randy_byers | At home with the Mennonites

I spent last weekend at my parents' place in central Oregon with just over 30 of my relatives. Along with my parents, brother, and sister, there were aunts, uncles, cousins, cousins children, and cousins children's children, and various in-laws. Four generations, all on my mom's side of the family.

Both of my parents grew up in the Mennonite church, and my heritage is Mennonite for many generations back. The Mennonites were part of the anabaptist (adult baptism) movement of the 17th century, they are ideologically related to the more conservative Amish, and they are what we nowadays call fundamentalists. I'm not sure how many of those 30 relatives are practicing Mennonites, although certainly some of them are, to varying degrees of conservatism (I don't think any of the women were wearing coverings, which were ubiquitous in my youth). My parents left the church in the '60s, before I was baptized, but as I've gotten older, I've realized that I have been shaped by the heritage in more ways than I can shake a stick at. All it takes is to get a pile of my cousins together to realize how much, despite all our differences, we have in common.

The activity around which this particular gathering was organized was a golf tournament. I skipped the golfing and helped my sister prepare an appetizer and burrito dinner for everyone for Saturday night. When we did this golf tournament last year, the thing that amazed me was how well the third generation -- the kids of my cousins and brother and sister -- got along, and how much they were just like us. My mother's side of the family has what my sister calls the Schrock mouth -- a sarcastic, teasing, almost hectoring sense of humor that latches onto whatever subject is at hand -- frequently something serious -- and builds an ongoing injoke about it. This time it was my cousin Dennis' scars from a recent car accident that split his face open. He told funny stories about the horrific aftermath of the accident, and we took to calling him Scarface. We are a peasant people (many were farmers and some still are, including Dennis), and the humor can be very crude -- certainly stooping to various bodily functions. I didn't hear five-week-old Brooke crack any off-color jokes, but just about everybody else did (and we certainly joked about her filling her pants). I'm not sure whether it's indicative of an earthy, sane approach to difficult subjects, or a sign of a frantically smiling avoidance of the same. What's also interesting about that side of the family is how prone to depression it is -- including Dennis.

Traditionally, Mennonites are opposed to all varieties of sinful behavior, including drinking alcohol. I think it's safe to say that most of us at this gathering, even those who go to church, are drinkers, but we are also uncertain about who might disapprove and make a scene about it. Thus the act of drinking becomes fraught. My cousin Marvin (Dennis' brother) drank heavily on the golf course and fell asleep when everyone got back to the house. My brother and I had our first couple of beers outside the house, but I later drank wine inside, once I was sufficiently inebriated not to give a shit whether I was offending anyone. Aside from my family and my uncle Truman's brother and sister-in-law, nobody else drank at the house. What was funny is that those who didn't turned out to be afraid of my frail aunt Erma, who is practically an invalid anymore and never a very forceful personality to begin with. But she has that sharp Schrock tongue, and I guess those who live near her don't want to have to listen to it (most of these people live in the Willamette Valley in Oregon, many around Albany, not a few in the houses they grew up in.) Such are the disadvantages of a close family!

The traditional advantages also showed up on Sunday. My dad is replacing the deck on the house, and they are also going to have the log railing replaced with wrought iron. My brother asked if I'd help him take the old railing down, so after breakfast he and his wife and younger son and I went out and started wrenching out the long bolts and hauling the logs away. Before we knew it, Dennis and his son and two son-in-laws were out there, and that old railing had vanished before we could say, "We can handle it, thanks." All this, mind you, after my half-deaf and careless old dad had "whispered" in earshot of one of those son-in-laws that his wife had said she'd never leave him because "he makes so much money" and that dad hoped, therefore, that he liked fat women. (At which point my brother shushed him and turned away, embarrassed.) Matt pretended not to hear, and perhaps he really had the grace to forgive an old man his graceless comments. He seems like a pretty easy-going guy -- an engineer of some sort, which is how he makes "so much money."

Throughout all this was the ongoing saga of my mom and sister's pending adventures with the Red Cross. LaVelle received her assignment, and on Sunday she headed off to fly to Montgomery, Alabama, where she will be assigned -- whither she knew not, but probably to a shelter somewhere, not necessarily in Montgomery. She was told to expect to sleep at a shelter, because all the hotels in the disaster area are full. My mom, who has been fielding calls at the local office for the past three weeks, also got her field assignment. On Thursday (the earliest flight she could get, just a half day after my sister made her reservations, because of how many people are flying into the area), she will fly to Biloxi, Mississippi, where she will probably be handling staff management. She has some amazing stories to tell about the volunteers she managed in Florida after one of the hurricanes last year. Amongst other things, one of them got married in the first week of his assignment down there and then wanted the Red Cross to cover the airfare back home for his new bride!

So we have all dispersed in our various directions, and it's uncertain if we'll hold this gathering again next year. All the cousins want to, but it's wearing on my mom and dad. It helped that they didn't have to handle food chores, but my dad in particular finds it hard to modify his routine much anymore. Having 30 people in the house for a couple of days is quite a disruption for him. But if it happens, I'll be there, looking at the mirror in my cousins (scars and all), and watching for signs of my inner Mennonite.