family memories and tales

Yesterday was my dad's family reunion--all of his living brothers (1) and sisters (2) and their children and their children and their children at a lovely little park in our hometown. The reunion was a delight. My dad's family has always had a zest for life and an eye for a good time. They are generous people with kind hearts.

I've always loved being with my dad's family. He had four sisters and three brothers but his oldest sister and oldest brother didn't always live with the other siblings because my gramma was married to two other men before she married my grampa. (Which, if you think about it, is a little reminder that people really aren't so different now than they were 100 years ago.)

My cousin, Linda, sent out the invitations to the reunion this year. She printed them over a picture of my dad's family when they were all kids--probably around 1935 or so. The picture shows all of the kids sitting around my gramma and grampa--girls in flowered print dresses and boys in overalls. And you can pick out my dad easily because he's the ten-year-old who's sticking out his tongue. My gramma always called that picture their "Grapes of Wrath" picture because they looked like a family of dirt poor okies. Her words, not mine. I think they look more like my cousins than my aunts and uncles.

As soon as I got to the reunion, I was surrounded by concerned family members asking about Stu's health. They were all relieved that he had received a liver as soon as he had and that his recovery was going so well. (Note: Stu and his family missed the reunion because of concerns about being in a large crowd, but to let you know how good he is feeling, he may be tired today but he and Shi spent yesterday afternoon making and sealing 20 bottles of salsa from tomatoes, peppers, and herbs from their garden.)

One of the people who came up to me was a man who looked familiar, but I couldn't figure out who he was. He approached me and said, "The last time I saw you was in the back seat of a Porsche."

The summer that I turned 16, my family took a road trip to southern California. It was the first and only such trip for us and we hit all of the required fun spots, but my favorite memory is from the last night we were there. We drove to San Bernardino to visit my dad's oldest brother, Bob, and his family. It happened that we showed up on the 21st birthday of Bob's son, Bruce. For his birthday, Bruce's sister and her doctor boyfriend bought tickets to a Linda Ronstadt concert for Bruce and a date, and also planned to cover dinner before and drinks after the concert. How lucky was Bruce when his geeky, 16-year-old cousin from Utah showed up that afternoon just in time for his dad to insist that Bruce would be delighted if I would accompany him to the concert and all of the other planned happenings that evening.

Happenings doesn't adequately describe the events of that night. It started when Ginny's boyfriend showed up in his Porsche and Bruce and I somehow crammed ourselves into the back. Might have been better for Bruce had I been his girlfriend, but at least I was a small-framed 16-year-old, so even if he didn't get to squish up close with his girlfriend, at least he had some extra space, right? The excitement continued as we headed onto the LA freeway at the same time as Ginny's boyfriend's buddy in his Lamborghini. And as everybody knows, if you have two competitive guys driving their fast cars and it's only 4:30 in the afternoon in LA, you can hit speeds well over 130 mph on the freeway as long as the cars are built to weave in and out of traffic and can seriously hug the road. We arrived at the restaurant in a flash (or maybe less than a flash) and gracefully exited the cars for a delicious dinner of fresh salads and fresh fish and wine. Well, they all had the wine, I had Pepsi, which at the time, in Utah, was nearly scandalous for me. Next we piled back into the cars and raced to the Universal Studios amphitheatre for a great concert. That Linda Ronstadt has some pipes. I'm not sure, but I thought she was wearing a cub scout uniform--the shirt and blue shorts and knee socks and all--but I could have been wrong. Whatever it was, she looked pretty good.

I figured the night was pretty much done after that. But I was wrong. I think we went to at least two or three bars before we ended up at the Playboy Club. In LA. When I was 16. Barely. From Utah. Holy cow. I had never had that many Pepsi's in one night.


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At the reunion, my cousin Linda said that the night before, during dinner, she kept telling her brother, Steve, that he was wrong, it couldn't have been Bill & Jeri's girl who was in Vegas with him, it had to be someone else, but Steve kept insisting it was me. I think she quoted him saying, "Dammit, Linda, I know my cousins and it was her."


The summer between my jr and sr years in high school, my high school band headed to Vegas for a parade. My parents made me promise to get in touch with my cousin, Steve, who was a pit boss at The Tropicana. It happened that our motel--motel, not hotel--was a couple of blocks from The Tropicana, so as soon as we got some free time, I lead a bunch of other underage band geeks down the side of the road to hook up with my cousin.

Don't know what I was thinking, taking a bunch of underage kids into the casino, but Steve was delighted to see us (and by us, I mean me, his cousin), and after we chatted briefly (and he escorted me and my underaged cohorts from the casino before he got fired), we made a plan for him to pick me up for dinner on the last day of my band tour. I begged my band director to let me go, assuring him that there would be no repeat of the previous summer when I missed the bus after a band trip to the local amusement park. Steve would get me back in plenty of time to load the bus and head home.

Steve picked me and and we headed to the MGM Grande where we were quickly seated and then played keno and had drinks--more of the evil Pepsi for me. When it was time to order dinner, I couldn't decide what to order, so Steve ordered for us--something foreign I'd never even heard of--lox and bagels. I was a bit apprehensive, but Steve was right, it was delicious. We laughed and ate and played keno and had a great time. But as you may have already guessed, we didn't allow sufficient time to make the drive back to the motel parking lot and we arrived just in time to see the bus pulling onto the highway. I was surprised by how quickly those yummy lox and bagels turned to cement in my belly. But Steve said not to worry, we would just follow the bus and when it pulled over, he'd stop and I'd get on and all would be fine. Before too long, the bus pulled off the highway and into the parking lot of a small souvenier shop. Band geeks piled out, eager to be first in the bathroom or to spend their last bit of money on Vegas Strip snow globes and tiny ceramic slot machines, while I begged Mr Talcott to please, please, please, let me on the bus. He pretended to shoot himself in the head but eventually moved away from the bus doorway, and I trotted back to Steve's car to tell him he could leave, I was going to be allowed back on the bus. Steve shrugged his shoulders and said he hadn't been that worried about it. He figured that if I missed the bus, we'd just hang out until I was ready to leave and then he'd have bought me a plane ticket to fly home. I never did tell him that my mom would have never allowed me to fly home. She had insisted on driving to Lagoon to pick me up when I'd missed the bus the previous year, and if she'd had time to get as steamed as she was when she showed up then, I couldn't even imagine how furious she'd have been after driving all of the way to Vegas.

I suspect that if I'd missed the bus from Vegas, I would have been better off to just get a job at the casino and begin a new life there. And I suspect that would have been okay with Steve.