Down to Details

Otto and me surrounded by just a few of
those who attended the Smith family reunion at Asilomar
last August. Back row, Son Stan with daughters Josie and Daria.
The great-grandchildren are Summer Bishop, Jon Andersen and Baxter Bishop.

The prompt for Sunday Scribblings this week is “family.” My mind is spinning among the multitude of approaches I could take to this subject. There are human families and animal families and, scientifically speaking, families of animals. I might discuss family size with reference to the population of the earth, which has tripled within my lifetime, or the pressures on the modern family that have resulted in increased rates of divorce..

I guess I’ll take the approach that I suspect most Sunday Scribblers will take. I will talk about my own dear personal family. Except that, even here, I must choose between the parental family in which I grew up,

My father Allen with my brother Allen.
My mother, Pearl, with me.

and Otto’s and my own family. All right, I choose the latter. But who said that even that is a simple choice, given the four generations our family comprises?

Smith Family Passport Photo, 1959
Back Row: Phyllis Otto Joe, Otto
Front Row: Sterling, Stanford, Candace

So I narrow it, and narrow it, and narrow it. (You don’t want to go through all of the steps!). I finally arrive at the subject of gifts for our multitudinous family, for holidays, birthdays, anniversaries, graduations, weddings, births. I need a marked calendar to remember the dates, and then I forget to look at the calendar.

Just yesterday I realized that I had missed great-granddaughter Summer’s tenth birthday, which was April 28. I sent an electronic late-birthday greeting, but the gift is yet to be chosen. And, during April, I also missed the birthdays of Ruthie, Anna and Gwen. Where has my mind been? I thought April was just beginning. Time passes faster all the time!

Maybe I should just resort to the following strategy, adopted when grandson Ian’s January birthday was over-looked. I made a card with the following verse (and the proper enclosure):

ODE TO IAN

I didn’t forget you. Honest, I made it
from DEC into FEB with no JAN. I mislaid it,
or else someone stole it to fence or to pawn.
Today when I looked it had vanished, was gone
just when I thought it was time to begin it,
gone with your birthday buried within it,
gone in an instant, quick as a wink,
while I wrote a verse or you skated the rink.

You know what I think?

I’d better just change the words at the head
of this verse to OWED TO IAN instead.
So I. O. U. something clever and nifty
or useful, or frivolous birthday gifty.
But if I choose it you might have plenty
of it already - so here’s a twenty,
I hope you’ll spend it on fun or a show
or somewhere you have been wanting to go,
event or place that will give you a lift
that I can’t wrap up as a birthday gift.