Scenes from a Reunion

Where to begin. I love my family. They are a bunch of nut cases and we certainly have our own level of dysfunction. But I can't think of many families I've met that I'd rather have, in the main, than my own. We laugh. A lot. There was one point when I thought my brother was going to die, he was laughing so hard. My cousin was asking me about my book (his dad is a published author, as was our grandfather) and Bro kept interjecting all sorts of little witticisms and cracking himself up. Cousin had asked about the title and I was saying that Author Friend thought I should change it. Bro said, "Well, you know what Grandpa said about a good book title..." and then he started to laugh. We waited. He composed himself and said, "Grandpa always said..." and started laughing again. It got ridiculous. He kept laughing and we kept laughing at his laughter and after about, no kidding, 10 attempts to finish the story he finally blurts out, "Grandpa always said, "A good book title needs an 'r' in it'. That was the joke. No. It's not particularly funny. But the journey sure was.

Here's another thing about my family. A lot of them are hypochondriacs. I'm not much of one. I just have a tumor when I get a headache and I generally interpret heart burn as a heart attack. I'm mild compared to my neice, E. She always claims to have a tumor or blood disease or flesh eating bacteria. But the winner, hands down, has to be Cousin's daughter, K. She is said, "Oh, yes. I always have something. I've had 27 different kinds of cancer, HIV, West Nile virus, leprosy (but that only lasted for a day). And I have a lot of heart attacks". Her mother, a very lovely and genteel woman added, "Yes, she had a heart attack on the plane coming here" and proceeded to act out K's ordeal. K then said, "It wasn't really a heart attack, though. What happened was my arteries corroded and my heart fell into my stomach". Well, yeah. That's bad.

That's K up there, not actually having a heart attack. At the moment.