Lewis Wickes Hine: Italian Family, Chicago (1910)

"Then the subtle and purposeful passion play commences."

A toodle turns utterly different once the toodlers drop in to visit family. At every other stop, our heroes remain the very soul of themselves: reasonable, mature, and experienced. Drop them into a family context, though, and they take on distinctly different forms. Roles they learned decades before resurrect themselves and start playing out in real time before them. The Muse becomes Aunt Amy, and I can't help but become the long-lost Uncle David. The family members we interact with, too, dutifully assume the roles they learned through iteration when they didn't realize they were learning anything, even though nearly thirty years might have passed since we first studied for our original parts. It almost seems not a moment has passed since that first performance, for there it is playing out right in front of us.

A little (or a lot) of effort might bring the performance to consciousness and allow an actor to intervene authentically, to somehow break the role and be there as they are now, rather than how they learned to be then. A powerful force rules these regions, and nobody could guarantee that anything other than theres and thens might play out through any visit. The patterns were established for good and decent reasons in response to conditions then present, but now long absent. To treat a fifteen-year-old as was appropriate five years before is to deliver a series of subtle insults. Nobody engaging might even notice the disconnect at first, but something will grate on the interaction. It might well seem reassuring at first, a comforting old familiar, but these relations never age well. We ache to be seen as we are rather than as how we once were but couldn't acknowledge. Nobody was ever a fully self-aware ten-year-old; likewise, for any sixty-some-year-old aunt or uncle.

We say we're catching up when we're more likely tracking down. We might be coming to grips with stuff we could never seem to previously acknowledge. We were mere innocents then, managing the very best we could, though we always might have managed better. We didn't, of course, and we grew partly due to the shortcomings we embodied then. Coming together again creates the potential for us to recover what we never suspected we'd lost and to more fully acknowledge what we always were but remained unaware of then. Now, the potential exists for things to be different, though the trance proximity induces renders both catching on and catching up a challenge. As humans, we're supremely capable of merely staying in the role we've assigned ourselves or were assigned by others. Some of these personas go back to our earliest childhood. Most were assumed long before anyone involved ever imagined they were even capable of assuming anything, let alone a life role. Others might have once upon a time been deliberately chosen, though their purpose and presence might have been forgotten long ago .

Family reunions are opportunities to awaken pasts, futures, and presents. The pasts will certainly visit, for they provide the premise for coming together. The futures might seem more optional in any moment, for the present moments can easily overwhelm. The present shape and form can contradict anticipation, to seem just wrong, and a kind of bartering can almost consume present interactions. With whom do I have the pleasure of interacting? I might find myself wondering and surprise myself when I can find no easy answer. Anyone might slowly come to realize that they are no longer who they once were, validating with experience the notion that we replace every damned molecule of ourselves at least once each year. We might have left as family, but we seem certain to return as strangers every time. We never begin our latest interactions with introductions, but with hugs, as if we knew the strangers who have just shown up. Then the subtle and purposeful passion play commences.

©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #FollowingChapters, #PureSchmaltz