We’re past the peak of the summer here in the northern hemisphere, and that means that children will soon be going back to school, all too soon, I believe. When I was a kid, we had three solid months of summer vacation, and that was the best time of the year by far, because then you were with your family all day long, or you could play ball with the neighbor kids, or roam the woods, or go for a swim — we had a nice pool, but there were lakes everywhere too — or do anything you liked. I had 39 first cousins, 37 of whom are still with us, and 20 of whom lived in our small town, so that I saw them all the time. We played a lot of baseball, and cards, and chess, and croquet — in my cousin Bobby’s yard, perched on a hill over the street, so that when your ball got sent for a ride, it could roll a long way — and ping pong, and we shot pool, or went bowling if we could get one of our parents to drop us off on a Friday or Saturday night, and a hundred other things. I haven’t seen Bobby in about 40 years, but I think if we sat down right now we could talk all day long about this or that or the other — like the time when he and our cousin Frankie dug holes in the deer-path in the woods and covered them over with grass as “traps,” then got one of the other kids to take a walk with us there, just to see him put his foot in one and trip. Boys!
One of the things we did that I loved most of all, before we got our swimming pool, was to spend a whole day at one of the nearby lakes, all the aunts and uncles and cousins, and our patriarch and matriarch, Nonno and Nana. Hamburgers and hot dogs on the grill, which I didn’t so much eat as inhale, so hungry I got; horseshoes for the men and sometimes for us boys; a huge ashcan or two full of ice that my father or one of the uncles got from the ice house — we still had an ice house in town — and then chopped to bits with an ice pick, and in the ashcans, bottles of beer and soda from the local bottling company. Why, even the soda was local, from “Crystal Club” and “A-Treat,” with a couple of flavors I haven’t tasted since. And wiffle ball, with the aunts too; and I have a clear memory in my mind’s eye, of my Aunt Irene striking out and laughing herself all silly about it. Mostly we went on these outings on a Sunday, after Mass, and my biggest worry was that it would rain, and then the grownups would call it off. The best of the lakes wasn’t even public, or much of a lake, and because it was privately owned, it must have taken its name then from the owner and his business, so that I can’t locate it now on a map. But they had pavilions there, one of which we’d rent for the day, and we needed one too, what with the 14 grownups and (at that time) the 17 kids. It wasn’t that we had any special ideas about family life — and there is our Word of the Week, family. We just did what everybody else did. Or so we assumed.
It was the same way with Debra’s family. She and her parents and aunts and uncles and cousins would take what was then a long trek to far upstate New York, where her Uncle Willard and Aunt Ruth and their five kids lived on a small farm, and there the men would pitch in with real work in the fields, and the kids too, helping to pitch and bale the hay, and in general have a grand time. Willard and Ruth could hardly ever get away from the farm, because after all, animals need to be tended, but it worked out splendidly when the others came to visit — and from it she has memories most dear, memories that don’t fade with the passage of time, but acquire the soft glow of gratitude and remembered love. Now, nobody would say that our “Holiday Lake” or Uncle Willard’s farm off the road leading into Boonville were tourist destinations. Thank God for that! But even when we did go on a vacation now and then, you know, the kind that involves a car and motels and hitting places to see, we went with other people in the family. So when I was 14, we took a road trip to Canada, to the Thousand Islands and Kingston and Montreal, and on the way back to Ausable Chasm and Lake George, but we went with my Aunt Diane and Uncle Joe and their two kids. That too was just a matter of course. I wouldn’t have had it any other way. I still remember my Uncle Joe shaking his head at me in amazement, while we were eating breakfast at the Howard Johnson’s in Plattsburgh. “I can’t believe how much you can put away!” he said — and he was six foot three!
Hey, school districts, and parents, you too, give your kids that full time. If you’re in school always, when are you ever going to learn anything? For there are a million things you can learn only outside of the walls and the structure and the surveillance. And if you’re learning them with your family, what a glorious thing that is!
An odd thing about the word, family: it is borrowed into Middle English from Latin familia and its descendants in the Romance languages, but in Latin it denoted the whole of a household, referring most especially to the famuli, the indentured servants. Even in English, it wasn’t till the 1600’s that family meant, in particular, father and mother and children. A common Old English word for everybody attached to a house, all the kin and all the servants, was hiwen, a cousin of Latin civis, originally a village, only later to grow abstract and huge — giving us such words as civic and civilization. But it is sweet to retreat from there and return to the familiar — near to the heart, as the family ought to be.
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