RIVER CITY JOURNAL: FAMILY REUNION: A MIRROR HELD UP TO REAL LIFE

Most adults have had the strange sensation of revisiting the old home place or a school or a church for the first time since being a youngster. Invariably, what you notice most is how much smaller the house or building is than you remembered.

That's memory for you. If you don't refresh your brain cells from time to time, they shrink. Although scientists probably wouldn't explain this phenomenon quite the same way, most grownups have experienced it.

That's what happened at the family reunion. At first you drove right by the shelter house at the park on the banks of Big Creek in the Ozarks. "That can't be it," you said, scanning other picnic sites in the midday sun. "Not enough people."

In fact, there were people in the shelter house: three aunts and one uncle, and some spouses. They were sitting in lawn chairs having just finished eating. You were late, because you went to the St. Louis airport to pick up your son from Boston who has no memory of the one and only family reunion he ever attended. He was only about 2 years old.

Although you have been to a couple of family reunions since leaving for college, your memories of the annual get-togethers go back quite a bit further. That was when all your aunts and uncles would be there with all their children -- your 17 cousins -- plus assorted other relatives and lifelong friends from that particular neck of the woods.

So instead of scads of people eating and talking and playing and swimming, there were your remaining aunts and one uncle. It turned out a couple of your cousins and their families were there, but they were gone to the creek already to go swimming, out of eyesight and out of hearing range. It was strangely quiet.

Another memory from your childhood: There were no really old people at family reunions then. Your grandparents were both deceased. Folks in those days came pretty much in two sizes: children and grownups.

This year, though, thanks to modern medicine and stubbornness, there were signs of aging. Your 80-year-old uncle recently had prostate surgery and has just been diagnosed with glaucoma. In spite of all that, his handsome features are still there, including the neatly trimmed mustache and the straw cowboy hat cocked at a rakish angle. His wife, the one with Alzheimer's disease, doesn't know anyone, but her smile flashes with the same brilliance as always.

All the aunts have their aches and pains, and they generally will tell you about them if you ask. But you know what? Even though all those years have gone by, they still look like your aunts, and they still hug you and make over you like you were only 8 or 9 years old. There isn't anything that makes a graying man feel young again like hearing one of your aunts fuss over you.

In all honesty, all was not well at the reunion. Some of the cousins, the ones who have been at the reunions all those years you missed, stayed away on purpose, it seems, and your aunts in particular were fretful about the loss of close family connections.

More than that, not everyone was exactly seeing eye to eye on anything: not the weather, not the food, not the reasons for the poor attendance, not anything.

Later, you visited your mother, who stayed home this year to take care of your ailing 98-year-old stepfather. You reported, as best you could, about the first reunion you've been to in more than 20 years. It troubled her that it hadn't been wonderful and lighthearted and fun. She was concerned that her siblings weren't having a Norman Rockwell day.

After hearing your version of the day's events and reflecting for a few minutes, she summed up most families everywhere:

"Well, we never were the Waltons, you know."

And then she added: "But they're my family, and I love them."

That's the way it should be.

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.