Family Reunionings

The best thing about family reunions is the food.

Grab a plate and head down the table. Pile food until it is as high as a small mountain. It makes me wonder why paper plates aren’t made in the size of turkey platters. I pile so much food on my plate that you’d think I have a turkey platter.

It’s good food, too. Fried. Fried chicken, gizzards and livers, fried okra, cornbread, squash, zucchini, apples. Corn on the cob, cream corn, black-eyed peas, field peas, white acre peas. And more fried chicken. Maybe some chicken & dumplins if someone saved some pieces from the deep fryer. Uncle Brice’s tomatoes.

If you are like me, you eat until you have consumed enough food in one sitting to feed a small African village for a week. Then you lean back and say, “Argh. I’m miserable. I ate too much.”

Then, someone points to the huge table with desserts. Suddenly, I find some room for more food, never mind the fact that my expanding stomach is going to crush my lungs, and I run the very real risk of suffocating; this is Aunt Eunice’ fried pies, Aunt Ginger’s Mississippi Mud, Julie’s egg custard and Grandma’s 21 layer chocolate cake.

Grab another plate and load it down.

As good as the food is, there is a down side to a family reunion. You know exactly what I’m talking about.

Family.

The reunion would be so much better if they didn’t show up.

I’m of the mind to tell all of them for next year, “Don’t come. Just send food. Since Aunt Eunice and Grandma are cooking in heaven, I’ll get some fried pies from Juanita and a 21-layer chocolate cake from Mary and send some your way. You send me your specialty. We’ll eat and not have to worry about meeting each other’s eye and forcing a stupid grin when we do see each other in a way we can’t possibly avoid.”

Real family reunions have some cousins who moved up north to some big city. They come down every summer to socialize while privately laughing about their backwoods relatives who don’t have a clue what civilization is, except we can cook better than anything they might find in Boston or Newark or some other place.

What about the uncle or cousin who always has a case of cold ones in the back of his truck? If Michael shows up, I spend most of my family reunion time leaning on his truck and verifying the contents of his cooler.

Every extended family has relatives no one really wants to see. Every family reunion has that cousin who should be kept locked in a closet to prevent him. Just prevent him. Period. Pick something and he needs to be stopped from doing it.

Every family has that weird aunt with more facial hair than Bigfoot. This is the aunt who insists on picking up all the children from age three on down and making them scream with terror as she kisses them and exclaims how much they have grown.

Every family reunion has at least one relative that everyone else wishes would stay home.

Look around your next family reunion. If you can’t find that person, then you are the one everyone else wishes would stay home.