Relevantly Off Topic: A Family Gathering

There is a loosely formed tradition in my family of gatherings that happen the first Sunday of every month.  It is a sort of potluck affair that consists of a pasta salad or two and a store bought cake if we're lucky.  This month however, this was all postponed for my Grandfather's 70th birthday.  My Grandfather (Grandpa Q to me and my sister) is a very able and intelligent man, who can work magic with a pen and has a wit as sharp as the tips of the Jesus statues he has sprinkled about his house (they are completely ironic of course, because for irony's sake is why he does almost anything).  So his 70th birthday was a big deal, for sometimes we forget that the people that are important to us are merely mortal and will not be with us forever, so it was in some ways, a bittersweet celebration.  

It was a classic Gehle family evening, my grandmother had just gotten back from a long trip to Australia, and even though she insisted she had missed us, her constant chatter about the beauty and the "overall feeling" of the island told us otherwise.  Soon her sister Carol, who was visiting from Kansas, had to follow her around and cut her off after four minutes of Australia talk and everyone thanked her silently. My sister and I like to play a game where we give our family points in our heads at these gatherings and Carol had just earned three.

 My other grandmother, Yia Yia, we call her for she has a strong attraction to everything Greek, was doing her usual. Sitting, asking people to bring her cups of water, and interrupting me while I tried to make small talk with my uncle's boyfriend (who was Greek she later learned and kept him trapped next to her all night).  My Yia Yia's husband, George, was talking about trains or radios or cell towers to someone, and my Aunt Karen had burst into tears when she walked in the door while her shy children scurried to the other room, to hide out with my sister and watch TV.  MY father sat in the corner with some relative and made sarcastic jokes about my grandmother and her trip and made fun of everything remotely serious about the evening.  My mother chatted with my Uncle Ben and his boyfriend Nick, while I hovered, and we ended up laughing and laughing, talking about old Christmas memories and quoting Steel Magnolias. So it was a classic Gehle evening.

Soon it came time to take the family picture. Something the kids dreaded and the whole family looked at as an ordeal, but also something that happened every time the family got together.   Linda, my grandfathers second wife (the one after my grandmother, the one who went to Australia), offered to take it and got out her camera. But somebody in our bunch of relatives all crowded under a happy birthday sign, said "put it on timer mode!" and everyone latched onto this idea and acted like it was so easy, but it turned out no one knew how.  Then my Uncle Jake came out of the kitchen, beer in hand, and we turned to him, thankfully he was somewhat familiar with cameras and put it on a ten second timer, just enough time to run back and get in the picture with everyone else.  Then there was the issue of how to set up the camera, poor Jake stood at the opposite end of the room, fiddling with the camera while different grandparents (Yia Yia in particular, being the bossy person she is) yelled out where to place the camera.  He ended up stacking two pillows and several books and placing the camera on top of that precarious mess.  He pushed a button and an orange light started flashing, counting down the seconds he had to run back and kneel in front of the usual array of tall men in the back, wives in the middle, children situated along the front, and the now 70 year old Grandpa Q positioned in a chair at the front like a regular birthday boy. The light suddenly stopped flashing and everyone assumed the picture had been taken so we relaxed, loosened our tight smiles and waited for someone to go see how it turned out.  Jake trotted over, pulling up his jeans and adjusting his baseball cap, and picked up the camera, then a flash went off and a picture was taken. This was the first of many fails.

So fifteen minutes passed of flashes turning on and off, passive aggressive comments, and a belt malfunctions that caused some unwanted views we got a pretty decent picture. Sure, the smiles looked pretty fake by then and Grandpa Q's legs were spread and his eyes half closed, but we knew that was as good as it would get. Out of that chaos had come a memory and even though in a year of even a month's time I'll probably forget about this night, it'll still be special, and a time that really defined our family for what it was and how even though we irritate each other, we'll always love one another forever.