Preparing for San Diego

This week brings another trip out of town.  Thank God. 

Not that being here in the Pacific Northwest has been bad.  The weather has actually brightened up in the past month or so, work is going well, and I’ve been able to spend a fair amount of time in Seattle with friends.  But I always look forward to a bit of travel.

This week’s trip will be my second one to California this summer.  Last time, it was a drive to the Bay Area for a concert.  This time, it’s a flight to San Diego for a family reunion.  I’ll be spending the weekend with a handful of cousins and aunts and uncles I’ve met before, and a few dozen I’ve never known.  Most of the people that make up my dad’s expansive Mexican-American family have seemed almost imaginary until now.  My siblings and I have heard that these alleged relatives exist, several hundred miles to the south, but we’ve seen very little evidence of them.  Even my dad, who is from that area, isn’t well acquainted with most of his extended San Diego family. 

My dad moved from San Diego to Bremerton, Washington, to live with his paternal grandparents almost 44 years ago, when he was 12.  We’ve always kept in touch with my aunts and uncles who moved up here with him, and we’ve gone to visit a few of the cousins and such down in San Diego at least twice.  I remember one backyard barbecue when I was 11, where my siblings and I met several cousins and practiced our slam-dunking skills on a tiny plastic basketball hoop.  But it was a small get-together compared to the one happening this week.  And in the 17 summers since that barbecue, we haven’t been back to San Diego as a family.  I went with my parents a couple of times six or seven years ago, and I went to visit a friend two years ago.  But this will be the first time the five of us have gone together in nearly two decades.  I think we’re all excited to get a little closer to some family we’ve long been distant from. 

So for the relatives in Southern California, who have been going to the same reunion every summer for the past 10 years, this shindig probably feels pretty ordinary.  But I think the Northwest branch of the family sees it a little differently.