Mysteries

"We stopped in to see some friends on our walk," The Baby told her dad, as she sat on a bike in her almost-built playhouse.
"Oh?" said her dad. "Which friends?"
"Um," said The Baby. "A big boy in an orange shirt."
"Uh huh? Who is the big boy's mommy?"
"Ummmmm... she has a white shirt and pretty oval roundish eyes?"
And that is how he knew which friends we went to visit yesterday on our walk.


When I was born, I had seven grandparents - my maternal grandparents, my paternal grandparents (my grandmother here, my grandfather in an underground house in the mountains of Arkansas. What? Long story.), my maternal grandmother's parents and my maternal grandfather's mother.

My paternal grandmother was very much part of my everyday life - a short, fat, querulous woman who loved children and taking offense and Red Rose Tea with Carnation Evaporated Milk - but for the most part, I grew up surrounded by my mother's family, endless amounts of maternal relatives, petite, polite, slim, restrained, fantastically long-lived people. I have pictures of my daughter with my GRANDMOTHER'S GREAT AUNT, for example.

My mother was the third of eight children and I was born when my grandparents were in their active 50s - vibrant, middle-aged people. My father's mother had him when she was in her mid-40s and her other two children from her first marriage were ADULTS, so by the time I was born, she was already an old crabby woman. And she had been born when her two siblings were almost adults themselves, my great-grandparents born fantastically long ago, dead for decades by the time I was born, my great-grandfather dead for decades by the time my FATHER was born. So my grandmother's siblings were even older than she was and she had grudges against them* and all of the relationships in that family were a bit odd because of the weird generational gaps, as you may well imagine. So I did know my dad's brother and sister and a handful of cousins, but other than that? No.

*Just writing this makes me nearly breathless with missing her. Oh, Grandma.

One thing that I have noticed as I get older is that I do not fit in well in my mother's family. I am well loved, do NOT get me wrong, but I am different - tall and dark eyed and prone to sudden fits of fatness and moody and intense and fond of ghosts and story telling and taking umbrage and intense types of faith - than my polite, short, slender maternal relatives, who went from the United Church of Canada to an urban sort of quiet liberal skepticism. And I love them and they love me but WHOA NELLY, I barely even seem RELATED to them.

So I went to a family reunion this weekend, a gathering of the relatives of the two people in the picture - my paternal grandmother's parents. I almost did not bother to go, because I already have lots of relatives and I pictured lots of awkward hanging around at the fringes of the room while people I did not know milled about. But I went, and walked into a room full of tall, generously built people and heard lots of stories about my long, long gone great-grandparents, these Edwardian people, my great-grandfather huge and mythic (you should HEAR the stories. Good grief.), my great-grandmother kind and ladylike.

On Sunday afternoon, we went to the final wrap-up, a memorial service that quickly led to a roomful of sobbing, heavyset, sentimental people telling each other long stories and then we sang Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee. And although they've been dead for over half a century, my great-grandparents were vividly present, even down to my red-eyed son who didn't know what anyone was talking about but who never lets anyone cry alone.

And then I knew for certain that I was sitting in a roomful of family and knew that my long, long gone great-grandparents could have walked into the room, my great-grandmother kind-hearted and child-loving and prone to taking offense and my great-grandfather with his pockets full of pennies for any children he met and they would have known us at a glance as their own, my character molded by their long-gone blood, my dark-eyed child following in their magnificent, long-gone bones..