Family Reunion

Family Reunion

Family reunions have always been a big part of my life. One of the most memorable was actually not my family’s reunion, but Larry’s. It’s hard to believe now, looking back, that I married a man without ever having met any of his family, except for his two children. But I did. And within a few months there was a Camp Family reunion in Gadsden, Alabama, and we went so that I could meet Larry’s mother and father and aunts and uncles and cousins, and they could meet his second wife.

I don’t what I expected, but I come from a very, very regular Southern family with almost no divorces and nice separation of the generations, so that all the cousins were younger than the aunts and uncles, and no scandal to speak of. I mean that literally. Our family did not discuss our scandals. Skeletons were kept securely locked in closets. My first clue that this (his) family was a little different was apparent when we first arrived at the picnic, spread out across three picnic shelters lined up in a row at a county park.

“There’s Mother.” Larry pointed toward a matronly, grandmotherly-looking woman seated in a lawn chair just inside the far end of Shelter #1. She was surrounded by other ladies about her same age and a few younger women.

“And there’s Daddy,” he said. I swiveled to follow his finger pointing toward the other end of Shelter #3.

“Who’s that he’s with?” I asked.

“Oh, that’s his first wife Elizabeth.”

“How long ago was he married to Elizabeth?” I asked.

“Oh, about thirty years ago,” he said.

“And there’s my sisters Betty and Doris.”

“I thought your sister was Judy and she wasn’t going to be here.”

“They’re my half-sisters and I hardly ever see them,” he said.

Pappy, or RO, or Jack—all names his father went by—spent the afternoon shuffling back and forth from Shelter #1 to Shelter #3, spending time with first one wife, then the other. Suddenly I had a glimpse of some future Camp reunion, where Larry would be shuffling back and forth between Wife #1, Donna, and Wife #2, me.

And it did come to pass, although thirty years and our own set of scandals had to be lived first.