We'll Have Fun Yet

Chicken Soup for the Soul: All in the Family

BY: Stephen J. Lyons

Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family. Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one.
~Jane Howard


My family reunions take place in hotel rooms and restaurant lobbies. We meet in towns like Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where my grandmother lived until last year, and more recently in Downer's Grove, Illinois, where motels advertise "extended stay" business suites, and low-flying jets roar overhead every few seconds.


We are a small family by American standards: my father and his third wife; my brother and his fourth wife and two children; and me with my second wife and one daughter. My mother, who holds a quarter-century hurt against my father, keeps her distance. Although we are veterans of many emotional outbursts, we do not need a scene. In all, the four original members of my family married twelve times. Seven of those unions ended in divorce, one in death. Perhaps that's why transitory anonymous places do not bother us -- we have lost so many homes.


I have missed most of these reunions. When I chose a life Out West at the age of seventeen, I knew I would come back to the Midwest infrequently, if at all. Youth creates an illusion of absolute truths. I easily bought into my own: I didn't need family. Instead, I relied on craggy mountain peaks, big skies, crimson sunsets, and magical swaths of desert. Truth is, I probably read too many Carlos Castaneda books and listened to one too many John Denver songs about a Rocky Mountain high.


The migration of Illinois high school graduates to Colorado and beyond in the 1970s must have rivaled the numbers attempting the Oregon Trail a century before. We were a ragtag bunch of Boomers armed with dog-eared copies of Walden and On the Road. Slung over our shoulders were new backpacks and acoustic guitars. College towns and cities like Missoula, Boulder, Tucson, and Durango took us in with the hope that we would only stay four years. But many of us never left. We graduated, found jobs, married, became parents, divorced, remarried. Twenty-five years quickly passed. Suddenly, all those absolute truths that were black and white -- the ones we stayed up all night to debate -- were now gray. So was our hair.


When I was almost forty, I finally met my Iowa grandmother, Mary, in the unlikely setting of Brooklyn. As the two of us sat alone in my father's living room, she took my hand, squeezed it, and said, "We'll have fun yet." Perhaps she sensed my feeling of loss at meeting her so late in my life, long after the usual familial bonding of grandchild to grandparent. Taking my hand was a way of closing those years, of taking us to the present tense where we could begin.


Grandmother Mary died last year. In my adult life, I had only been around her twice, and we exchanged just a few notes and cards. But her greatest gift was yet to come. A large manila envelope arrived shortly after Mary's death. Inside were letters, charts, journal pages, and copies of small town histories. These were the voluminous results of her life's passion -- our family.


I learned that my earliest known relative in America was David Lyons, born in 1788 in Virginia, who served in the War of 1812, where he was paid thirty-nine dollars and ninety-six cents for six months of duty. Among all the pages in my family's history, among all the underlined passages and Mary's carefully written margin notes, one passage stands out: "David's father came to Virginia from England. He returned to England to claim an inheritance and was never heard from again. David, being left in Virginia and underage, was 'bound out' for a period of time." Two hundred years ago, my family was off to a shaky start.


My newest stepmother, Robbie, says it's never too late for family. At the age of forty-three, I crave family. The setting is secondary to the substance. Although there are not a lot of "remember whens," and "whatever happened tos," something vital happens. The three cousins create their own sense of family, one we hope lasts forever. My brother and I can finally practice the role of uncles and, more importantly, the role of sons. Simply standing next to my brother and father in a hotel foyer takes on a heightened importance because decades have passed since we have stood together.


The photographs from our last summer's reunion just arrived. If you saw the images, you would never know the effort it took to reach that moment. In one picture, we are standing in the parking lot of a suburban restaurant that I would be hard-pressed to ever locate again. We have our arms around each other. Our smiles are bright and winning. But the best part is we look like a family. Mary was right. We'll have fun yet.

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