Gather, Ye Family, While Ye May

For as long as I can remember, I've had a powerful yearning in my heart for the closeness of family. I think it's because the blurry, leading edge of my memory includes moments of extended family, mostly of my uncle's fantastical house (did it really have a homemade sauna in the basement, or did I make that up?): sparklers and hotdogs in their gigantic, tiered backyard on the 4th of July; roaring around the block in the Fiat my uncle was rebuilding; my large, loud, deaf Grandma who taught me the sign for "milk and cookies," and of whom I was terrified, though every time we went to her house, she gave me a toy to keep; getting caught by my aunt at maybe 4 or 5 years old, in bed with my age-peer cousin, comparing her parts to mine, both our eyes wide in amazement. Ah, good times.

But we moved from Colorado to Texas when I was 5, and all of that was lost. We returned for visits, and a camping and fishing trip at Red Feather Lakes, in which the Colorado family ridiculed the Texas family's new accents, singing "Put another log on the fahr!" at us over and over again. I remember listening to "The Gambler," and "Coward of the County," and watching Breaking Away with my cousins and laughing at a man shaving his legs. I remember sitting in the back seat of my uncle's truck, driving through Denver traffic without a rear-view mirror, wondering who was following us as he turned to look over his shoulder again and again.

Then Aunt Piggy (I called Peggy "Piggy" when I was younger, and it stuck) died of cancer, and Grandma died, and we went on with our Texas lives while the Colorado family shattered and the pieces drifted apart. I periodically missed them, particularly that cousin, so close to me in age, who had for the briefest sliver of my memory seemed more like a sister than anything else. I wrote to the uncle, with no response. I wrote to the cousin, and she replied, but the connection didn't stick. I found her again after she'd married, but again, there was too big a gap between us now to bridge.

In my immediate family, too, there were gaps I longed to fill. My oldest brother, 12 years older than I, was on a year-long exchange program in Germany when we moved. He completed his senior year in Texas when he returned, but then moved on to begin building his adult life soon after. I remember that he built towers of blocks for me to giddily kick over, and he patiently rebuilt them again. I remember the smell of the backseat of his station wagon and "Hell is for Children" on the radio as he and his girlfriend drove my other brother and me to a water park. I remember watching Eddie and the Cruisers on the television in his apartment.

My sister, too, is there, barely visible in the wavering images of my early memory. She, like my oldest brother, was a product of my father's first marriage. My clearest memory of her is walking in on her in the bathroom as she stepped out of the shower, and how she screamed at me. I was sure she hated me. Then she was gone to California to live with her own mother, another gaping hole in my picture of what my family could have and should have been, but never quite was.

When I married into Mrs. Rodius' large, Irish-Catholic family, I envied her the seemingly thousands of cousins she had. Every month, it seemed, there were weddings and wakes, birthdays and showers, and people to visit in the hospital. The aunts and the uncles seemed to be the core of the family events: the aunts organized and the uncles entertained. The wake and funeral for Mrs. Rodius' father was one of the first family gatherings that I was a part of, and I was overwhelmed by how many names there were to remember.

But this weekend, my family is gathering. We've had two or three "Family Days" a year since my oldest brother's oldest child was an infant. This year, for the first time, we're doing it at the Rodius house. My mother's house has always been the setting, because it's always seemed the most appropriate place, with a covered patio and a big back yard for inflatable pools and badminton nets and squirt gun fights, and within a short drive for about half the family. My sister has never been a part of Family Day, though. There were bad feelings around the time that she left and before that, feelings that I didn't understand or even know existed at the time. Now, though, she has moved from California to Florida and seems ready to come back into her Texas family again. She's coming, with her two teenage boys. My older brother and his wife are coming, with their two kids. My oldest brother is coming, too, with his wife and youngest child, a tennis-playing teenage boy. His middle child is an Air Force cadet, and she's flying directly from the academy to Austin. His oldest daughter, 21 now, may not come, beginning as she is now to build her own adult life. We'll miss her if she doesn't come, as she has been a part of these gatherings for as long as she's been alive.

I think my mother's thrilled to have another venue in the rotation. She's always expressed her willingness to have Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Family Days at somebody else's house, but we've all been content to let her host. And I'm thrilled to be carrying on the tradition and to find that more and more family are including themselves in it. I hope they are all a cherished part of Thumper's memory when he is old enough to be sentimental.