THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, September 27, 1994 TAG: 9409270108
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DIANE TENNANT, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 71 lines
THE FAMILY reunited without us this summer.
It's not the first time we've missed it. In fact, I think we've only gone once in 15 years of marriage.
I vividly remember the raccoon that was, like me, the new family member the year I got married. I wore glasses; she wore a mask. I smiled nervously; she bared her teeth.
Come to think of it, that may have been the wrong family. That was the Scottish kin. The one we missed this summer was the German bunch.
But we did our own little reunion of sorts, just me and my husband, the kids and my in-laws. A little bit German, a little bit Scottish, in a twice-removed sort of way in a hotel room at Manassas.
My mother-in-law whipped out a shoe box.
I have pictures of the reunion, she announced, and began the narration.
Look, here's Travis showing where his two front teeth are missing, she said, holding out a 3-by-5 of my nephew pulling his lower lip clean below his chin.
Can I see? asked my 3-year-old.
Look, here's Guy and Mary Dell, my mother-in-law went on, flipping through a stack of pictures so fast that my relatives took on the animated moves of old cartoons. Wilma and Wayne flew past. Betty and Denzil leaped through several frames. On and on they went, hordes of people wearing ordinary clothes, wading through extraordinary plates of dessert.
Whoa, said my husband, throwing out a hand to break the action. She's all dressed up, he commented, eying the gold brocade jacket on some elderly cousin.
Yeah, said my mother-in-law, she had her teeth in that day.
Can I see? asked my 3-year-old.
I pulled one picture from the stack that was flying past and studied the new girl in the family. She was slumped in her chair, head leaning on her husband's shoulder. She grinned nervously. At least she wasn't competing with Rascal.
Several rolls of film later, my mother-in-law pulled another surprise out of the shoe box. A lava lamp. Red.
I remembered it, too, from my earliest association with the family. This lava lamp used to sit in my mother-in-law's living room. It lit those countless Sunday evenings I spent during my dating days, watching the ABC Sunday Night Movie with my future husband and his family.
Red oozing blops of goo roiling up from the base of the lamp, breaking at the top, floating down again. Its presence was topped only by the revolving fiber-optic bouquet sealed in plexiglass on top of the clock.
I didn't put this in the yard sale because I knew you wanted it, my mother-in-law said to my husband. Oh, good, he said, genuinely pleased.
Can I see? asked my 3-year-old.
The day we got home with it, my daughter lay on her stomach for nearly half an hour, watching that lava lamp. It wasn't even turned on.
But now this red relic of the '70s is sitting on my contemporary white fireplace. Makes the marble shine blood-red at night. Makes your gums look red, too, if you bare your teeth.
But it's not the seeing that makes me believe.
I heard myself say the other evening that ABC has several good movies coming on this season. I went hunting for a picture of the cat and realized that I have the family photos stashed in three shoe boxes. Thank goodness I have not - yet - purchased a fiber-optic flower.
Still . . .
The lava lamp pulses quietly in the corner of my living room, like Poe's Tell-Tale Heart. It's only a matter of time, I'm sure, until we all crack.
And next year, it will be us in the family reunion photos.
I hope we'll look as good as our cousin. by CNB