95 Piccadilly
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Famed Anglo-American writer and great proprietor of the emigre, Henry James, said, “it takes an endless amount of history to make for a little tradition.” This past weekend, I felt quite a bit of that course through my veins. For most, Labor Day remains a celebration of the American Dream and the ingenuity that it took to build greatness and conquer the foes of industry, a mindset that surely has its place and served America well. From the onset of the Industrial Revolution and through and beyond the Great War, the sky seemed perpetual and filled with America’s industrial spirit. If that’s the mentality for most, it’s not quite been – at least not entirely – for my maternal family. While most Americans are getting in their last wear of white and seersucker, for us, it’s been the weekend of “the family reunion,” a highly anticipated event and one on par with Royal Ascot for my grandmother and her siblings’ social calendars. Keeping tight with that tradition, that reunion transpired this weekend, as we added to the mix a memorial service for one of the great familiar lights and yet, too, a marriage, miles away, for my cousin, Alisha, as she tied the knot in a chapel in Nevada, adding numbers to our family. Not missing the irony, technology, a direct correlation to the feats of Labor Day itself, allowed us to do and be many places.
Though the reunion is not what it was decades ago, with numbers (and food services) annually dwindling, that so many of my grandparents’ generation have gone on to greater rewards seems to have taken both a toll and uplifted a modern resolve: to try and perpetuate something they cared about. That seemed evident as family member after family member thumbed through my great aunt’s collection of photographs, seeing all the familiar faces of parents and grandparents and cousins, long gone. In ways, I suppose, it was a suitable sendoff, as we said goodbye to the lady who was, to me, growing up, simply “Granny Jip.”
When I was born, my parents lived next door to she and Uncle Bob and hours from either set of my actual grandparents. I suspect that’s when she became a surrogate grandmother. She was the lady I chased with frogs in the front yard, when knee high to a grasshopper, and who accompanied us to the hospital, even as a teenager, when I had a tonsillectomy, and it became clear over the weekend, possessed a hundred photographs of me as a child. With passing years, we learn that family are not necessarily those who share your blood, but they are always those who share your dreams, who want for you that which you want for yourself, who share your passions and enthusiasms for that attainment. Modern family reunions can far too often highlight those who don’t have your back, but then, sometimes, we get lucky and they highlight those who do.