Arithmetic progressions. They can boggle the mind. I think I’ve noted before—I’ve been doing this so long that it’s difficult to be sure—that the exponential increase of ancestors is astounding. We have two parents but by the time we add ten greats to the grandparents we’ve got a crowd larger than the small town I grew up in. Typical of a child of an alcoholic, I have no idea of what normal is, but I’ve had a rare and precious gift more than once in my life, and that has been finding that I had hidden family. My father, unable to afford child support, made his way back to his family to survive. Nobody in my household knew that he’d done that. In fact, I had no idea he had siblings and I had unknown cousins. It was a gift to discover that just as I was graduating from high school. My mother encouraged me to stay in touch with them. That was the reason behind my recent brief trip to South Carolina.
A few years back I learned that I had a cousin on my mother’s side that nobody in my family knew of. People drift apart, even in families, and some people have to be rediscovered. Call it redemption. That’s what it feels the most like. This cousin made the effort to travel across the country, in part to see me. Kinship is like that. Families feel for each other. Being long apart can raise questions of motivation. It’s awkward when, due to circumstances, you can’t see someone for some time. I have a half-sibling in that boat and have recently re-connected. I can only say that it feels like being a prodigal coming home.
I suppose that in a perfect world families would have no dysfunctional members, and everybody’d live next to each other in harmony and good will. Right, Pangloss? Economic circumstances would never force someone to live near where jobs might be found, and nobody would ever marry someone from another state, let alone half-way across the country. And marriages sometimes double the arithmetic progressions, sometimes perhaps triple or more. Families are complex and complicated, in reality. I’ve seen pain in more eyes, and heard it in more voices than I would care to. And I have a very difficult time letting such things go. Charlie Bucket, according to Tim Burton’s version, says that families make you feel better in an imperfect world. A world in which family reunions take place with individuals not being notified. A world in which arithmetic progressions are mere fictions. Never in a perfect world like ours.
