Reunions

I haven’t seen my cousin Jennifer since the 1990s, when the economy was recovering from the first President Bush to screw it up, and a 28.8 dial-up modem was a technological marvel. Regrettably, I missed her wedding in Kingston (where she spent most of her life, having been born in Pembroke but relocating there with her parents as a child)—I traveled a lot at my previous job and was out of the country (which I think qualifies as a pretty sound excuse!).

Jennifer and her family have returned to Canada for a few brief visits since, but we’ve never connected, save for a brief phone chat some years back while I was visiting Nanny, which ended with the promise to eventually “catch up” (it never happened, of course—life gets in the way and these commitments tend to dissipate to nobody’s fault).

We got reacquainted earlier this summer on Facebook, and in a rare case of sublime synchronicity, found out we were both scheduled to be in Pembroke with our respective beaus and broods the exact same week! Jennifer, along with husband Joe and sons Benjamin and Daniel, planned to spend a day with Nanny before embarking on the three hour drive to visit her father in Kingston, and then fly off to Vancouver to investigate career and housing opportunities for a planned return to Canadian shores.

Monday, a few hours after we arrived from our day-long drive, Jennifer and her family pulled into the driveway with Nanny and we all enjoyed a compressed, but lively, round of catch-up, chased down with a pizza dinner and some frenzied frolic with Benjamin and Daniel in the yard.

Too brief a reunion, certainly--but long overdue, and who knows? The next one could well have us taking a Griswoldian family trip to the west coast (and I hear there's tons of film work there)...