When You Have To Go There, They Have To Take You In

No one described home better than the poet Robert Frost

In Death of the Hired Man, he wrote, "Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in."

And so it is with the holidays.

We ply the freeways or fly over fly-over land to get to a place where they have to take us in, and sometimes, we are the place where the most improbable of people, our family, has to be taken in.

I have thought a lot about family. Much of it done while driving freeways or gazing down at the checkered patterns of harvested fields and what I thought is this - there is hope for us all, because if we can fall so deeply in love with the perfect strangers who are our family, we can love anyone.

Think about it.

Most of our music, poetry, literature and way too many movies are about romance. In short, about beginning a family. The process takes years and is chuck full of hope, heart-ache, longing and rejection.  Yet all after that, it is the luck of the draw and too often the bad-luck of the draw that sticks us with strangers who tumble arbitrarily into our lives.

I have to say, the most improbable of families is my own. I have two parents, four brothers and six sisters. That makes thirteen extremely eccentric individuals growing up together in a house with only one bathroom.

The bitter irony here is my father is a plumber.

Maybe because of this, we rarely talk.

We scream, we argue, we debate, we gossip, we complain, we pontificate, we cry, but we rarely talk.

How can we talk? We are all so different.

I have three siblings who are equity millionaires as well as three who are statistically poor.

I have a brother who was world's triathlon Masters champion - five times, and a sister who quit a secure job to become a dancer at fifty.
 

I have a sister who hitch-hiked through Central America during the nastiest days of their civil wars and returned years later with two children. These kids, my nieces, arrived on Memorial Day speaking only Portuguese and by Labor Day, spoke only English.

Another sister managed a stage at one of the world's most prestigious theaters and now can barely manage to find a job to support her son.

I have a brother whose publishing house overlooks a bluff in rural Wisconsin and another whose workplace is beneath the flight deck of the USS Ronald Reagan.

There is a lot of talent in the family, but it is like god threw it all in a blender then forgot to turn it on.
 

So how do we all get along?

Carefully.

Perhaps our relationship is the result of six thousand mornings spent jostling for a moment in the bathroom, or maybe it is forged from that piece of human nature that instinctively understands how to get along in a pack.

None the less.

That's who we are, and today we will be - after a full meal, a little beer, a few jabs, a couple of flare ups and the obligatory political donnybrook - a family together again.

© Greg Schiller, 2008
Author: Greg Schiller