The Family Reunion

Last weekend, eighty-six in our family gathered at a resort in northern Minnesota to, uh, well, you know....If you were under twelve, you were bored, heavily involved in fun, and getting to know relatives you had only heard about.

If you were middle-aged, you watched your children meet other members of the family, swam, golfed, boated, canoed, played tennis, and managed to find your way to the fermented and distilled areas so thoughtfully provided by resort management for refreshments.

If you were in the geezer generation, you talked and talked and talked and talked...mainly about now, but family stories were bubbling up all over the place. You noted family resemblances, admired new spouses, clucked over the occasional divorced, but mainly took pleasure in seeing the family find ways of making new friendships and renewing old ones.

Long ago, many of us lived in Minnesota, but now we have dispersed all over the place, and getting together is not easy. It's not just the challenge of getting from place A to place B; it's the realization that to maintain a family takes considerable effort, as much an act of will as an act of love.

And it is at such events that one becomes palpably aware of those who preceded us, not only in previous generations who made us possible but also those who have departed more recently - the pain of these departures has not yet been eased by time. 

So the stories and the pictures we brought to share take on another dimension, because if we do not do these things, who will there be to tell them at some future reunion?

Giving & Receiving

As one ages, there are three phases of stuff which arrives in the daily mail. The "introductory" phases is that first mailing from the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) which arrives around one's fiftieth birthday. This is a great opportunity to stomp around the room sermonizing about several topics - I'm too young, how did they know I was about to become fifty, why would I ever belong to that, and lastly and reluctantly, well perhaps I ought to consider joining...later.

Phase two begins with innumerable invitations to discuss your retirement with a veritable cascade of organizations and people, all deeply interested in helping you surmount the reality of your failing cash flow, your failing health, your failing abilities to manage yourself in your home, and your inevitable final trip after you have tumbled off your perch. This phase runs from the early sixties to the late sixties.

The third phase has to do with giving to worthy organizations, none of which will be able to survive another week without your committing to a bequest giving program, a big check now, an annuity deal, a charitable remainder trust, or some other device to empty your exchequer on behalf of some worthy organization. Comely lasses will chat with you for yours about your uniqueness and special relationship to their organizations and how long you will be remembered for having shifted a little something in the direction of their organizations.

Not long before my mother died, she decided to make her "bequest gifts" while she was still on deck. She asked me to write letters to accompany her check asking only that the gift be acknowledged in the way that the IRS required and that no matter how long she lived, all she wanted to hear from the organization was an annual report. All of the organizations she supported complied with her request, and there was one young woman from the University Museum in Chapel Hill who would take Mother out to lunch and never mention anything to do with money, for which act of personal charity she has been widely admired by my family.

My mail box is full of attractive invitations to benefits, projects to support, organizations on the boards of which I have served over the years, and frankly, the plethora of paper is beginning to wear me and the guy who picks up the recycling box every week out.

Better, i think, to look to the youngsters in their forties, tasting success, full of energy, in their peak earning years, and still unaware that the great American giant of Ageing, the AARP, is readying the first warning that the end is approaching. Leave the rest of us aged souls to think on the sins of our youths as we approach the end of our perch, without the accumulated guilt of not supporting organizations with which we were associated three or more decades ago.