Family is a very odd thing. I went to a celebration of my Aunt's 70th birthday this week, which consisted of a small, awkward gathering of relatives near and not-so-near in a white, echoing community hall in the west end. Either because of the mood i was in, or the simple fact that most of these people really had little to do with my life in any way, but i was even quieter and more detached than i usually am . I stood by the food, said little, and observed. It all struck me as slightly absurd. The only thing most of us had in common was a little genetic material, yet we feel obligated to gather every so often and catch up on the superficial details of each others' lives, where we are now working or studying, where we travelled, who we ran into once and where, as if any of this mattered to us, as if we were old friends who actually had some shared experience, some bond more concrete than this mere biological "family", as if these people had interesected with my life for more than a few minutes, at another birthday, wedding, or funeral 15 years ago, when i was only "this high". True, immediate family has shared experience, shared pain, perhaps some shared happy memories, some journey together, and so much of this fills the silences between and behind our words, our differing remembrances of those times when we were together, when what we did and said affected each other, before the seas rose and we became islands. I would be a fool to discount the affect that 20 years of living with one or both of my parents, and my brother, had on who i am now...but could not people i have known for much shorter periods of time have equally significant influence on me? And what are these lonely, troubled souls who shared my early life to me now? When i was young, they were my world, my culture, my friends and enemies, the people whose love or approval i sought, the only ones whose habits and words i sought to understand, the only ones from whom to try to cajole the things i needed or wanted. As i grew older, they still shared my world with new objects, new puzzles and confusions. But i left them somewhere back there, or they individually left me and each other, and now i am as incomprehensible to them as they are to me. I have spent more time with them than with any other human beings. Yet we are strangers, groping for some point of common understanding. My father i think i know best, yet he continues to surprise me, and in his silence there is a deep well of feeling and thought i have not touched. He is still a mystery - i cannot predict him, and i do not how to read the motives behind his actions. I worry that all relationships lead here, to this entropy, that more time only reveals less understanding, that any connection or shared understanding is only an illusion that time will eventually dispell, leaving all of as completely alone and un-comprehended.
Yet i share tables with other peoples familes, the children of my father's sister or brother, who i have only snippets of shared life, a thanksgiving meal once a year at best, people i respect and enjoy, but as an observer- they do not know me and i can only know in them what read in those short encounters. They finish degrees, move, marry and produce children- but these do not reveal who they are. This is a gathering of stangers- we are all nervous, we are all unsure of the other, circling carefully, answering politely but vaguely, avoiding the known but unmentionable, My father and my uncle's alcoholism, my cousin's failed marriages, another cousin's disowning her mother, the fact that my own mother, previously a part of these strange gatherings, is never mentioned here, as though, in my father leaving her, she has ceased to exist. I wonder what they say about each other when they leave here, how do husbands and wifes judge the updates they obtain about these unrelated relations? I wonder what they think of me? Do i imagine their puzzled expressions, their forced inqiries? Afterwards i imagine them shaking their heads, wondering what happened to "Don and his boys"
I think about them, i read into their distance and their too-polite inquiries a condesension, an unpleasant but necessary duty discharged- but is that only attributing my own feelings to them? Is it merely the same noncomprehension that seperates us all? Why should we expect to find understanding and connection in family, though we are thrown into it by chance, as it were, when it is difficult to find even among our carefully selected friends, drawn from those that common interest and pursuit has led us alongside?