looking through me

Tag: family

July 4, 2015

the fourth

One day of the year we all come together. Young and old look forward to it. The youngest don’t have a choice, but the rest of us plan trips around—or in some cases to—it. We keep time by it: “That was the year…”, “Don’t you remember when…?”, “You were a baby, so…”.

It’s not really about the food or the spread of desserts. It isn’t even about the pool or the ping-pong.

It’s about four generations being together. One day, one place, one family.

It isn’t exclusive. It is a rare year at least one friend or relative from another tree isn’t welcomed into our midst.

We sit. We eat. We swim or maybe just float. We talk. We remember.

In the warm summer afternoon time slows down. We simply are.

There’s no one to impress. We’re just us, and it’s glorious.

Then the under five and over 85 year olds tire despite their protestations. The ice cream has long since turned soupy. The shadows have completely covered the not-warm-enough-to-begin-with pool and chased the last shivering child into a towel.

The middle generations pack up the youngest and oldest generations. The goodbyes take progressively longer. We won’t all be here next year. We weren’t all here this year.

But therein lies the power of a family tradition. The faces around the tables change, but year after year the tables are filled.

The 4th of July: national holiday, family treasure.

 

Note: this was originally written three years ago. The youngest generation continues to increase; the oldest generation continues to decrease. And for the first time in family memory, the tradition broke this year . . . 

 

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May 3, 2015

timelessness

Twenty-some years slid by, but I’d have known them anywhere—their voices, their faces, their laughs . . . unchanged. It’s as though we were together last December, not some long ago Christmas buried in my childhood.

Family: the record skips and we dance without missing a beat.

Maybe it’s a miniscule glimpse of timelessness. Maybe it’s an imperfect, shadowy insight into God. He is unconstrained by beginning or end or any other point in time. He is fully present and fully past and fully future. He is. And maybe as His image bearers we contain a fraction of that ability to abide. Maybe in knowing one another we slip the shackles of time.

The relationships and bonds of family move on a separate plane from our day-to-day existence. We know one another apart from the details of our schedules. Because it isn’t about the time at all; it’s about the mysterious thread stitching us together. A gossamer filament binding life to life, sometimes running through bloodlines and sometimes woven by choice.

The older I get the fainter the clock ticks, the less pronounced its peels.

While my nephew hones in on the chime of his grandparents’ clock—every 15 minutes his head swivels to find the sound—and my nieces count their age by the month and when we’ll be together again by the day—they’re young.

At some point the seconds stilled for me; I stopped measuring time and started tracking memory. It means more than hours and years.

Love laces us together. And what is time in the face of love?

 

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