By PAT NEWMAN
pnewman@thecitizennews.com

Family reunions — you either love them or dread them.

I've approached these unexpected, or planned-five-years-in-advance, get-togethers with a mixture of curiosity and apprehension.

The first real family reunion I attended was a small-scale Thanksgiving soiree put together by my aunt in New Jersey. That was 13 years ago and I haven't seen or heard from her since. It seems that she was unprepared for the antics of two boys under the age of 4 in her House Beautiful.

I tried to smooth out the skid marks from their Matchbox cars which tracked across her Italian leather sofa, but the softening agent I used only proceeded to lift out the color. My older son attempted to plunge the clogged toilet to no avail. And the spilled cranberry juice on the heirloom lace tablecloth was clearly an accident.

I heard through the family grapevine that my aunt moved to a condo somewhere in south Florida the day after we left. It turns out her driver also quit following a really inconsequential fender bender on the Turnpike when my younger son beamed him on the head with a size two Buster Brown shoe on the way to Newark Airport.

The time I met with my then-husband's family on Isle of Palms outside Charleston several years ago was truly an experience. In the mix were seven children, six parents and one grandmother. The beach house contained two double beds, three single beds, one crib and zero sleep sofas.

Now, do the math. Let me tell you, rattan porch furniture has no give and leaves bodily scars.

Aside from the catch-as-catch-can sleeping arrangements, the 18 hours we stayed together were fairly enjoyable. About six hours were spent scouting for the alligator that inhabited the nearby lagoon. It took us another six hours to hunt down the missing children and the final six found me curled in the fetal position on a torturous 40-inch love seat.

Funerals prompt those spur-of-the-moment reunions we all dread. A family passing two years ago reunited me with a slew of cousins I had forgotten I had. I found that my eldest cousin had indeed divorced her first husband, a Jamaican limbo dancer and remarried a hard-working construction worker.

Another cousin was bi-coastal and had succeeded in maintaining a year around tan. My favorite female cousin had become a top notch secretary and an authority on Disney World, claiming two visits a year for the past 15 years.

We celebrated the long and full life of the departed with a three-hour lunch at a well-known Jersey hotel, topped off with a round of decadent desserts.

“You know, we really shouldn't wait until somebody dies to get together,” my favorite cousin said.

Maybe we should track down our missing aunt, reportedly living somewhere north of Coral Springs and south of Boca, and meet at Disney World with our exes and their conglomeration of assorted relations. It's a small world, after all.

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