482. That Thingamabob Called Family

 

The photos show various moments of the Corpus Christi celebrations of 2022 and my nieces returning to their origins.

When we don’t know what to talk about, we talk about the weather; failing that we talk about families. Does this happen when writing too? Of course it does, and no, I am not going to talk about the weather but that other thingamabob called family.

You may be the most lonesome person in the world, but you too came from somewhere so you too have a blood tie, i.e., family, somewhere or other in this universe.  But there is also someone out there that has no blood tie with us but knows of our existence and that knowledge consciously or otherwise transforms itself into “caring” – in other words, family.

I’m one of those persons who have no problem in finding blood-ties: I have literally hundreds of kith and kin. Without counting those I don’t know, in a village of just over two thousand, I have 365 relatives at the last count.

Many people think they are a sole flower blowing alone in the wind but that’s only because they have never sat down and looked into the matter closely. Each of us has had two parents who also had two parents who in turn had had two parents and you can go on backwards as long as the cows come home, the circle of blood ties widen endlessly. And when you consider the various offspring of those parents of parents and the offspring of their offspring your list of relatives could go on ad infinitum. 

But I would like to close the circle around my immediate family, and even though I have not generated any kind of human offspring myself, I have plenty of furry creatures which I consider family. However, I do have a niece of real flesh and blood which I used to baby-sit when young but had not seen for the last twenty-seven years when lo and behold, one day last week, she jumps off a plane with her teenage daughter and lands on my doorstep.

Strangers? Of course we’re not strangers. We immediately started chatting as if the time-lapse of twenty-seven years had never occurred. Because that’s what blood-ties are, that’s what that thingamabob called family is, something that does not vanish in time, does not lose itself into nothingness – it’s as if they had never been gone.