Out Of The Old Black Bag
OUT OF THE OLD BLACK BAG
Return to Camelot — Part 1
Musical accompaniment: “Camelot” by Lerner and Loewe; sung here Richard Harris playing King Arthur.
“Winter must be cold for those with no warm memories… we’ve already missed the spring!”
— Terry McKay in “An Affair to Remember”
It was long overdue. Even as an in-law, or perhaps because I was an in-law whose role in the “Lyons Family Dynasty” was often from the outside-looking-in, I sensed a weakening of the glue adhering the generations together since the grand matriarch Mary Irene (a facsimile of the late Queen Elizabeth II with a rivaling sense of humor) passed away in 2018. No better time for an inaugural Lyons Family reunion than in the dog days of the summer of 2022.
For my own selfish reasons, I was concerned that the generations comprising Mary and Jack Lyons’ grandchildren and great grandchildren would be strangers to each other as their 12 children left their own backyards in Pittsburgh seeking fortune and happiness in distant localities. I know that I was sensitized to this unintentional disintegration of family ties having witnessed it first hand with my mother’s large 13-child Italian Bonacci Family, whose members moved out of the little village of Treskow in Northeastern Pennsylvania to leave the coal mines and seek the American dream elsewhere in the mid-20th century.
“You are very blessed if your children stay and raise your grandchildren in the Steel City,” I told the parents in my practice. “They will be so happy (and I will be too) that you can bring them when necessary to the pediatrician’s office. I will be green with envy!”
A family reunion can be an awkward, contentious affair!
So those who were able to sacrifice the weekend made the trek. My grandchildren Miles and Mary who live in Virginia arrived the day before the event and turned our house on its head with excitement. Being 6 and 7 ½ years old, they competed relentlessly for their grandparents’ attention. Exhausted, I bemoaned the rhetorical questions presented in the accusatory song from “Bye, Bye, Birdie,” criticizing the parenting skills of my own children: “Why can’t they be like we were — perfect in every way? What’s the matter with kids (and parents) today?!”
Before turning in for a good night of recuperative sleep before the reunion, we watched old videos of my own four offspring at various ages “doing their thing” under our “supervision.” I was appalled as I witnessed full documentation of my ineptitude as a disciplinarian; the antics of my own children far outshadowed those of my grandchildren. I then recalled MY father’s tales to my relatives describing how my brother and I “destroyed” the old apartment we lived in before we moved to a house in the suburbs; Miles and Mary are pikers compared to their grandfather. As the old admonition goes: “The more things change, the more they remain the same.”
With this new perspective, I approached the reunion the following afternoon with great humility and apprehension about the validity of my remote memory! Furthermore, was it not this pediatrician who insisted on referring to this current generation of millennial parents as “Generation A” — awesome, amazing, awakened, aware, attached — because of their superior child-rearing skills compared to us baby boomers?
The Great Grandchildren — the offspring of Generation A — displaying varying degrees of enthusiasm for the reunion.
Somehow, I had it stuck in my aging, romanticizing mind that the reunion would be a return to a time in my life that might be referred to as “Camelot.” We remember Camelot as that mythical time and place in the 12th century that featured the citadel of King Arthur and the noble Knights of the Round Table, symbolizing an atmosphere of idyllic bravery and happiness, where goodness reigned supreme. In the context of my own family, Camelot embodied the wonder years of raising babies and innocent, frolicking little children and contentious but aspiring teenagers — all at the same time. Little did they know!
I later realized that my subconscious hidden agenda was to gain personal redemption for the years as a young professional when I was compelled by ambition and selfishness to “steal” (the term used by pediatrician/poet William Carlos Williams) quality time from my devoted wife and young children. I believe that I vicariously experienced his personal guilt by reading his memoirs and that reversed my misguided emphasis on reputation germane to the medical profession; I implicitly trusted the wisdom of Williams because he practiced in Rutherford, NJ — across the Passaic River from where I grew up in Clifton — and he also graduated from Penn (across the Delaware River in Philly).
Although the great grandchildren reluctantly engaged each other and posed for pictures together, I was surprised that most of them gravitated to the activities of us elders. Miles was preoccupied with proving to his uncles that he was a formidable opponent in chess. Mary stole the spotlight by crushing the adults in Jenga, a sport I had never even heard of. However, some of the more astute individuals reported hearing the laughter of matriarch Mary Irene among the adjacent grove of North Park trees; I suspect it was nervous laughter due to frustration on her part because, dining alfresco, there was no need for the activities she most enjoyed performing at parties: washing and drying the dishes!
To be continued…
source http://www.thepediablog.com/2022/09/20/out-of-the-old-black-bag-29/
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