Reunited

I'll be heading to a reunion soon. So will my wife and my son, in fact he is already attending. Interestingly, we will be in three different places. In the normal routine we would all be heading to the same get together. But this year things are different. My son is in the Dominican Republic on a mission trip sponsored by Foundation for Peace. It is however a reunion in that he was there last year as well and helped begin construction of a church in a fairly remote village. The folks he met then will once more be grateful for the folks who choose to leave a lifestyle beyond anything they can imagine in order to help them. He will be doing a good deal more sweating than either Jennifer or I in our single day excursions.

Jennifer will be going to have lunch and reconnect with some of the hockey players she coached some forty years ago. She is looking forward to reconnecting with these girls who are now middle aged  women and some of whom she has not seen since they played on the team she coached. In this case also part of this planned luncheon is the result of people appreciating the time someone dedicated to teaching life lessons through teamwork. As it turns out the luncheon is a conflict with the family reunion I will be attending the same day.

So I get to represent our clan by myself this year. Our family reunion is a bit confusing in that almost everyone there is somehow connected by our less than common surname. That name has been around for a long time as names in this country go and figuring out how we're all related is part of the fun. It will be a fun day of catching up on what folks have been doing and, of course, eating more than one should on any given day. Carrying on in the tradition my dad started, I try to make some item to be raffled off to build the treasury for future reunions. This year it's a pretty simple bench that grew out of a small slab of cedar that my dad figured might make something some day. So with thoughts of him and all the others who have completed this side of the journey, I'll be off to see all the others fulfilling that need to reconnect.