I'm the oldest of five, left home in 1989 to spend a year in Mexico, lived with
my parents again for a year while going to college and working, then moved to
Germany in 1991 "for a year or two." Under NO circumstances was I staying for
any longer, and I was most certainly NOT getting involved with a German. Spanish
was my language and Latin America was what I loved, and German was the only
class that I did badly in during my two semesters of college! Although my
husband I didn't start dating until two years after I arrived in Germany, we
actually met within the first couple of months. We got married a year later, and
it was over 17 years that I ended up living in Germany. None of that is relevant
to the rest of this post, I just liked writing it! :-)
My next sibling,
Scott, is two years younger than I am. He and Kristy got married when they were
19 and 18 (it was actually only a month before Scott's 20th birthday, but 19
sounds more dramatic) and just celebrated their 17th anniversary. Their sons,
Kyle and Alex, are 13 and 12. Scott is in the Air Force and they live in
Florida, finally staying in one place for awhile. They started homeschooling
temporarily when unhappy with the school at one location, and have just kept on,
loving it, for about six years now, I think. Kyle plans to go to school starting
with eighth grade, Alex at this point plans to homeschool all the way
through.
The fourth sibling, Erin, is eight years younger than I am, is a
clarinetist, and lives in San Bruno (near San Francisco), in the house my dad
grew up in, and the youngest, Ruth, 11 years younger than I, is a pharmaseutical
(spelling?!?!) assistant and she and her boyfriend, Justin, live in the house my
mother grew up in, in Grass Valley.
Shawn is the one that this post is
supposed to be about. He's five years younger than I am and has traveled much,
much more than I have, although he's only ever lived in the U.S., mostly in the
San Francisco Bay Area and in the Washington D.C. area, now in D.C. When he
announced on Facebook a couple of months ago that he was engaged to Lindsey
(whom Katie and I met in May 2008 when we were here on a good-bye visit to my
paternal grandmother, three months before she died), I wrote back that if he
wanted us at the wedding, it would need to happen in California and between
December 28th and January 18th! Apparently, they'd been thinking more of a
summer wedding, definitely wanting it outside and with all sorts of outside
activities, but they re-worked their plans for us, for which we were very
grateful. They have friends all over the world as it is, so many of their guests
were going to have to travel no matter what.
The wedding ceremony itself
was scheduled for 5:00 p.m., outside, with a gorgeous view of San Francisco and
the sunset. The weather cooperated, although it was rather cold, and the
ceremony, officiated by my mother, was quite short. There were no attendants,
but Marie and Kyle carried in jars of sand and Lukas carried in a bowl, into
which Shawn and Lindsey poured the sand, and another little girl carried in the
rings on a pillow. Then we all went inside for the party. The speeches were
good, there was lots of food, and it was great seeing so many relatives, such as
one aunt whom I did see in May 2008, but the last time before that was my own
wedding, and her husband, whom I hadn't seen since our wedding. There was also
dancing, and the music was good and not too loud! (Katie was really nervous when
she heard that we were going to a wedding at all, as the last wedding we went to
had horribly loud music and half the people were smoking. We all left coughing
and with headaches. So Katie was immensely relieved that Uncle Shawn's wedding
wasn't like that.)
At some point there was a variety show, something that
the Americans apparently thought a bit strange, as hardly anyone signed up for
it, but to Germans was the absolutely normal wedding reception. :-) Shawn and
Lindsey started by making all the participants dance across the stage to the
Muppet theme song (if we'd known that was coming, probably even fewer people
would have signed up...), then the two of them sang a song together. One little
girl (I think a niece of Lindsey's) sang "Rudolph, the Red-nosed Reindeer", an
aunt of Lindsey's did a stand-up comedy skit, and another little girl at the
very end sang another song. Marie played the violin together with my sister Erin
and Erin's partner Ginny, both on clarinets, and Joern and I narrated "Die
Hocheitskuetsche", "The wedding carriage", a very commonly done skit at weddings
in Germay. The actors were the bride and groom (princess and prince), the
groom's best friend (coachman), the parents (the four wheels), the siblings
(horses), the children (forest), and the audience (the forest path). Most people
seemed to enjoy it--at the very least, there was a LOT of laughter--but my dad
did make the comment at the end that he could understand why we got married in
the U.S.! (Actually, the one thing I DID miss at our wedding was the typical
German reception...)
Anyway, the rest was basically what a usual New
Year's Eve party always was when I was growing up: ice cream sundaes, lots of
junk food, lots of noise, and lots of board games. :-) Then at midnight, lots of
noise, and being over San Francisco, we even got to watch a far-away fireworks
display. Then it was clean-up and drive back to the hotel, where we collapsed
into bed. Katie and Helen had both fallen asleep during the evening, but the
other three children made it all the way through. Helen did wake up in time for
midnight, meaning that Katie is the only one of all of my children to have ever
slept through midnight on New Year's Eve.
The next day started with a
breakfast buffet, then a hike to Shawn and Lindsey's "first kiss spot" in Tilden
Park, then bowling, and then dinner at a Mexican restaurant. I can't say I
enjoyed the bowling much--at least there wasn't any smoke (my last time bowling
was over five years ago, in Germany, and one could hardly see through the smoke,
and the time before that, which was also my first time ever, was well over 20
years ago, when they still smoked in public places in the U.S., too), but it was
quite dark and the music was so loud that one had to shout to be heard, so there
wasn't much conversation. Added to which, I think I got the lowest score of the
30 or so people that were there. 35 on my first game, and on the second game,
which started with a strike on the first frame and ended with a spare on the
final frame, had a total of 40 points. I kind of doubt that anyone else could
get that low if they tried.
During breakfast one of my aunts was talking
about lending us her car, which seats seven, for a couple of days, and the
negotiations ended with her taking my mom's car back to Ukiah with her, and we
left with her van for the next two weeks! My parents have two cars and a truck,
and my youngest sister
January 2nd the festivities continued. After
breakfast we went to an indoor climbing gym, where Shawn and Lindsey had been
members when they lived on the West Coast, and everyone who wanted to got a
chance at climbing. I didn't climb, but the children did, and there was a very
nice (and quiet!!) area for sitting and watching and chatting with the other
people who weren't climbing. From there we headed into San Francisco, where we
had lunch on our own and then met up again with the group for a high-tech
scavenger hunt. Shawn is a conflict resolutionist and travels around giving
seminars, etc., and this was a version of one of the programs he leads. We were
over 30 people and divided into 6 groups. Jacob was our captain and when he saw
the GPS thing-a-ma-jig and saw that it was exactly the same one that he's
familiar with from our friend Richard, who taught Marie and Jacob sailing last
summer and has been having Jacob work with him on his new boat all autumn, he
immediately took over that. Lindsey's father, Tim, and I, as the only adult
native speakers of English on the team, worked on the word puzzles while we
walked, and Magdalena from Switzerland took care of the camera. Her husband and
Joern (who had Helen in the Ergo carrier) helped look for photo challenges and
corralled the niece of Lindsey's who was along, as well as Katie, who sometime
during the afternoon deftected from another team and joined ours. We came in
second place, the only area we did really badly in was the quotations, getting
only four out of 10 right, and two of those were guessed.
Then we headed
back to Berkeley, to the home of some friends of Lindsey's, who had taken home
the left-over food from the wedding. We saw a slide-show of photos from the
wedding, ate our fill and then some for dinner, and finally drove home. I
managed almost an hour, but was definitely falling asleep, so switched with
Joern, who drove the rest of the way, another hour. As on just about every
single day of our trip so far, the evening ended with us carrying sleeping
children to bed and then collapsing into bed ourselves.
So that was my
brother's three-day wedding! The next day Joern, my mom, the two little girls,
and I went to church in Colfax, where I grew up. I didn't get to go there my
last couple of visits to the U.S., as my mother is now a pastor in King's Beach
(on Lake Tahoe), but she had taken all three Sundays that we're here off of
work. There were two people I really wanted to see, and both of them were there:
Myrtle, the widow of the pastor there from when I was 6 until I was 13, and who
must be somewhere between 70 and 100, but hasn't changed in the slightest since
I can remember; and "Mrs. Murphy", who has been in charge of the Sunday School
forever and ever. She taught Sunday School that day, too, and Katie made up
one-third of the whole Sunday School. All of the other people I had known there
from my childhood have either died (most of them--my parents were the youngest
adults in the church for 20 years) or moved.
And the next day we headed
for Disneyland, which will be a separate post, and probably on another day, as
I'm now going to play a game with Jacob and Lukas.
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