Family

I don't write  much here about my extended family because I don't want to violate their privacy. I'm certainly not going to start now. But I went to California last weekend to help celebrate my brother's 60th birthday and want to write about how that was.

My brother and I have not always been close, at least not in a conventional sense. We have, more so than my other siblings perhaps, been enmeshed with each other's feelings and reactions, but throughout our childhood and into early adulthood this was not a good thing. Our acute sensibility of one another mostly took the form of anger, hostility, and confusion. This all started to change about 15 or 20 years ago and  our relationship has progressively improved to the point where he is now one of my favorite people in the world. This was hard work on his part  and on mine. To be able to go to his celebration felt as much like the culmination of a glorious progression as it did like a birthday party.

rb photo © 2013

We have a beautiful family. No, really, we do. We're pretty darn white (though some progress is being made in that regard), but for all that we are amazingly diverse. And for a bunch of middle class (mostly) white people, we do pretty well at  being joyful in each other's company, cutting each other enough slack to make this family thing  work. We love each other and it shows. We accept each other for what and who we are and, hey, no reason to sugarcoat it, there has been a lot to accept over the years. I wish this made us just the average family, but that's not what I see. It seems to me there is a great deal of grudge-bearing and vindictiveness in the families I know and experience through others.

Through all of the time that some of us were being obnoxious twits (I'm talking about myself here, though if anyone else feels the shoe fits them, feel free to put it on), our hearts have always been in the right place, or so it seems to me. Am I  being a bit of a Pollyanna here? I suspect some of my family would say so. But that's my observation. Where push came to shove, we have always had each other's backs. Even now it  is not all sweetness and light by any means—my sister couldn't come to our celebration because of a crisis with a grandchild. But we persevere.

rb photo © 2013

Our celebration was on the Northern California coast, about 40 miles south of San Francisco. It is a beautiful place, full of wildness, wind, and weather. It was cloudy, sunny, rainy, warm, freezing, foggy, and perfect, all in the  space of three days. We ate together, sat around fires, roasted marshmallows, went to the beach, and even visited the Boardwalk at Santa Cruz.

rb photo © 2013

I fulfilled my Bad Uncle role by encouraging children to play with sticks they lit on fire. I mean, what could possible go wrong, am I right? I am proud to report that (to the best of my knowledge) no one was permanently scarred and I'm fairly certain my nieces are still talking to me. I also had an 11-year-old tell me she wasn't sure I counted as an adult. A proud moment.

But the real  pleasure was being in each other's company. I know this sounds like any family anywhere, but I feel the miracle of us coming together every time we meet. Frank Bruni, in his New York Times column of May 26 (published while I was in my little tent cabin on the coast, a sweet coincidence) notes that family "aren't people [we] would have likely made an effort to know or spend time with if [we]'d met them at school, say, or at work.... They're less tailored fits than friends are. But in a family that's succeeded at closeness, they're more natural, better harbors." A safe harbor, that's exactly what it feels like when I am with my family. And, I must say, I don't really feel that way anywhere else in the world. The way our world is currently constructed does not consistently create communities in which we can feel accepted and at home. To have that, I must go find these people, wherever they may be.

Our parents moved around a lot, not from one community to the next, but to new homes within the Sacramento area. Which is to say, we have no edifice to go home to, no family manse, a physical structure to give solidity to our "familiness". I for one don't miss it, though. It is these people who make the safe place for me to come to rest. I will just keep going where they are. It's a good place to be.