Before our family reunion in Michigan this year, we went to Ohio to see our son Chris and his wife, Angie.  We stayed in a motel close to their apartment.  The next morning Jim and I went to the motel lobby for the standard continental breakfast.  In this case, continental meant a few dry pastries and bagels, boxes of Fruit Loops, a broken juice machine and coffee.  We took the bagels and coffee and sat down at the last empty table.

Halfway through our bagels an elderly woman hobbled in.  She surveyed the occupied tables and announced loudly, “Well, I have to sit somewhere.”  We pulled out our extra chair and she joined us.  We never did learn her name, but her personality made us recall the movie “Driving Miss Daisy” from some years earlier.  I think she might have been Miss Daisy herself.  “I love to travel,” she said.  “I’ve traveled all my life.”  She had come up from a little town in Texas near San Antonio.  Every year she hired a companion named Melvin to drive her somewhere.  This year Melvin had planned a trip up to Mackinaw Island.  After a few days on Mackinaw Island they planned to return home by a different route.

She couldn’t hear well and macular degeneration had taken some of her eyesight.  Even with unsteady feet she needed to get out and go somewhere, anywhere, to see no one in particular at least once a year.  And why not?  To fade away slowly, ears first and then eyes makes a person wonder what’s next?  She couldn’t stop any of it from happening, but she could decide where she might be while it happened.  We learned all of this while she ate her Fruit Loops.

Miss Daisy reminded us of Grandpa Smith who died a few years ago.  Cancer had made the last years of life a chore for him.  Regardless, he often hauled himself into his boat and went fishing.  He said, “If I’m going to be miserable, I’d rather be miserable in my boat on the lake than in a chair in front of the TV.”

By the middle of the next afternoon all of us, including Chris and Angie were at our family reunion in Grandpa’s backyard in Grand Rapids.  Our chairs were by the dessert table.  The cakes, cookies and brownies on this table made it look as though chocolate was one of the major food groups.  Fourteen great-grandchildren ran in and out of the back door.  The smallest ones had stripped down to their underwear and were dancing around the water sprinkler in the back yard.

Our cousin, Pat, was telling us how she made her cake with honey instead of oil.  After we appreciated both the ingredients and the taste, she began to tell us about the recent funeral of a 16-year-old girl and of the extraordinary sense of peace and the presence of the Holy Spirit they experienced in spite of grief.  She had been so touched by this experience that she needed to share it with us.

That evening Jim’s youngest brother, his wife and two girls joined us for a swim at the motel.  At ten o’clock Jim and Laura went out to McDonald’s to bring back hamburgers for all of us.  While the grown-ups were talking, two and a half year old Magdalena delighted all of us by jumping up and down on the bed while she meowed like a kitten and laughed.