There’s this photograph Scotch-taped to the front of my desk where I can see it while I’m working. It’s a color snapshot–color slightly off-register with a tinge of flashbulb green–and it looks like this:

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There’s a white-paper-clothed table loosely place-set with an opened Diet Coke can, an opened Sprite can, a clear plastic iced-tea-size handleless cup, three styrofoam plates, a wadded-up white paper napkin, thin and fragile little white plastic forks and various remnants of food on the plates.

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To the left of the table is a folding wooden chair upon which sits my placid daughter Margaret, who is leaning forward toward my wife, their elbows touching.

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Margaret is not eating and is trying to ignore the camera, but my wife has this enormous fried-chicken breast at her lips and she is diligently gnawing away while staring at the picture-taker.

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At her other elbow is tiny granddaughter Jessica, whose eyes also stare at the camera while immersing her mouth into a small styrofoam cup. Behind this trio is a green blackboard (why are they never called greenboards?), complete with eraser and no chalk, and a couple of other wooden folding chairs.

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This is a typical scene from a long, long-ago family reunion, one that used to take place each year in the Bethel Presbyterian Church basement on the Watermelon Road in Tuscaloosa County, just fifty miles from my shop and home in Birmingham.

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The food is always varied and good and often real home-cooked, and relatives and in-laws and out-laws always do the same thing: they huddle together as families and look around to see which other families are present today; they struggle to remember names and lineages, and frequently fail; they always look forward to attending the reunion, always wonder why they bothered to come, and always look forward to attending next year’s gathering.

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We are forced to imagine another reunion taking place at the same time, an imaginary reunion that would be even more interesting than this one: that’s the reunion attended by all the relatives who will never come to this reunion, plus all the long-passed relatives who used to have such a good time here.

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Wouldn’t it be nice to go to such a gathering, one that unites at once the reluctant and secretive relatives with all the favorite long-gone relatives?

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Oh, well, whether these absent or dead kin are here or not in body, they are certainly here each time in spirit, since we who attend can never forget them. In essence, we pull them from their graves and their secret places and bring them in for a couple of hours to enjoy or puzzle at their memories, then we release them till next year and try to get on with our lives, the lives that produce and groom more relatives to attend future reunions, reunions as mysterious and sad and happy as anything else you can do of a Saturday Noon on the Watermelon Road

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 © 2016 A.D. by Jim Reed