Connections and Clusters

Connections and clusters, everyone has them. We call them families. We call them friends. We call them congregations. We call them co-workers. We all have them to one degree or another. Some of these social connections are an accident of birth and stronger than titanium. Some of them are by choice and although strong, can be broken with enough wear on those connective relationships.

The connection between parent and child is one of those of titanium-like strength. Holidays like Christmas and Thanksgiving, Easter and Fourth of July provide the evidence of those kinds of connection. When I was growing up our connections were evidenced weekly by a gathering at my grandmother’s house. My dad and my uncles were there along with the cousins. Dogs barked and children laughed, played and shouted in the aftermath of a home-cooked meal. It was Thanksgiving every week. Saturday night it was ice cream, sometimes homemade, and Perry Mason. We’d try to guess which city would show on the TWA commercial. Grandpa would get so "nervous" with all the noise that he would "retire" to his bedroom. I always wondered what he was doing in there. I found out later he was reading paperback novels.

It seemed that those weekly gatherings were the glue that held our family cluster together. And they went on for a number of years until dissolving marriages and deaths in the family dwindled them in size. For nearly forty years now two holiday gatherings kept the cluster together on Fourth of July and Christmas Eve. Fourth of July coincided with the birthday of my half-sister. Her birthday and my dad’s love of fireworks (the safe and sane kind, really!) along with good food, popsicles and swimming in the pool kept the extended connections of our particular cluster together.

Cross-country moves dwindled the gathering down. One year it was just my son’s family, even my dad wasn’t at his own party!

Last year was the first one we missed Fourth of July since the annual gathering started. For the past few years our Christmas Eve gathering has moved to my son’s house. The number in our cluster has dwindled but the connections are strong. We keep in touch by facebook during the times in between. Those weekly gatherings at my grandmother’s house didn’t span as many decades as our Christmas Eve gathering. But my childhood memories of those times are pretty vivid, even still.

My grandmother has passed from the scene, and the homestead was sold, demolished and the staging ground for a McMansion. That was my first home. There was a flagpole in the backyard, we kept trying to climb it until we could. A concrete pond used to hold the family alligator. We wondered if we would see his offspring rising from the murky water. Paths ran among my grandmother’s foliage and a huge tangerine tree was always good for an afternoon snack. Hide and seek and tag were our weekend staples. What great hide and seek games we could have in our grandma’s backyard. We’d play until it was too dark to see and then it was in the house for ice cream! Sometimes in the evening grandpa would emerge from his den of solitude. There were discussions (arguments) among the uncles and the other kin covering every subject under the sun. Great training ground for a budding lawyer. There was love, for sure.

Distance strains these connections and we make up for their lack with instant messages and emails. They are a poor substitute at best for face to face connections around the family meal and the joy that children find in the unsupervised play of a Saturday afternoon.

These are the memories my parents created for me and they echo through the corridors of my life.