Family

Last winter Bradley's Grandma Cora and I had a discussion about family and the pace of life.  The conversation ended with her saying, "Well, if we have not our family left on this earth when we go, we have not left a legacy have we?".   In her own way, without directly saying it, she was proclaiming her prideful love of her family.  Because of the union she and her late husband had, the world is a better place with three hard working children, seven grand-children, and 21 great-grandchildren.  All in different places spatially, religiously, chronologically, but all from two people.

The "Grands" and "Greats" - only part of the legacy.  

This last week I witnessed the honesty of Grandma's logic at a family reunion on my mother's side.  40 people gathered.  Those 40 were the legacy left by my mother's parents.  It is truly amazing that from only two people, such a wonderful legacy has grown.  Although they have left this earth, their legacy has lived on through these amazing people I get to call "family".  All soooo different.  From all ends of the country, age ages 2 - 70+, everyone from a Fish and Game worker, to professional violinists, to a Radiologist at Stanford, to a college freshman.  Our family, my grandparents' legacy, gathered for one week, at a 100 year old YMCA resort in the Adirondack mountains of upstate NY.  There was no cell-phone service, TV, air-conditioning, 21st century mattresses, and barely any Internet.  Yet, all of the cousins played together as a unit seamlessly.

Ages 2 - 19 - the "Greats"

My children went from breakfast to fishing with Bradley, to shuffleboard, to lunch, to beach time, to treasure hunting, to dinner, to baseball, to ice cream, to shuffleboard, to bed.  Once a day the entire group joined up for a large activity.  Two nights we played baseball, one night we roasted marshmallows, and another night we were treated to a concert by our cousins.  Although I have only a few of the family member's phone numbers in my cell phone, and only see or talk to them every three years, it didn't matter because we were all connected.

I have been going to Silver Bay since I was only four or five years old.  I loved, loved, loved, it and made lifelong friends there.  As a parent, I get to see Silver Bay through the eyes of my boys.  Within 48 hours they were running around the porch of the Inn as if they had gone there for years.  They owned the baseball diamond and played shuffleboard like old cronies.

After our first two trips were done I joked about hoping that my children didn't turn into demons again during the next two trips, and I promised that we would use Yelp! a bit better.  In all honesty, the children were very well behaved on our last two trips, but we did not have to use Yelp on the last trip because at Silver Bay there are no options in food, and everyone just comes to expect to have to detox after a week of pre-prepared and highly genetically modified sustenance.

As I reflect on a week with extended family and the words of Grandma Cora, I can only smile looking at our two boys and know that our legacy has already started.