The last big holiday of the summer season has passed—successfully, I hope. In my family, Labor Day is the time for gathering what’s left of the clan for a last outdoor meal, a game of touch football and maybe some badminton. The littlest one are delighted when it’s hot enough to have duels with the water hoses.

 

Many of us will be together again at Thanksgiving, but there’s always an element of sadness associated with Labor Day. Maybe it emanates from the children, who face the start of a new school year . 

 

In my family, holidays are no longer the momentous occasions they were in my parents’ day. I think my grandfather spent his year planning for the next holiday, when his brothers and their families would all come together for the festivities—always at my grandparents’ house. In those days, all four of the brothers lived within thirty minutes of each other.

 

But with changes in American society brought about by greater mobility as well as economic opportunity in cities that had seemed no more than names in distant places, my family, like most, dispersed. Today, they live all over the map, including overseas. The only times we are all together are at weddings, marking the start of a new branch on the family tree, or at funerals, when we close the book on another.

 

At times I get nostalgic for what I remember of those grand gatherings, especially Thanksgiving, when my cousins and I were allowed to sit on cushions that raised us high enough to be at the “big” table. I don’t recall many details, but my mother’s stories of those celebrations are wonderful. I’m especially intrigued by one about a New Year’s party that must have taken place in the mid1940s. Three of the guests were neighbors who were good friends of my grandparents. One was a single gentleman who went to work each day, but no one knew what he did. Later, everyone learned he had been a physicist working at the University of Chicago on the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb. The other two were a couple who had a son in the Air Force. Again, some time later it became known that their son had been part of the crew that flew the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima.

 

I’ve always thought it ironic that at these happy celebrations, my family unknowingly had their brush with history. Would that it had been a less ominous brush.

 

 

Paula “Another drink? Sure” Gifford