Gypsies

I’m sitting on the floor of our rented condo. I’ve been awake since 5 am and we’re packed into this place like sardines in a can. There are sleeping bodies everywhere; 3 sweaty teenaged boys lie about 15 feet away on make shift beds because when you are 13 years old you can be made to sleep on a couch or a floor or an air mattress and be told to be happy about it. Upstairs, grandmothers are huddled with giggly, gangly granddaughters and great-nieces. In the room across the hall are the uncle and aunt splayed-out across 2, now obsolete, full sized mattresses with a helicoptering baby between them. My husband is knocked out in the master bedroom unconcerned about my sleeplessness and grateful that he has weathered another event with my family.

Doesn’t it seem like every time we conclude another _____ (birthday, holiday, vacation, dinner....) with family it’s as if we survived another round in the ring. We walk away winded, hands on our hips, swaying to and fro, slightly bloodied, knuckles bruised, faces swollen but victorious because this time, yet again, we didn’t get knocked down. And after a couple of months, once the post-pugilism amnesia has fully taken affect, after discussing with our agents, we sign up for another spot in the ring. Because in the end, we don’t remember if we win or lose, but we do remember that left hook to the temple or the upper cut to the jaw or the time we got back up off the mat. That’s what it is like with family, there might be that time when Great Aunt Gladys kept calling your wife the wrong name (your ex-wife’s name), or Little Johnny broke your great-grandmother’s heirloom vase (the urn in which you kept her ashes), or your cousin Bob drank too much and kept slurring his words (and you had to walk him back to his room and put him to bed), but you file that stuff away as family history.

Sure, family is genealogy-the whole big tree with all the limbs and branches and leaves and the trunk and the roots-but it is more than this. It’s shared experiences and collective history, both good and bad. It’s the reason God gave us families. We don’t get to pick them, we’re stuck with who we got and if you ever need a kidney, they are the people you are going to first (and not because they are feeling generous, but because you share DNA and they are the only match).

This is a long and winding road that we walk along, some of us with the good fortune of a longer journey. You pick up friends along the way and a few stay with you for the distance but most are only there for a short segment until their path takes them a different way. Per the wise, pot-smoking, guitar-picking, country music singing lyricist, Willie Nelson, we are a band of gypsies rolling down the highway. And while, at times, we might walk away and grumble, I am grateful that I am your pain-in-the-ass and you are mine. I am grateful that I wake up each day and that I have 2 legs that can take me places, 2 lungs that can fill with air without assistance or difficulty, the finances by which to stay in this over-stuffed condominium, family who will tolerate each other long enough to co-habitate together, an employer who allows me vacation time and a country that provides the liberties of free will and commerce and recreation and self expression.

Mostly, I am grateful for MY band of gypsies; all of you, our similarities AND or differences. I am grateful for my Abuelita and my Abuelito,and despite all of their short-comings, the two things they seemed to get right and pass on to my mom and my aunts and uncles, the things that matter most...the 2 commandments that Jesus said were the most important; 1) Love God your father and 2) love each other. Faith and fidelity. Remember this and give thanks. Life is a gift; choose gratitude.