My father turns 80 next week, but last night we — as in my family — held a birthday party for him in Pittsburgh. All five of his children (i.e., my and my four siblings) were there, along with handfuls of grandchildren. There was even a dog, although sadly the cats couldn’t make the trip. He and my mother (who have been married 56 years) both seemed very happy. The food was good and there was lots of it, all of the strains and broken and reforged alliances that inevitably mark any family that has endured for a significant amount of time felt far away. The atmosphere was respectful and at times appropriately exuberant without being unduly nostalgic or maudlin; for a few minutes (but only a few), we traded memories of working on different aspects of the family business — mostly manual labor and the kind of assembly-line work that served as summer jobs during our teenage years — my father started in the 1960s and subsequently turned over to my brother and sister. There was a sense of time passing, but not too fast or too slow.
The party ended and everything was cleaned up. Everyone dispersed, back to our lives, which feel at once very near and very far removed from what they used to be so many decades ago.
