Johnson

 A week ago, I called my mother to ask her for clarification. I do this a lot. She's my mom. This particular call was in reference to my family tree. I was attempting to regale my wife with stories of my clan of origin, the Johnsons, when I realized that I had no working knowledge of exactly how my own line could be traced up into the branches before me. 

I knew my mother, and her cousin Gail, and her family were "my cousins." I was never handy with the math related to first and second and how many times removed any of them were. I was comfortable with the simple answer. I was also aware that my great uncle Marvin was Gail's father. In many ways he filled the void left by my lack of a grandfather. My mother's father died when my mother was a teenager. My father's father was lost to me somewhere in Kansas, persona non grata. But I knew that Marvin was a Johnson and that meant my mother's mother was, before marrying Ralph Myers, also. It was Marvin's brothers and sisters that made up the core for their eponymous family picnic. 

It was this event, more than anything else in my young life, that gave me the recognition of extended family. Aunt Elda and Uncle Lloyd. Aunt Mae and Uncle Kenneth. Uncle Marvin and Aunt Dorothy. There was another aunt, who didn't make it to the picnics, perhaps because she got married off into a family called Van Houten, who I expect had their picnics at the club to which they were all members. 

The Johnson Family picnic, in its heyday, was held annually at our cabin in the mountains above Boulder, Colorado. It was a mildly centralized location for those Johnsons who had made the leap in a previous generation from Kansas to Colorado. It was in and around that mountain cabin that, once a year, all those aunts and uncles and cousins of varied permutations landed for a day of food, fun and a considerable amount of drinking. There were coolers full of beer, mostly Coors, and the overflow went into the creek nearby to stay cold. Whether it was horseshoes, hiking, or the marathon volleyball game in the meadow, it was necessary to keep one hand free for consumption. The Miller boys, cousins, eschewed the Coors and I spent one summer afternoon listening to Dex extolling the beer that carried his family's name. "Miller," he confided to me, "is the champagne of beers." Up inside the cabin, the patriarchs and matriarchs held forth, telling stories and singing songs. These were aided, in part, by the portable bar that accompanied Uncle Kenneth most everywhere. 

And you might get the impression that this was a hard-drinking group of individuals. And you would be mostly right, especially in those days. Part of the way they expressed their joy de vie was sharing a cocktail or two, but it was the gathering of the family that made it all work. Long before my time, my mother described her grandfather breaking out the Old Grandad, and pouring everyone a drink. Communion, of sorts. 

Nowadays, my mother and her cousin Gail are holding down the matriarch position. The Johnsons have mostly faded into memory. Getting everyone together, climbing that winding mountain road and spending the day at a cabin that has since become part of old photographs and memories, doesn't happen anymore. That sense of belonging to something much larger doesn't get the same kind of annual charge. 

Until I call my mom, and she tells me stories of how it used to be. 

And I remember.