Name tags can pay off (06/11/07)

"I was at your wedding!" the guy in the blue shirt announced as he cornered me outside the park shelter house. If he had not been wearing a name tag with both his and his father's names emblazoned on it I wouldn't have known who he was at all.

As far as I was concerned I had never seen him before in my life.

That is how it goes at family reunions. We don't recognize people until we put them in context.

It wasn't until he told me how my grandmother had "stretched" his brother's hair that I knew for certain who he was. Unfortunately, the brother with the stretched hair didn't attend. I guess he was afraid my grandmother was still alive and might grab him by the hair again and make him get another haircut.

The story was that this brother had a bad habit of running up behind people and shoving them in the back. He did it once too often and Grandma grabbed him by the hair. When he had to visit the barber shortly thereafter, he complained that it was because his hair had been stretched and it was his Aunt Merl's fault.

It was a perfect day for a get together. The sky was blue and the breeze coming off Grand Lake St. Marys was just right. We were greeted by a cousin (?) wearing a shirt that proclaimed that "Fat people are harder to kidnap."

I laughed when his son took the group picture because that shirt will go down in history. I can just see some future descendant wondering why this guy was afraid of being kidnapped!

I peered at name tags and tried to recall who belonged to which branch of the family. I recognized the twins but only because they looked a lot like their mother.

They resembled each other less than I remembered. We reconnected and told all the old stories that I have heard my whole life. I even learned a few new ones.

We marveled over how much one relative looked like her mother, how one was still pretty and how bad another one looked.

I heard that one relative had lots of children -but only one that was legitimate. I wish I had gotten his name! I'm pretty sure it was one of the Texas bunch. He sounded very, um ... popular. And friendly.

We were afraid to cut into the picture-perfect Jell-O dessert created by a very talented wife so it melted and still managed to look pretty. We polished off numerous dishes made by people we had never heard of before but who were connected by this thing we call family.

I took lots of pictures and not enough notes. I wrote down addresses for relatives I had lost touch with. I even found out that one of my favorite cousins is in Louisiana and trains guard dogs.

After it was over and we were driving through a 10-minute downpour, I regretted not getting more information. I wanted to grill these people on their lives and their pasts but kept getting sidetracked. Then I realized that I had more tales than I could process already.

I now knew that I belonged to a family of talkers. There wasn't a shy, quiet soul among us.

We were all more than willing to share our stories. They may not have been the exact ones I was after but there were clues as to why certain things were tolerated and others were not. We conveniently forgot to mention some of the more terrible parts of our lives and brought up some things that were best forgotten.

We shared sepia-toned pictures and someone pointed out that the baby in one photo was me. I couldn't tell because I had left my reading glasses in the car. I now covet a copy of my grandparents' wedding picture. They both look so young and she was incredibly pretty. I still wonder what happened to her.

It was the first reunion I had been to as an adult. I remember going to several as a child and being bored out of my mind. Now it is up to our children and grandchildren to be bored while I collect memories and photographs.

Where else am I going to find out I am related to a philanderer, someone who used to be paranoid about haircuts, a guard dog trainer and someone who was at my wedding?[[In-content Ad]]