I'm back.

I'm going to have to wait (as usual) for the battery on my camera to recharge before I can offer pictures. So I'll talk about other parts of the trip.

Generally the trip was uneventful. But, I think I'm kind of done with the "trip-within-a-trip" set-up. Going to my cousin's wedding was pretty stressful. Over the span of roughly 3 days (actually not quite that; we left around 7.30 on Friday morning and got back home around 5.30 on Sunday afternoon), I was in the car for a total of 16 hours. (As a passenger. As a backseat passenger. As a backseat passenger stuck between suitcases, a bag of books*, the folded-up walker (my father still isn't done with his knee rehab). I did get knitting done while on the road - I still cannot read in a moving car without getting sick - but DAMN was I glad to get out of that car on Sunday afternoon.)

(*My brother and sister in law came along - they did much of the driving - and they insisted on making a side trip to the Eerdmans publishing-house bookstore in Grand Rapids (Eerdman publishes mostly Christian books but also books on ethics and other topics). I cannot pass up a bookstore without buying SOMETHING so I wound up picking up a couple of books of C.S. Lewis essays I didn't have yet, and a big volume of Wallace Berry's essays, and a book by Marva Dawn - who is a theologian who also talks about "how are we to live authentically in a culture that seems to celebrate the inauthentic" - and one of George MacDonald's fantasy novels (he was a friend and colleague of Lewis and Tolkein; one of the "Inklings.")

Most of the books are in the mail to me but I'm about halfway through the Marva Dawn one already.

Anyway. I was more stressed about the wedding than I should have been. My aunt and uncle and all their kids are Catholic and it was a Catholic wedding. And I, born and raised Protestant, had never been to any kind of Catholic service ever before (even though I briefly dated a guy who was pretty devoutly Catholic, the issue of attending church or Mass together never came up)

I was terrified that I'd do something - out of ignorance - that would terribly offend someone. (I knew going in that non-Catholics generally are not supposed to partake of the Eucharist unless it is an unusally liberal bishopric, so at least I had one piece of information.). But nothing went wrong. The standing and sitting was kind of self-explanatory, and we were not expected to kneel, and the places where an entire congregational response was desired, it was printed out for us. (And besides: really, it would be kind of shabby for someone to be very offended by a person who was there, in good heart and good spirit, who just didn't know all the proper forms, and messed one of them up out of ignorance.)

But it was just kind of a long trip. I hate to say it, but I hope the next family wedding is at a time when I'm busy teaching so I'm excused from making the effort to travel.

I think also it was stressful because it was just so many people in such close quarters for a few days. I don't deal well with large numbers of people, especially when I don't have somewhere to go as an escape. And reading a book in a room full of family* is not an adequate escape.

(*I only did that during obvious "down times" when I was only with my immediate family. I'm not quite willing enough to accept the "Rain Man" image others would bestow upon me were I to bury myself in a book with extended family about)

I didn't talk with my cousins all that much - well, of course, the bride was busy having to be sociable to everyone, and the others in that family were "attendants" and also had to have sociable roles. But I didn't talk that much with my other family of cousins. And I realized again something I've known for a while - it's easier for me, for some reason, to converse happily and comfortably with people of my parents' generation or older. (Part of it may be the cousins I sort of "avoided," even though they're as old or even older than me, are still kind of in party-mode where "going out" is the big thing. And it never was a big thing for me. And also several of them loathe their jobs, and it's kind of a downer to talk with someone who loathes their job. [and also, it seems that there wasn't a whole lot of interest in hearing me talk about my teaching and research - and it wasn't like I was trying to monopolize; I got about 20 seconds worth of talk before the "I'm bored; let's talk about when that guy did that thing in the bar" vibes choked me off.] So I don't have as much in common with them as I did when we were kids, and finding an anthill to watch was enough of a thing-in-common to keep us amused for an afternoon. (One of the tragedies of growing up - when you're a kid, you can be friends almost instantly with people - all it takes is an anthill or a ball and glove or some toy horses or a good climbing tree. But when you're an adult, so much other crap gets in the way - insecurities, and personal prejudices, and posturing, and the need to look cool, and one-upmanship or one-downmanship ["You think your boss is nuts? Let me tell you about mine...."]). If it had been the 1920s in Britain, my cousins would have all been Bright Young Things and I would have been the country spinster schoolteacher who doesn't even get the lingo. Or at least that's how I feel after reading several Ngaio Marsh novels on the way up and back....

Actually, you know, that image makes me feel better - picturing myself sitting there in my sensible shoes and slightly too-long skirt with my hair pinned up under a broad-brimmed hat, while my cousins with bobbed hair and painted fingernails and white flannels and brilliantined hair and cigarettes burning dangerously close to their fingers talking about how BEASTLY such and such a place was, or how CORKING their new car was....and me secretly thinking about my herb garden, and making jam, and mending my own stockings, and my little watercolors* and my classroom of students who say "Yes, Miss" and "No, Miss" and secretly feeling, I don't know, a little bit better than those flashy people who seem to need to adverbise everything....

(*No, I don't paint. But somehow, it is a necessary part of this fantasy)

But anyway. My family isn't totally nuts and I don't hate them or anything - and I know other people who have way crazier or far more taxing relatives, but still - there's a feeling of disconnection from people of my own generation in that crowd. Like I grew up and became at least somewhat serious, and they'd like to go on living a version of college-days. (And I marvel at how different my immediate family is from those other folks. A friend of the family once said she envisioned us - this was at a time when both my brother and I were still living at home - as coming home at the end of the day and eating dinner together, but then each going off to a separate room with a different book. "You're such INTROVERTS!" she exclaimed with a little laugh. Well yes, I suppose we are. But we get along and are happy in our own way.)

I don't know - maybe that comes off as a little harsh or negative. But it surprises me how awkward conversation is with my cousins now, as opposed to how it was when we were all seven and eight and ten and things like that. Not that we saw each other any more frequently then; but somehow it was easier to pick up and ignore the intervening time than it is now. I suppose it's probably because we now are deemed too old for props like waterguns and dollhouses that would provide a focus for conversation...