My younger brother lives in Queensland, and his lovely Aussie wife Genevieve thought he might spend his 60th birthday with his siblings across the Tasman here in Algies Bay. Thus we turned to and arranged a kind of tribal coagulation for lunch here at our house last Saturday, the actual birthday.
So Duncan travelled from Brisbane with Genevieve and their two sons, Tom and Hamish. Tom and Hamish, let me tell you, are handsome, urbane, accomplished, poised, sociable, world citizens. They have two younger sisters of similar quality presently travelling somewhere in Greece.
Here at Algies Bay on any normal day that does not involve shifting furniture around for some family jamboree, arranging food, negotiating times and places, you would find my peaceful home with Mary, my sister Marilyn’s stable and tidy home with Lionel (another great Aussie), and my even younger sister Barbara’s welcoming home with Noel, a dinkum Kiwi.
Just over the ridge at Sandspit, where the boats leave for Kawau, is our sister-in-law Jan, who has an art studio. Jan doesn’t socialise with us. Jan’s husband Morris is our brother, Marilyn’s twin. And. mirabile dictu, Morris showed up smiling on Saturday, a wonderful gift for us all.
I hope you are keeping up with me here because now we come to the offspring, and their offspring. I won’t name them, and some of them couldn’t come. But quite a few of them did. One even brought his very brave girlfriend. And so we all ate ham and chick pea curry, salads and cakes, with wine, and beer for the blokes on the balcony.
We gave Duncan a birthday book, a real quality one about the 18th and 19th century sailing ships, with brilliant accurate illustrations, the best kind of gift, the one you would love to have yourself.
Now, you understand that in our tribe there are plenty of more or less constant adverse currents, relating to things that happened in years long gone which have left their wounds, memories, griefs.
Each of us has long ago gone our own way, making our own private arrangements eventually with the past, perhaps failing in the main to listen to or understand the others. It’s all pretty normal, actually. I don’t think we are a dysfunctional family. It’s just that the years bring their scars, and choices people made long ago have had huge effects down to this day.
The years also have brought their triumphs. We raised families. We did learn things and teach our kids things. We did support each other solidly from time to time. But now we certainly show our wounds.
I think in the main we have managed to demonstrate the triumph of openness and hospitality over division and bigotry; of love over fear of difference; of dogged loving loyalty over shock and catastrophe. We have all turned out different, quite different -- imagine that! From the same stock, we each became something else. We have no need to come together to pretend we are all the same. We are not. And that’s perfectly OK.
Our offspring will go on widening the diversity, even as they retain the genetic inheritance. That’s amazing. Our parents, Tom and Eulie’s cohabitation, long ago now, results in vastly different people in New Zealand, Australia, Japan, and travelling everywhere, adapting to the cultures they discover, learning the languages and folkways.
We had a good tribal meeting. Nothing of any value got negotiated. There were too many people and there was too much noise and activity ever to discuss anything properly. But it was worth it all to see each other and get an impression of each person, recognise worth and what various people have survived and overcome, sometimes to share a brief heart to heart moment and understanding... It all mattered.
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