More family than I thought

Posted: May 29, 2023 | Author: | Filed under: Brief...therefore witty. | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I’d love for ‘family’, in my context, to mean a little more mafia than it currently does.

My family are simply my family, of the traditional context – father, mother and a brother.

But I wish it meant people who worked in the concrete shoe shop.

Perhaps it’s in the enunciation: “The Fairmily”. Maybe then people would give up their train seats for me, or just bring their train seats to me at my family compound, so it’s more convenient for me that having to be on a train for them to give up their seats.

And I’d have a plethora of brothers instead of the embarrassingly singular sibling I’m stuck with, and their names would be ‘Paulie’, and ‘Joey’, ‘Tommy’ and ‘Mikey’. My brother’s name is Ben.

And we’d have nicknames. Like ‘Sam the Nose’ – which would be appropriate because of what I’ve got.

My brother would likely be ‘Big Ben’, because he is enormous. But that wouldn’t make me ‘Little Sammy’, because I’m only really slightly less obese.

Anyway.

Family. I’ve come to realise I’ve more of them than I previously realised.

I have long disliked large crowds, which I presumed was due to coming from a small family. Both my parents were a single-child, whilst both my brother and I are both single-children too according to how we feel about one another.

But at a family dinner yesterday, my father invited his only living blood relatives (aside from me and my brother, which is weird as one tends to picture a ‘closest living blood relative’ as being an appropriately distant and appropriately many-times-removed grandmother of an ancient generation, instead of it being me).

And there was a pile of extra family, all ages, many types of clothes, basically all one colour, and they all had no idea who each other was, least of all me.

“Here’s Sam, the less obese one I was telling you about” says my father, “and his equally less obese wife and two kids – both of whom are also single-children”.

And everyone looks at me and my family, each of them agreeing vaguely and approving the description. There’s some handshaking and pecks on cheeks, and then I left the room because I’ve got a problem with large crowds.

I didn’t feel any kind of interest towards these people and so didn’t engage (nobody’s loss), but my father was keen to get to know them, because he really didn’t know them, nor they him.

As I played with my kids, I saw him leading them in comparing old photos, the black and white ones, followed by the later coloured photos that have now gone a 1970’s shade of nicotine-brown.

And then, my father told his stories to the new lump of distant family we’d discovered, detailing his upbringing (some family remembered his childhood address – which was nice), his family and career.

I was listening and realised something I’d suspected before.

My dad is really, really super-cool.

He’s a cockney-rebel, a cage-shaker, and the new next big thing in the classic style, a rebel with many causes (in fact, he’s a Rotarian), but he’s always been willing to do what he can do get jobs done and to achieve so with flair. He’s my hero.

And looking through the photos, the variety of hairstyles and scenarios in which he had those hairstyles, were astonishing.

Meanwhile, I have a blog, and literally piles and piles of distant family that I’m about as related to as everyone else is related to the Cheddar Man.

I’d best look to emulate him. My dad I mean, but also the Cheddar Man a bit too.

They’re both fairmily after all.

Sam