Greetings, friends. (LXIX)

Greetings, friends. Last Sunday, after visiting the graves of my great-great-grandparents, I continued on through my old ancestral stomping grounds.

Saturday’s rain had moved off elsewhere, and the day started out clear but cool. I drove north. On my way out of Sayre, I passed a cleaning supply house with my family’s name on it. Some third cousin, presumably.

Across the state border in New York, I drove through Waverly, where my grandmother Pippy was born. About a half hour beyond it, I crossed over into Schuyler County, for which I was named, indirectly.

Not far from there, I found Laurel Hill Cemetery, just outside the village of Odessa, where my granddad Red went to high school. The cemetery was peaceful and tree lined, surrounded by farms, off a side road with very little traffic.

I got out and started hunting for Nelson and Mae. The task of finding my ancestors’ graves at Laurel Hill was somewhat easier than at Tioga Point, because the cemetery was about a tenth the size. Once again, I was armed with a photo already taken by some good Samaritan on the Internet, so I knew what to look for.

Even so, I gave myself only half an hour, since I still had to get to Buffalo to pick up Suzy, then get to Franklin PA to visit the Seidens, and then finally over to Columbus before dinner.

I covered the entire cemetery once, and then found Nelson and Mae on a second pass, right by the vehicle path. Their shared headstone had started to fill in a bit with moss, though not nearly as badly as his parents’ had. I sharpened a stick and did for their monument what I had done for Luther and Susan. I found myself saying kaddish over them, even though they were not Jewish, and I didn’t have a minyan. It didn’t matter. It made me feel better.

I wondered what old Luther and Susan and Nelson and Mae would makes of yours truly, if they could see me now. A Jew and a socialist and a libertine, at that. I think my granddad Red only got to be as liberal as he was by virtue of having spent his adult life in the Army and having seen a wide swath of the variety of humanity that God saw fit to put on this earth. Leaving your small town and traveling the world changes you.

I got back in the car and made for Buffalo. I drove through Montour Falls, where my father was born. I had not been here since the summer I was 9 and my father took me to a family reunion on Lake Seneca. I remembered learning what a speed trap was on that trip, and I slowed down carefully as I came down the grade into town. It was strange to be seeing this country again, all on my own, squinting at it to imagine what it had been like through my grandfather’s eyes, when he and my grandmother had lived here in the ‘30s and ‘40s.

I made it to Buffalo at nearly one o’clock and found Suzy and her cousin in the Target parking lot. I was glad to see her. We loaded her stuff into the back seat. Somehow, after all the packing and the fretting for weeks, there was plenty of room. We started driving south.

Franklin, Pennsylvania is not a place I would normally have recourse to go, except that my friend Jennifer and her family moved there something like 20 years ago. I used to call her parents Uncle Ron and Aunt Georgie. I hadn’t seen them in forever. Like, not since they moved to Franklin.

In fact, my dad introduced Georgette to Ron at the Philadelphia Folk Festival circa 1977. I don’t remember that Folk Fest, but I was there in utero. Georgie told me that she had specifically asked my father to keep Ron the hell away from her, because she thought he was a creep, but somehow, after a couple Festivals, Ron managed to wear her down. They were married in my parents’ living room the summer I was three years old.

I found photos of the Seidens’ wedding in my mother’s archives. I don’t remember the wedding itself but I do remember dancing with Jenny at the reception. She was 2 or 3 years older than me and I had the kind of innocent crush on her that young children sometimes get.

I still sort of had a crush on her when I spent a couple weeks hanging around the Seidens’ the summer I was 14 back when they still lived in the Catskills. Jen was dating this dude who (I thought) was even older than she was and I just thought they were both so cool. He introduced me to Peter Sellers and Fate’s Warning and Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma album. They took me camping at a bluegrass festival and I smoked pot for the first time and it all felt like a rite of passage. This is what chosen family is for.

Uncle Ron and Aunt Georgie also came to my mother and stepfather’s wedding, the one in period costume at the Colonial Pennsylvania Plantation. There’s a photo of Georgie at about the age Jen is now. They could be sisters, or maybe twins.

Then the spring I was about to graduate from college, Uncle Ron came and lived at my dad’s for a while, sleeping on the couch and smoking cigarettes in the basement with my dad and talking until all hours. I had just bought Shipley’s old Jeep Cherokee, but it had a standard transmission, and I didn’t yet know how to drive stick. My father knew quite wisely that he was far too impatient to try to teach me, or maybe that I was too impatient to be taught by him. So Uncle Ron taught me how to drive stick. This is what chosen family is for.

The last time I can remember seeing any of them was at Jenny’s first wedding. There is a great photo of me, drunk off my ass, with an arm around my sister Adah and another around my sister Kate. Actually, it is a terrible photo of me personally, but it is one of the very few photos I have of me together with both of my siblings. Friendship with the Seidens was one of the things my parents still had in common. This is what chosen family is for.

Then Jen and her husband moved to Washington state, and my Dad and Jane moved to North Carolina, and my mother had since moved to New Hampshire, and we all kind of fell out of touch with them.

Fast forward to today, Jen is on her third husband, and living with him and her two daughters in Franklin, and, surprise, Uncle Ron and Aunt Georgie live downstairs. Jen, I gather, has been reading these journals and cordially invited me to visit on my way across the country. Thankfully Franklin was only a little out of the way between Buffalo and Columbus. How could I resist?

It was surreal seeing the Seiden family again. They are all different but also still the same. Georgie is still the wise mom and Ron the smart dad. Jen still keeps a perfectly straight face when Ron talks over her. They still keep up a running banter and told a long and wonderful story about the last big cross-country roadtrip they took as a family. Poor Suzy sat through the whole thing very patiently.

Some things are new. I got to meet Jen’s daughters. They are very different but both very talented and precocious. I got to meet her husband, who goes by the name Weasel. He didn’t say much but, to all appearances, he seems like a progressive upgrade. I too hope my next marriage is an improvement over my last one.

It is a kind of heart aching thing to go two decades without seeing your chosen family. I hope I get to see them again, but life being what it is, who knows. Our visit was awkward but all too brief. On the way out the door, I told Georgie that I would convey her regards to my father.

“One thing that has always bothered me about your father,” she started to say.

“Yes?”

“I send him a Christmas card every year. Every year. Never get a reply.”

I laughed out loud.

“I’ll tell him you said so.”

This is what chosen family is for. I hope Jen and Weasel at least will make it to Besha’s and my wedding.

I gave everyone hugs and then Suzy and I left for Columbus. Not Columbus, strictly speaking, but Delaware, that is, Delaware, Ohio. Except that you have to say Delaware, Ohio every single time, lest anyone think you mean that small wonder, that first state, that haven of tax-free retail shopping. Delaware, Ohio is where my cousin Abigail lives, with her partner Eric. They have a big old house in a quaint old part of a quaint little Ohio college town.

Cousin Abigail is, along with her brother Matt, my oldest friend. He is two years old than I am, and she about six months older. Everyone in the world calls her Abby except me and I think maybe her mom, my Aunt Susan, the one named for our great-great-grandmother. I cannot remember not knowing them.

I had been hustling to get there before dinner time, because I wanted to spend some quality time with Abby, but it was not to be. Finally at around 9pm Suzy and I were sitting around their kitchen island munching on PB&J because everything was closed by the time we got there.

I didn’t mind. Abby has been battling chronic illness for a while and hasn’t been able to travel much lately. I was just glad to see her. Suzy went to bed and the three of us sat up drinking beer and talking about the road trip and about their various artistic endeavors with Space Quest going in the background. It was a very pleasant visit.

That was last Sunday. It was a lot.

On Monday morning, Suzy and I were treated to a homemade breakfast by Eric, which was a delight, knowing that we wouldn’t enjoy another home-cooked meal for a solid week. I had wanted to linger a bit to spend time with Abby and Eric, even though we had at least 10 hours of driving to do to get to our first booked accommodations in La Crosse, Wisconsin.

Which made it a little bit of a wrinkle when Marc phoned me up to say that he and Sea were still in Columbus and did we want to come meet them. Marc is an old college friend — Eric the composer (not my cousin’s partner) introduced us when they were both at the Cleveland Institute of Music — and then Marc and I shared an apartment in Cambridge years later. I hadn’t seen him and Sea since, well, before the pandemic. Call it six years.

I begged Suzy’s indulgence and we drove to Columbus, even though it was strictly speaking out of our way. Marc and Sea were in town for the weekend from Cleveland for her sibling’s wedding. We got to the appointed rendezvous, which turned out to be a mansion rented by her family for the weekend festivities. They were all rushing around to clean up and pack up and get out before checkout time and we were desperately underfoot.

Nevertheless it was good to see Marc and Sea again, and to see that they were doing well. They shared the good news that they, too, are getting married! So insh’allah I will see them again twice next year. This is what chosen family is for.

I suppose the entire point of this long winded missive is to just say:

I hope you can make the time to spend with your loved ones, chosen or otherwise. Life is short, and in truth we may only get to see the people we cherish most a mere handful of times before we part ways forever.

I don’t mean this in a metaphorical “you might die tomorrow” kind of way, which is true, but statistically unlikely. I mean that, if you do the math, you’ll find that, even with normal life expectancies, once you get into your 30s or 40s, you’ll probably only see most of the loved ones you don’t live with maybe a few dozen more times in this life. You gotta make it count.

These memories, these relationships — they are what make us who we are, far more than the jobs we work, the television we watch, the stuff we accumulate. These are what matter in the the end.

(Did I take photos of any of these loved ones on any of these visits? No, of course I did not. I know. Hush.)

Anyway, after they finished checking out of the mansion, Sea’s family took us all out for ice cream. Suzy was delighted. Then she and I started the long drive west.

If you’re reading this, I send you my love. Gee whiz, but you must be about as exhausted as I am. Tomorrow is the last day of the road trip and I will finally see Besha again and start coming to grips with what home actually is for me. Ceterum censeo imperdiet vigilum cessandam est. I swear the rest of the week was less eventful than last Sunday. I guess we’ll see.