Pop 89: Reunion
By Madonna Hamel
madonnahamel@hotmail.com
On Friday night the texts starts flying: Who’s bringing beer? I’m bringing tarts from mom’s recipe. Do you have any birthday cake candles? Yep. And party hats. Should I bring the Scrabble game? Duh! Can I have the back bedroom? We need to stop in Calgary. What’s the weather like in Banff? What time are you getting here? What time are we leaving, again? Who’s bringing the beer?
We are gathering, finally, to celebrate my father’s 90th birthday and my brother’s 60th; we are flying across the country, driving from a remote island, taking ferries, and caravanning through the prairies. We are picking up my little sister’s old roommate from Montreal in Calgary. We all try to remember when was the last time we saw her and other friends and relations. Now that we are all in our sixties, a fact that bears little resemblance to any earlier concepts of “sixty”, the anecdotes and details fo our past stack up, so much water under the bridge, so many meandering paths.
How many heartbreaks, cross-country moves, job changes, medications, new prescriptions, old injuries, hair colours, graduations, marriages, divorces, funerals, concerts, and books read and re-read? We piece together our stories from “the olden days,” filling in the gaps of years, passed, so quickly we swear, “that can’t be right, wasn’t that just two years ago?” “No, no, because remember we had Ce’s 60th at your place, and she’s 65!”
What makes reunions more precious as we age is the shift in posture toward life that age bestows upon us. As my friend Bill says: “Life is less about what I want now and more about what I’ve been given.” We become more aware of how everyone else is doing. We listen more and ask more questions. The subtle ways we joke, laugh, provoke, nurture, comfort, and support each other become noteworthy. Everything feels precious and fleeting, you never know when you’ll be together again, but you know you want to measure every moment.
Families who find a way to gather together on a regular basis are lucky people. Talking around the dinner table, we hear how an old family friend is no longer talking to his brother or how the parents of an old school friend are expecting her to take sides. While we certainly have our flashpoints and triggers, and, in our younger days, some of us have taken our distance for long stretches at a time, my family tries to work through problems and resentments before they become too unwieldy. That just maybe because we are talkers, we can spend hours on the phone talking about what we dreamt last or what we are reading these days. We posit theories, argue points, interrupt and give unwanted advice. We also ask for advice. There’s always some crying involved. But most of all, we laugh.
So when half of us got hit by a cold (that was not covid) after the first day of our reunion, it was, to say the least, a bummer. My younger sister got hit first - she was out for the count for a day and a half, absent from the revelry. Then came me, laying upstairs in a room of my own (which was a godsend, as three of my sibs were on the floor in the living room). I could barely hear the stories and laughter through the pounding headache that stayed with me for two days. It felt like someone had unloaded a pile of bricks on my head. I had lay perfectly still, slept fitfully, longing to be downstairs with the family.
This sucks, I kept saying to myself, forgetting the advice I just gave to my sister the day before: acceptance is the key. It’s true that the degree of my serenity is directly proportionate to the degree to which I accept my life as is. But it ain’t easy. I was acutely aware that within a couple of days I’d be headed back to my quiet little apartment in Val Marie, surrounded by silence and darkness - two rare and wondrous commodities I yearned for and found in my little village
But in small, dark, quiet and isolated places, one’s own thoughts are difficult to rein in. And in times of change or upheaval, such as a pandemic, those thoughts can become frightening, morbid, and despairing. Without anyone around to bounce one’s thoughts off of, without an ear to hear your frets and worries, they can run away with themselves. The brain, as one nature writer wrote, after living alone in the woods for a year, can start eating on itself. We are, after all, herd animals. We need each other. To be around each other, living and moving and breathing in each other’s company.
Unfortunately, breathing on each other was not an option on this trip. Half of us sat around the table in masks. Even as we marvel that we managed to get through the worst of the pandemic without losing anyone, we still feel the strain of distance. At the beginning of this pandemic, we talked about using this time as an opportunity to regroup, get priorities straight, and reveal to ourselves what really matters and what can be relinquished. But the idea of an enforced solitude no longer feels like a blessing in disguise; nobody wants to isolate against their will.
And then someone reminds us of what’s happening in Ukraine, about families who will never reunite again. Here I am, with a family who has somehow, someway, through our own separate venturings into the world, through a wealth of lessons and failures, through a fortunate DNA, through an acquired and intuited sense of values, has found the wherewithal and the desire to become acquainted with our own selves, a process that takes a lifetime.