Sunday with the Family

I’ve been asked several times now if, what with all this world-travelling I’ve been doing, I ever get homesick. I tend to answer no; I love my family and friends, I do sometimes miss my favorite meals and my own bed, and going back home is always really nice, but I think I’m the kind of person who was born to travel (Thursday’s child – we’ve been over this). I don’t mind being alone. I like independence. I never get tired of exploring. However, this weekend is half-term, when all the Freshers’ families come for a visit, and I can’t deny I was feeling the tiniest bit abandoned.

After having seen groups of loving parents embracing their prodigies and flocks of precocious-sounding little children touring the gardens all of Friday, I was surprisingly resentful. In an attempt to fend off any bitterness, I cooked a large pasta dinner for some of My Fellow Americans on Saturday evening (new plan: bribe friends to be friends with delicious food) – and it worked well – but what to do Sunday? This whole Sabbath-day-of-no-working has been going really swimmingly, but the forecast called for rain, and with the majority of my friends entertaining their families, this Sunday seemed like it was headed for a lot of solitary reflection. Okay, I’m taking the Sabbath off for religious reasons, but my intent wasn’t to go stir-crazy in my room…the plan was to have a leisurely church experience and then a fun and relaxing remainder of the day.

Until…hang on…for those of you who know I have a cricket bat in my basement and suspect that I celebrate Bonfire Night, I am about to submit some damning evidence for the case of my British poseur nature. I called up my adoptive British grandparents. (Aha!) So Barbara and Dick Ashley are a lovely (Aha!) couple who, along with their extended family, have taken us Ruzichs under their collective wing ever since I was a wee lass (Aha!) living down the road from the Lakenheath base in Brandon.

And the Ashleys agreed to drive up from Cambridge, and everything was perfect. I woke up on Sunday morning, pedaled down to the town center in the rain, and met them in time to get some coffee before going to church. I love being out in a light rain...it makes me feel especially alive. Weird. We attended St. Michael at the North Gate, a hilarious little place in which our threesome increased the assembly by twenty percent while at the same time lowering the average age by about fifteen years. (That last part was all me.) We prayed for the quick and the dead, heard an elderly clergyman with wild eyebrows and comb-over to match deliver a sermon that concluded with the phrase, “Whatever. God is really our Father,” and sang a closing hymn entirely reminiscent of a Mr. Bean sketch. Alleluia. (Yes, another obscure British humor reference…sorry…)

After fulfilling this part of my Sabbath, I showed Mr. Ashley the Concept (he recommended some WD-40 for the chain), and took the two of them back to my college for a guided tour. Miss Barbara loved the gardens, despite their wet and wintery state, and Mr. Ashley spent some time making quacking noises at the duck pond and contrasting my dorm room with some lodgings he once had to live in. My room came out on top. By a lot.

Over lunch, we got a chance to catch up. I’ve known the Ashleys forever, but I’ve never gotten a chance to really talk to them. I never knew, for instance, that Barbara first met her father at age five when he returned from the RAF after World War Two, or that Dick’s grandfather was a Welsh cobbler, or that Judy, their pet dog who I knew as a child, was a foxhunting hound. I really like learning about people’s lives – I’m still that person who sat on a train to Lyon and imagined where the people next to me had been or where they were headed. (Funnily enough, they had been to Aix, and they were going to Lyon.) Barbara and Dick have been married for nearly fifty years. I think that’s fantastic. (Aha!)

They say you can’t choose your family, and I wouldn’t want to change a thing about mine, but now that I’ve been given a third set of grandparents, I think that "they" are wrong. I'll pick who I want – for me, family is no more constrained by blood ties than home is constrained to a geographic location. ...And all that rubbish.