Family Reunion

or An Interesting Question

Last weekend I went to a family reunion on my father's side of the family. Besides the normal catching up, there was a theme throughout the day. How did your parents meet? This all started because I found a newspaper clipping in one of my mother's scrapbooks about my oldest aunt's wedding in 1948. It got me thinking that I had heard the story about how my parents had met, but none of the accounts of how my aunts and uncles first got together. I asked around and heard bits and pieces of stories from various cousins about their parents. However, I was able to get one of the stories straight from the source--Aunt Debbie and Uncle Alan.

Uncle Alan at the time he met Aunt Debbie
(minus the leather jacket.)

Debbie and Alan told the story of when they first laid eyes on each other at a church Christmas play. Upon seeing my uncle standing at the back of the church in a leather jacket, my aunt declared that was the man she going to marry. It didn't seem to matter that her fiancee at the time was sitting right beside her. They wove a quite colorful story of the complications of fiancees and girlfriends with my aunt even telling my uncle that she was engaged, but only on weekends.

While I immensely enjoyed the tale of their first meeting and courtship, there was another part that I found even more interesting. My aunt asked each one of her suitors, including my uncle, a curious question, "If you were going to build a city, what would you do?" Among other things, Uncle Alan answered that he would design one like Washington, D.C., with a center circle and streets going out like spokes from there. I commented to my aunt that that must have been an acceptable answer and she said that Alan was the only one who ever gave her an answer. Her fiancee said she was never going to build a city, so it didn't matter.

Then I asked the obvious question, why did she ask about building a city? Aunt Debbie said that it told her if the suitor could make a plan and if they could dream about the future. I found that very smart of her to question her boyfriends in that way. It seemed to be a good test because she and my uncle have been married for almost 62 years now.

I was not nearly so clever as my aunt, but I had a question for Ward, too, before we got married. I asked him that if we had problems, would he go to a counselor with me? He said that of course he would. Then there was my follow up question, "Would you go even if I thought we had problems but you didn't?" Well, he gave the right answer to that one also and here we are thirty some years later. Luckily, I haven't had to take him up on his promise yet.

Did you have any specific questions for someone with whom you thought you might spend the future? Is there a question you wished you had asked?

Note: You've heard it many times before, but I'll say it again. Now is the time to learn your family stories. My Uncle Alan is the only one left of my father's eight siblings. I wish the others were here to ask the same question about their meeting, but they're not. Who knows what other stories we might have to add to this one if I had talked to them earlier.