All posts tagged: family visits

50 Years of Funk

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It is a little complicated and I heard different versions of the tale floating around over the weekend. One way or another, my WideEyedParents fled south to North Carolina and got married in 1963. They married with little consideration for the impact of a July wedding date on their forthcoming 50th wedding anniversary party. It was warm. Fifty one parents, kids, aunts, uncles, cousins, first cousins once removed, twice removed in all directions, second cousins, fictive kin cousins, grandparents, in-laws, and yet to be born WideEyedFamilyMembers sweltered in the humid July afternoon of rural-ish Virginia over the weekend. We feasted on Jinx’s masterful barbeque from the Pit Stop in Charlottesville. (Just in case Jinx is reading this, we promise, no one put the cole slaw on the pulled pork Memphis style. They were kept strictly separate.) We drank a rootbeer keg dry and made poor showing on the wine and beer. Evidently the kids were thirsty and the adults are too old to properly attend to a keg. We talked and feasted and toasted into …

1,500 miles of family, Or, Caviar tastes like chicken pox.

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Stop 1: Scottsville, Esmont, Charlottesville Virginia WideEyedFunks: I was spooning caviar onto a smear of cream cheese at the pre-Christmas dinner snackie spread. Sister-in-law L. and Older Brother set us up with fine cheeses, Dracula’s Dilemma pickled garlic, some kind of awesome aged herbed salami.  And caviar. Our WideEyedParents were across the room and from around the Christmas tree we could hear dad shouting at mom: “Do you want some cold cuts?” “A cool one?” she said, “no, I don’t want a beer.” Heh. Might be time for hearing tests. Sister-in-law N. pushed through Sister-in-law L. and me to get to the snackies, “Quit snack blocking,” she told us. I inched my counter stool over an inch or so, but not really too far. I hadn’t tried all the cheeses yet. I lifted my caviar cracker to take a bite. “You eat that stuff?” Older Brother asked, clearly doubtful. I shrugged and ate the cracker. Older Brother watched me chew. “I don’t eat it,” he said. “Good,” Sister-in-law L. said, “more for the rest of …

Nice to see you. What books did you bring?

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Wide Eyed Funks visit one another every now and again, even though leaving the comforts and libraries of home is difficult for us. We are happy to see each other even if the joy of the family visit is tempered by the knowledge that a certain amount of reading time is going to be sacrificed for actual human interaction. It is, at best, bittersweet. We have developed a solution to the problem. And what I can’t decide is this: is our solution – mutually enacted, endlessly repeated –  conscious or unconscious? When a visit to or from a Funk household is impending, the book stack begins. What might the visitor like to read, what might be passed on to the host from the far-flung family collections? Once the visit begins, the discussions about “what have you been reading” are far more interesting than accomplishments, work activities, household life events, yah yah yah. That stuff comes and goes. The books, they linger. And, the best part, since everyone has new books to read, no one is left …