Communities

This morning: Sitting at a friend’s computer in another state, watching friends sleep in random spaces around the house … and feeling right at home …
Except for this damn ergonomic keyboard, which makes it hard to type coherent sentences without looking down all the time …

Anyway, where was I … oh yes, abusing ellipses and trying to write a nice post about families, friends and communities …

This weekend is the “birthday bash” at Amy & Jeff’s house in Alabama. They seem surprised every year when people drive across one or more states to help celebrate their slow decay graceful aging. I’m always surprised that they’re surprised.

The funeral for Suzan’s grandmother gave me time and reason to think about family, both in the genetic sense and the community sense. Suzan’s parents moved away from their hometown over a decade ago, keeping ties with the people there but starting to live their own life away from the somewhat insular Southern town structure. Returning to Johnson City showed them how much had changed and how much stayed the same. New restaurants and stores didn’t erase the names on the mausoleum wall, the same names that have been in the city since it began.

In a way, Suzan and I shed small towns for our new life together … we live in one, but we’re not so much a part of it yet. We have friends in Loganville, but not as many as we do from Dragon*Con or our other social activities. Thomas & Barrie’s pirate wedding was another reminder of the “community” and “family” built from our interests.

I’m sure we’re not the only ones … Loganville, a small Georgia town on the edge of Metro Atlanta spreading growth, has it’s own on-line message board. Why does a town of less than 10,000 people need a chat room? I prefer meeting my local friends … well, locally, face-to-face. Of course, I prefer the same of my distant friends on occasion … hence the car trip to Alabama.

I saw family stress and drama at the funeral, people with uneven histories coming together to deal with a situation that is unpleasant. Some reunited with long-lost connections that weekend, but many will part again and go back to their previous states of disconnection … some will use the passing of a relative to break ties only kept bound by her life, perhaps to never speak again.

Family is genetic, a reproductive lottery creating ties that centuries of instinct compel us to maintain. Sometimes those ties are strong, bringing a lifetime of joy and comfort. Sometimes those ties are better left undone, which confuses our obligations to those that helped bring us into the world.

Community used to be local, based on the distance animal feet could carry you before dark. Families came together over watering holes and fields of tennable soil. But somehow Suzan and I have built a distributed community, based on common interests instead of grain fields. Our watering holes are conventions, instant messenger, e-mail, home gatherings … the legs on our animals are wings and wheels.

Family and community still mean a lot to me, but perhaps the words are too limited to constrain what those things have become in modern times. I am guilty of trading time with real relatives for what seem like other pleasant times with friends, but I’ve also shed my share of tears with people who share no more of a genetic link to me than an earthworm.

However I build my family & community, they remain close in a way distance cannot measure.