, without hesitation, embarrassment or any other emotion that once defined the wandering, restless will of an immigrant's daughter.
And then, while sitting around a table in a Manhattan supper club where photos of Frank Sinatra and Joe DiMaggio hung in gilded frames over the bar, I was reminded just how far I've strayed. Because, though I wore my best silk dress from Banana Republic, to the women of my family, unless your clothing has shoulder pads and sequins you are not dressed up! And when Cousin Johnny actually said "Badda-bing, badda-boom" for empha-sis, I rudely laughed out loud (secretly realizing I'd inherited his life-of-the-party genes). Worse, when he stood by the door with his chin up and arms crossed behind him looking like a bouncer hired for our reunion, I joked that I felt like I was on the set of "The Sopranos." This did not bode well. But still, we were simpatico. I knew this by the way he bear-hugged me. From this point on, we were cousins again.
In my home city of Seattle we are accustomed to food politics. In fact, many people (frankly, those with a bit too much time and money on their hands) define a huge part of themselves (no pun intended) by what they will or will not eat. Recently, at a potluck gathering Wallingford is famous for, I felt enough peer pressure to stop myself short of saying there are days I prefer a blood-oozing rib-eye to anything even remotely resembling tofu, because, well, tofu on a skewer just doesn't do it for me. Too much texture. Too little taste. But I've learned that in a white, politically appropriate neighborhood where women dress as if it were still the '60s, some things are just better left unsaid. However, when the no-dairy-vegan-vegetarian spoke out in support of the Native Americans' right to slaughter another innocent whale, I had to challenge her convictions no matter how many times my husband kicked me under the table.
Mentally, I compared all of this to my family's food issues at hand: whether a pound of pasta per person was enough to serve. How, as soon as lunch was over, all conversation shifted to dinner.
I didn't try to give my family a view of my life they could identify with. Or of my city, a city that can feel, especially during local elections, as segregated as the Deep South. Not by race but by ideology. Or how people in my neighborhood eagerly espouse cultures other than their own as if searching for an identity (think Tibetan prayer flags snapping over Scotch-Irish foyers and all the feng shui'd Midwesterners) and how this differs from my family's way of embracing only their own culture. One doesn't describe a city with less of an ethnic culture and more of an all-encompassing, cautious nature (that encourages sensitivity, but oftentimes forsakes truth and, dare I say, passion) to people who have never viewed conversation as a tool to reason abstractly. I'm aware of my family's provincialism, but when you get right down to it, is there any real difference between meditation crystals and rosary beads if peace of mind is all you're after?
When I first went away to college, I remember hanging a sign on my door that read you are not your family! Ah, but everything I've discovered since then is that I am: in ways I can choose to carry forward, ways I can work to let go of, and, perhaps most painfully, in ways I cannot adjust the alignment of no matter how diligently I try.
Sooner or later we all have to climb back up the rungs of our family tree, no matter how exhausted it makes us feel or how many limbs have fallen behind. Only then, embraced by all that was, will one have a fighting chance of moving beyond those very confines to make whole our lives and work, and be able to turn a new leaf into, say, a new tree if a new tree is what's desired.
Mary Lou Sanelli divides her time between Lower Queen Anne and Port Townsend. Her latest book is "Craving Water."[[In-content Ad]]
