The Best Unlaid Plan

When I was a kid, my mom’s side of the family — all the crazy Polacks — would get together for Thanksgiving every year.  We’d switch off venues.  Sometimes our place in Nevada, sometimes southern California or the Bay Area.  Any way you cut it, it was pure chaos.  Forty-plus people stuffed into a house and maybe a motor home parked out front (some of the more sane individuals might have gotten a hotel, but back then, that was a big deal).  Kids running everywhere.  Dogs and cats living together.

Every year it was the same.  My brother and I would watch our older cousins fight with each other (exciting teenager drama).  My elderly aunt would cheat at cards.  My grandmother and her sisters would argue about the exact date on which their mother died.  My Uncle Art, the designated patriarch, would say grace.  And in a couple of days, we’d always have egg noodle casserole with leftover turkey and ham.

I’m not sure when or why these annual meetings stopped.  I was a kid, and kids aren’t privy to or interested in the details.  What I do know is that my mother grew up with family all around her, and she loved having these yearly get-togethers.  For me — a kid with no first cousins close to her own age — it was the closest thing to experiencing my mom’s childhood:  days filled with running down the street to one of her aunt’s houses and grabbing one of many playmates who also happened to be a relative; huge, crazy dinners filled with men who talked in booming voices, women who laughed so hard it sounded like they were almost screaming, and kids who were barely noticed because there was so much activity; people who went along their day without giving a second thought to the fact that four generations were in the same room most of the time.

For the first time since those huge Thanksgivings, we had close to forty people converge at my dad’s place a couple of weeks ago.  And it all just kind of happened.  No mass email where you throw out dates and see what might work for the most people.  No block of rooms arranged in advance.  No stressing about who may or may not show up and why.

It was all a little surreal, partly due to the fact that the last time this many people were around was during my mom’s several-week-long demise and memorial (all at this same time, one year ago).  Whether or not everyone was psychically drawn together by existential forces or naturally driven together by their lizard brains is a mystery.  Perhaps they all just looked on the calendar and felt they had to come.

The thing is, my mom was the family “planner.”  Every clan has one.  So the idea that this ever would’ve gotten off the ground without her is frankly amazing.  It was, to use my best hippie terminology, organic.  And almost a little magical.

At the end of the day, the only one missing, of course, was my mom.  She would’ve loved watching the kids running in, around, and through her house like it was an amusement park.  She would’ve loved pretending to be annoyed when her cousins gave her the business like they did when they were little.  And she would’ve loved seeing her uncle and aunts who always had a soft spot in their hearts for her because she was the first born out of all their children.

And I think she would’ve been proud — and frankly shocked — that the big group of Polacks actually managed to get together.  That we didn’t find any excuses to put it off another year.  That for one long weekend, we did what she drove us crazy trying to do all the time — make ordinary life a little more special.  Find something to celebrate.  Recognize the day.

And even though she’s not around, I’m guessing she wouldn’t have minded us using her as a good excuse to have a party.