Label this reunion revealing
Lori Borgman | Monday, Aug 31, 2009
The husband and his sister recently hosted the
first family reunion on their father’s side in nearly 40 years.
There were first cousins once removed, second cousins twice removed
and several cousins five times moved. With all the moving and removing,
there were a number of cousins whom we were meeting for the first
time.
The crowd was milling about the farmhouse and
buildings where previous generations had lived as I wondered if
there was a common thread that ran through those related by blood
and birth.
My brother-in-law casually asked a woman married
to a first cousin from Virginia if her husband liked to put his
name on things.
“Why, yes,” she said in a lovely southern drawl,
“he likes to put his name on everything.” She pointed to a large
blue plastic cooler filled with ice and soft drinks and assured
us that if we were to turn it over, we would find her husband had
written his name on the bottom of it.
I offered that the husband likes to put his name
on things as well. “When we were first married he had a label gun
with red tape. His name was on his clock-radio, his television and
his shaving bag,” I said.
I assumed he had labeled his things in college,
but then I began finding him with the label gun putting his name
on more things, “just because.” Fearful I would one day wake up
with a label on my forehead, the label gun mysteriously disappeared.
My brother-in-law, who first posed the question,
said his wife often puts her name on things, including the lawn
chairs they had brought with them, and wondered if it was a familial
trait.
The answer was staring us in the face. Two bowls
on the picnic table tagged were with return address labels, a digital
camera slung over a chair had an identification tag attached to
the camera case and one wall of the old garage held years of old
license plates, each one bearing my father-in-laws initials.
When a cousin who had traveled from Minnesota
was asked if he shared the love of seeing his name on things, he
chuckled and said “yah” he did. His son, who had flown in from Colorado,
jumped in and said he routinely felt compelled to put his name on
things he owned and often wondered why. And now the young man knows
-- the compulsion is from his father’s side, two Sharpies removed.
In the early afternoon, when we took group pictures,
every man, woman and child related by blood had to be reminded to
take their nametags off for the picture. When the picture taking
was over, the blood relation immediately put their nametags back
on their chests. Many of those related by marriage, lacking the
labeling gene, forgot about their nametags and wandered into an
area restaurant with their names clinging to their backsides.
On day two, you could tell the old guard from
the shirt-tail relation by those who had clung to their battered
nametags from the day before. They had curled edges and blurred
ink, but their chests were appropriately named.
The nice thing about cleaning up after a group
that shares a gene for putting their names on things is that if
anyone forgets a cake pan, a cell phone or a small child, we’ll
know exactly who it belongs to.
