huge oak tree. Made of planks laid over sawhorses, the table is very long and is crowded with pickled eggs and cold cuts and potato salad and three-bean salad and lemon meringue pie and dozens of other goodies. The place is my Aunt Isabel and Uncle Ted’s home in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, about ten miles from Norristown. The occasion is the annual family reunion.
In my early years the reunion was, after Christmas, the biggest event on my calendar. It was the only time I got to see Aunt Lizzie and her gang from Highspire, some eighty miles away. Even their names seemed different. There was a Willard and a Juanita and a second cousin exotically named Kendra.
One year there was even more excitement than usual: Uncle Elwood and Aunt Kay drove in from Michigan. I kept staring at my midwestern cousins Bruce, Janey, and Suzie. They might as well have come from Mars. Alas for Aunt Margaret and Uncle Chet and their kids Cindy, George, JoAnne, and Patty, there was no magic of distance. They lived on Chain Street in Norristown, a mere block and a half from 802 George. I barely noticed them.
As a once-a-year event, the reunion became a gauge by which to measure my progress, both physical and social. On the tennis court-size side yard, the uncles always got up a game of softball for the kids. I began as atiny, grunting fumbler, swinging in vain at the slowest underhand tosses with a bat as big as I was. By the age of ten or eleven, I was clipping the grass with sharp grounders; then line drives to the garage; then, as a seasoned teenage shortstop, long flies into the strawberry patch beyond the trees. But by then the family reunion was no longer number two on my calendar. It had been eclipsed by such happenings as school dances and miniature golf with my friends. The year came when I felt myself too big to participate in the softball game. In college, some years, I did not even attend the reunion.
But home—home is a reunion daily. And I never felt too big for Christmas. Christmas was a Bible thing, of course, and a school-vacation thing and a wrapped-presents thing and a homemade-cookies thing—but most of all, as I look back, it was a family thing.
My parents spent almost nothing on themselves. They bought only the clothes they needed. It was a big deal to treat themselves to a milkshake. They never went to the movies. And yet, for all they gave my brother and me, you’d have thought they were rich. My Christmas gifts came in piles. From Lincoln Logs to the inevitable walnut in the toe of my red felt stocking, I accepted the presents strictly as the objects they appeared to be. Only years later did I realize the truth: the gift was my parents’ selfless love.
One Christmas morning it bounced lightly off mychest as I came down the stairs, and I looked to see my first football wobbling at my feet. Another year it waited for me in the kitchen. I had unwrapped the last present from under the tree, and my father said, “Well, I guess that’s it. Looks like you did pretty good this year.” And then someone asked me to go to the kitchen for something, and there it was, in front of the sink: a spanking-new cream and green whitewall-tired Roadmaster bicycle. Love leaning on a kickstand.
My mother and father at the beach in 1940, six months before I was born.
Big
Brother
When my younger brother became student council president as a ninth grader at Rittenhouse Junior High, I was proud. In the years that followed Bill and I played golf, flung Frisbees, shared friends and cars. We were pals.
But those days were yet to come. During the George Street years, the four-and-a-half-year difference in our ages ruled out being pals. When I was in fourth grade, Bill was in kindergarten; when I was in tenth, he was in sixth. We had different friends, different involvements. Except for two years, we attended different schools. We shared parents and a house, but that was about all.
Because I wasn’t paying much attention to him
In my early years the reunion was, after Christmas, the biggest event on my calendar. It was the only time I got to see Aunt Lizzie and her gang from Highspire, some eighty miles away. Even their names seemed different. There was a Willard and a Juanita and a second cousin exotically named Kendra.
One year there was even more excitement than usual: Uncle Elwood and Aunt Kay drove in from Michigan. I kept staring at my midwestern cousins Bruce, Janey, and Suzie. They might as well have come from Mars. Alas for Aunt Margaret and Uncle Chet and their kids Cindy, George, JoAnne, and Patty, there was no magic of distance. They lived on Chain Street in Norristown, a mere block and a half from 802 George. I barely noticed them.
As a once-a-year event, the reunion became a gauge by which to measure my progress, both physical and social. On the tennis court-size side yard, the uncles always got up a game of softball for the kids. I began as atiny, grunting fumbler, swinging in vain at the slowest underhand tosses with a bat as big as I was. By the age of ten or eleven, I was clipping the grass with sharp grounders; then line drives to the garage; then, as a seasoned teenage shortstop, long flies into the strawberry patch beyond the trees. But by then the family reunion was no longer number two on my calendar. It had been eclipsed by such happenings as school dances and miniature golf with my friends. The year came when I felt myself too big to participate in the softball game. In college, some years, I did not even attend the reunion.
But home—home is a reunion daily. And I never felt too big for Christmas. Christmas was a Bible thing, of course, and a school-vacation thing and a wrapped-presents thing and a homemade-cookies thing—but most of all, as I look back, it was a family thing.
My parents spent almost nothing on themselves. They bought only the clothes they needed. It was a big deal to treat themselves to a milkshake. They never went to the movies. And yet, for all they gave my brother and me, you’d have thought they were rich. My Christmas gifts came in piles. From Lincoln Logs to the inevitable walnut in the toe of my red felt stocking, I accepted the presents strictly as the objects they appeared to be. Only years later did I realize the truth: the gift was my parents’ selfless love.
One Christmas morning it bounced lightly off mychest as I came down the stairs, and I looked to see my first football wobbling at my feet. Another year it waited for me in the kitchen. I had unwrapped the last present from under the tree, and my father said, “Well, I guess that’s it. Looks like you did pretty good this year.” And then someone asked me to go to the kitchen for something, and there it was, in front of the sink: a spanking-new cream and green whitewall-tired Roadmaster bicycle. Love leaning on a kickstand.
My mother and father at the beach in 1940, six months before I was born.
Big
Brother
When my younger brother became student council president as a ninth grader at Rittenhouse Junior High, I was proud. In the years that followed Bill and I played golf, flung Frisbees, shared friends and cars. We were pals.
But those days were yet to come. During the George Street years, the four-and-a-half-year difference in our ages ruled out being pals. When I was in fourth grade, Bill was in kindergarten; when I was in tenth, he was in sixth. We had different friends, different involvements. Except for two years, we attended different schools. We shared parents and a house, but that was about all.
Because I wasn’t paying much attention to him
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