The main phalanx of Madigans rolled into the local burger joint like the first Roosevelt Administration, a collection of siblings, cousins, neighbors and parents to celebrate a boy’s 9th birthday. The pool table was the first casualty, cues and balls used in ways never intended by the rules of the game. I was on my second glass of wine by then, the result of Carol’s careful predisposition to put me in the proper frame of mind for her grandson’s birthday. She needn’t have worried. As the party unfolded, I found myself in the middle of a Parenthood reunion special.

    The evening was also the occasion of her nine-year-old’s grandfather’s birthday, Carol’s deceased husband Mike, for whom the joint was a birthday favorite. It would have been Mike’s 74th, and he would have loved the mess his progeny made of the place this night.

   I secured a solitary station at the edge of the festivities, where I could better bear witness to a family gathering of both celebration and remembrance that left me both somewhat envious of their effortless devotion, but nevertheless oddly thankful I came from a family that would rather exchange gunfire than affection.

   I secured a solitary station at the edge of the festivities, where I could better bear witness to a family gathering of both celebration and remembrance that left me both somewhat envious of their effortless devotion, but nevertheless oddly thankful I came from a family that would rather exchange gunfire than affection.

   Life is struggle, and the struggle is not the least exhibited in the human invention of family. By the time I left mine at age 21, and took out on the road, I was warped by a perverted vision of wishing I’d been an orphan. Without any understanding of what that would have meant (and my own mother had been an actual one) I lived out most of an adulthood that turned out to be blessed by a family of my own that I never felt I had earned. But I take it anyway.

   But back to Carol’s. She told me once that Mike collected people. There is a certain embrace of the human condition that informs a life lived that way. With the Madigans, I can see that it is passed on – spouses, offspring, cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparent(s) – a sense that every one of those family labels are glued by something that not even Flex Seal could replicate.

   I’m not, as it’s turned out, a social being. My most engaged social activity is solitude. (Carol is getting used to the idea that me sitting on the couch and staring is “conversation.”)*  I sleep, I eat, I read, I sleep. If an oyster could read….

   But somehow this entire family has embraced me. And while the activities of normal family life are still somewhat strange as far as what I’m used to, I’ve become attached to this group of Madigans who seem patient to give me the time to learn what they know how to do naturally.

   Carol sent her nine-year-old grandson into orbit with a microscope as a birthday gift. He’s a curious lad, and no doubt that scope will be employed to unlock the mysteries of home secrets his parents would nevertheless wish would remain that way.

   No telling what his five-year-old sister has planned when she steals it.

   And now I’m suddenly involved in all of that.

   Mike was some kind of special dude.

   ___

*No, she isn’t.