Family Recipe

Our trip up north so far is turning out a bit differently from last year. For one, it’s just me and my two teenage sons squeezed into the Corolla, instead of five of us all spread out in the Expedition. For another, we had to roll down all the windows three times the first day to let the "bad" air out. Boys have no inhibitions about releasing inner demons in mixed company. Car games tend to have a different focus as well. I quit playing "20 Questions" when the last three answers turned out to be complicated weapons systems that only the boys knew anything about and which subsequently prompted arguments about classification ("It's a rail gun!" "No, it's not! It's a mass driver gun!"). Most of the drive I spent thinking ahead to my family reunion, part of our annual summer vacation.

When I was a child our family reunions were held at my uncle's house. He and my aunt lived on a lake and they had a big L-shaped dock that stretched a hundred feet out into the water. After arriving we'd spend the day getting sunburned, playing badminton in the big back yard, swimming in the cool water, hoping that this was the year we'd be allowed past the second ladder to the deep end and the diving board where the big kids hung out.

Always my mother made sheets of baked chicken and a pan or two of apple slices to bring for the potluck and the smells of both would make us crazy the whole drive there. I remember the women in the kitchen, heating food, the men outside sitting in lawn chairs or playing lawn darts. There was a player piano in the rec room in the basement and we kids, there must’ve been a hundred of us, would take turns pushing the pedals and watching the keys magically go up and down, not really hearing the old timey music, just hurrying through to the end because the fun part was flipping the lever to make the paper roll rewind, and listening to the snap, snap, snap sound as the little metal hook on the end released and whipped around over and over.

When it was time to eat we'd make a beeline toward the back of the house where the cloth covered picnic tables held stacks of plates and plastic silverware. A line would form and, shivering in our wet bathing suits, we’d shuffle up either side of the food table under our parents’ watchful eyes, careful not to take dessert before we'd had some "real" food first.

Besides my mom’s chicken, and my aunt’s chicken, and my other aunt’s chicken, there would be meatballs in barbecue sauce, bowls of potato salad, soft rolls with butter, lemon cake and fruit pies. There were huge watermelons cooled in the lake, then cut into half moon slices. These were eaten standing up and a little hunched over so the juice dribbling down the sides would miss your bathing suit. We ate them all the way to the white rind, saving a mouth full of seeds to use as ammo on our cousins.

After lunch my uncle would take us out in his motorboat, driving with one hand on the wheel and the other on the back of the seat, standing and watching the waterskiers skimming over the water behind us. I never attempted to waterski, sure I couldn't in a million years attain that perfect balance between the pull of the boat and the push on the skis, admiring the others who circled around and around the lake and made a game of letting go of the handle at just the right moment to come coasting all the way back in to the dock.

Things have changed in the past twenty years. My aunt and uncle no longer host our reunions. Most of their generation is gone now. Instead of meeting at someone’s home we get together at a park with picnic pavilions and a swimming beach. There are fewer of us that show up every year, partly because we’re more scattered and partly because it’s difficult to commit the time and effort to come.

As children we played in the water until we were so tired we could barely lift our arms to wave goodbye and we sprawled in the back of the car, sleeping all the way home. Now we’ve become the grown ups we watched as children, content to sit at the picnic tables under the shelter, talking for hours and looking at photos.

There are ultimate Frisbee games played in the field at the front of the park and someone usually brings water pistols. This year my sister brought a ball and chalk to play four square. At the end of the day we gather together for one of my all time favorite games in which a family member sets the camera to take a picture and then runs like hell to get in the shot over and over because someone keeps saying they blinked until finally said family member falls down from heat exhaustion while everyone else cracks up.

In an effort to help boost the turnout numbers this year my brother organized a recipe book to mark our reunion. He contacted family members via email this past spring requesting pictures and recipes. I put it together on the computer, then posted it online for downloading. We got a good response from the families with over thirty pages of recipes, covering a broad range of foods from appetizers to desserts, although there was a curious duplication of effort regarding a particular dish so that at one point we thought about calling it the Marfia Big Book of Baked Bean Recipes.

My brother hopes the recipe book will become part of the reunion tradition for us, binding us closer together as a family, encouraging us to add recipes and pictures to it every year. Everyone will be able to participate regardless of where they live and no matter what age they are. We’ve already heard from family members who want to be included in next year’s book, so I’m sure it will be a success. My favorite picture in this year’s book is the group shot on the front. Everyone’s laughing because I just made it into the shot before the camera went off. Unfortunately, I blinked.