Of Present and Future Realities (or ''What I Am Going To Do On My Summer Vacation'')

A little bird asked recently where I'd been and why I hadn't blogged lately. The answers to that question are essentially, (a) I've been right here. (b) I've had nothing much to say. Answer "b" does not mean I've had nothing going on; in fact, the opposite is true. I've had so much going on that I have had no time to stop and process any of it and consider what, if anything, any of it means to me.

So lets do now...

Christmas came and went, leaving behind it a few cherished gifts and a pile of bills so daunting, that I've been forced to go on Zoloft while we figure out how to pay them off. We had fun, though the weather conspired to deny us our usual snowboarding/skiing (and sometimes crashing and emergency-rooming) trip while in New York to see my folks, siblings, nieces and nephews. After years of being frustrated at having to "fit" a trip to my father's home into our too-short trip North, I was profoundly saddened that we had no need to "fit" that trip into our plans this year. After having gotten to know the area where he lived fairly well over the years, it seems strange to think that I have no reason ever to go there again. And his home, which was always somehow so familiar to me yet never a very comfortable place to be; the knowledge that it belongs to someone else now, and that I will likely never set foot there again, is tough to get my head around.

That present reality has forced me to face a future reality; one upon which my brain has seized far ahead of actually being ready to think of it. That being the sure knowledge that one day (may it be many, many years hence) my mother and step-father will follow where my father has now gone. That knowledge has led me to think of the time I have left to share with them in a very different way than I did only a year ago.

Between them my mother and step-father share six kids, and have shared them since I was two. With three boys and three girls, we were the "real" Brady bunch. Unlike the TV version, we had more than one bathroom and no live-in maid. Our trials and tribulations were similar to theirs at first blush, though I like to think ours would have made for more entertaining television. While TV's Marcia was nursing a swollen nose, my sister Tracy was throwing one of our cats out a second-floor window to see if it would still land on its feet. (It did, and was fine, though it tended to keep a safe distance from her after that.) When TV's Jan was struggling to find her place while living in her sister's shadow, my brother Mark was shooting one of the neighbor's kids with an arrow. (In Mark's defense, the kid did dare Mark to do it.) During another episode, my step-father came home one day to find one of my sisters being held at sword-point by yet another of the neighbor's children. (In his defense, it can reasonably be said that our family fired the first shot in that particular war.) Yes, we were a lot like the Brady's. (Maybe the Brady's on acid?)

Growing up in Upstate New York, we spent a lot of summers in the Adirondack Mountains (where the phrase "bear with us" is actually a call for help), and we've managed to keep up a tradition of getting together there on or around the Fourth of July each year. For most of the past twenty-odd years we've spent the time "roughing" it on a small island on Fourth Lake. (Alger Island, if you care.) As we've gotten older and more numerous (we kids now have kids) the will to endure the elements just for a chance to rehash old arguments has waned for many of us. Also, as more and more of us reached the legal drinking age it became harder get a good fire started and even harder to keep from falling in it once we had. So it was that in 2006 we eschewed the arms of Mother Nature (and the charms of crapping in an outhouse) and rented a lodge on the channel between Fourth and Fifth lakes in Inlet, NY, thus beginning a new chapter in our shared summer history. (And no doubt a new file in the local sheriff's file cabinet.)

Of course, like every chapter before it, this chapter has its associated problems, hassles, dilemmas, and such. High on the list is the fact that as families go, we are legion, and so it is hard to find any single domicile capable of housing us all comfortably. ("Comfortably" here means with enough room to allow combatants to find neutral corners when someone needs to cool off after a row over whether or not "pantine" is a legitimate word in Scrabble.) Fortunately for us, the place we've found has beds for 22 individuals, which pretty much covers the subset of our tribe most likely to show up for the Annual Fourth of July Family Get Together and Hand-to-Hand Combat Training Extravaganza. Unfortunately, the draconian, anti-business residential codes in and around this particular Adirondack burg mandate that no more than 16 people actually stay there overnight.

That's right! We've got 22 bodies and we're renting a place that has beds for 22 bodies, but only 16 bodies can sleep there. This means that this year, as last year, a couple of people will have to sleep a few doors down at the venerable, "Fish-Smell Motel." (Okay, it's not actually called that, but it should be.) And who decides who stays where? Well, the long answer to that is that we will work out a reasonably equitable solution betwixt the family heads in such a way as to please everyone. The short answer is; I will.

See, everybody wants to stay at "the lodge." Remember the episode of The Brady Bunch where both Greg and Marcia stake a claim to the attic room as their own? Same thing, except the lodge is the attic and we are dealing with roughly 10 Greg's and 12 Marcia's (give or take a couple of each). Nobody wants to be the odd Brady out, but someone has to be. There are simply no other places that could hold all of us to be found in that area. (Certainly not on our collective Brady incomes.)

As in all things familial, the week we spend together is always worth the trouble, but the trouble is always part of the price we share for that week of memories. And that's another problem... with so many families coming together and so many variables to be considered, deciding who pays what at week's end this year will no doubt be a hotly contested issue (as it was in 2006). What variables? Well, for starters, not everyone can come and stay for the entire week. Should those people pay the same as those who stayed longer? Second, my family will take up four "slots" in the lodge (myself, my wife, my one kid, my other kid) while my sister's will take up three (her, her big kid, her smaller kid). Should she pay the same as we do for a week at the lodge for her family, or should she pay for three "slots" while we pay for four? Oh, and her husband will be coming down later in the week, but we don't know how many nights he plans to stay. Since the house will be at capacity at that point, does he get a room down the road away from his wife and kids, or do they all move down the road, or do we hide him in the attic?

However we work out these and other issues this year, I hope we can minimize the number of panties that get tied in a wad over them, because (and here's where we find our way back to my point about future realities) we have no idea how many more years we are going to be able to spend together. My mother and step-father, matriarch and patriarch of the gang that couldn't shout straight, aren't going to be here forever. I get that now. And "getting it," I've come to realize that they are the glue that binds the entire happy/loud/crazy/scattered/contentious lot of us together.

With all the difficulties inherent in gathering any significant number of us (along with a sufficient cache of alcohol, snack foods, and first aid supplies) in any one spot at any one time, I wonder whether we'll find the wherewithal to brave the highways, the vacation housing dilemmas, and the occasional unavoidable hostilities with any frequency in that inevitable future reality. How many years will it be before I'm looking back on my memories of so many summer visits to the Adirondacks and realizing that I have no further reason to go there? I mean, maybe my siblings and I will stay connected and keep committed to our shared traditions. Maybe we'll be making memories together as a group, in one form or another, for the rest of my life and beyond.

There's an emotion I cannot name. It comes in the form of sunlight reflected off ripples on the black water of a deep mountain lake, the bottom of which is layered with memories of raucous laughter and quiet contemplation—the sounds and silences of a family—that have drifted down and settled there to be stirred only by our eventual return or the errant angler's hook. I hope we can go back there forever, or in the alternative, that I never actually know when we've seen it for the last time.