Quill Ink

This weekend, we celebrated another college graduation.

Of course, I am proud of my niece. Watching one more kid walk across a stage, accept a diploma, and step into the next strange chapter of adulthood is always emotional. It is one of those moments that makes you pause and think, How did we get here already? Weren’t they just small enough to fit in a shopping cart?

Which, unfortunately, some of us actually were.

But as proud as I am of the graduation, I found myself feeling even prouder of something else.

Us.

This loud, loyal, slightly unhinged family unit we somehow built and kept alive for more than thirty years.

Growing up, my family never quite fit anywhere. We were different, but not in a charming, movie-version kind of way. We did not assimilate well, and I do not think my parents ever really knew how to teach us to do so. They had come from somewhere else. They carried a different language, a different rhythm, different expectations, different rules, and a level of volume that could make a quiet American family clutch its pearls from three houses away.

We never really found another family like ours.

Until my father went on a service call.

He met a man whose family had immigrated from a neighboring town in Italy. As they talked, they realized their families had known each other back home. That one conversation turned into an invitation to Sunday dinner, and that Sunday dinner turned into the rest of our lives.

Over the years, the families grew. Kids became teenagers. Teenagers became adults. Adults became parents. We all scattered in our own directions, as people do. But the one constant was the family my sister eventually married into.

My sister and her husband have known each other since grade school. By the time they began dating, our two families were already so close that it barely felt like a new relationship. It felt more like someone finally put a name on what had already been happening for years.

And the rest of us kids built our own bonds, too. We were not just thrown together at holidays and told to be polite. We became friends outside of the family gatherings. We stayed connected. We showed up for each other. We stood in each other’s weddings. We baptized each other’s children. We celebrated birthdays, graduations, holidays, sacraments, Soprano Sundays, random Saturdays, and every excuse we could find to put too much food on a table and make too much noise in one room.

For more than thirty years, we have created a family that has brought joy, entertainment, love, support, and, if we are being honest, a healthy amount of trouble.

Camping was a big part of that trouble growing up.

My brother-in-law’s family had a trailer, and we would meet them at the campground for weekends filled with wandering, laughing, and terrorizing the other campers. We sat around the fire pit telling stories and jokes.

And when I say fire pit, I do not mean a sweet little controlled campfire where people roast marshmallows and quietly reflect on nature.

I mean a fire worthy of a blacksmith’s forge.

My father and his friend Mike would build these massive fires and then patrol them like two Italian fire marshals with no badges and too much authority. They yelled at us constantly for throwing things into the flames just to watch them burn. They told us a thousand times to stay back before we set ourselves on fire.

Which is funny, because one year, my father was the one who caught on fire.

We were all sitting around, talking and telling stories, when suddenly my father started stomping his feet like he had been possessed by the spirit of the tarantella. At first, we just stared at him. Nobody knew why he had randomly broken into an Italian folk dance beside a campfire.

Then he started smacking the backs of his legs and yelling, “I’m on fire,” followed by a string of words that would have gotten us grounded if we had repeated them.

Did anyone grab water?

No.

We laughed.

We laughed so hard that basic emergency response completely left our bodies. Thankfully, the only casualty was his track pants. He was fine. He smacked the flames out himself, which honestly felt very on brand.

When I got my driver’s license, the world became our playground. We were no longer trapped on the couch watching Chuck Norris movies or late-night wrestling. We could go places. We had freedom. We had wheels. We had absolutely no sense.

One night, we ended up in a grocery store parking lot before cart corrals existed. A few stray shopping carts had been abandoned overnight, and because we were apparently conducting scientific research on bad decisions, we put the two smallest people in the carts, pushed them to the top of a slight hill, and let them go.

There was no steering.

There were no brakes.

There was no plan.

There was only momentum and poor judgment.

Nobody got hurt. Well, not too badly. And to this day, we still laugh every time we remember it.

Years later, after my second son was born, we reignited the camping tradition. This time, we were the adults, which was a disturbing realization considering we still had the judgment of raccoons near an open cooler.

We celebrated my son’s first birthday at Yogi Bear’s campground. No trailer. No cabins. Just tents, air mattresses, and a campfire.

That night, none of us slept.

Tent walls offer absolutely no privacy. We heard everything. Every whisper. Every cough. Every zipper. Every sound a human body can make after eating campground food. We laughed most of the night away.

By morning, the weather turned. It started storming so hard the tents could not keep us dry. As we tried to break down the campsite, someone had the brilliant idea to turn the giant tarp under the tents into a slip and slide.

So naturally, all the adults took turns launching themselves across it on their stomachs.

We were soaking wet, covered in mud, bruised, sore, and exhausted from laughing. It was ridiculous. It was unnecessary. It was probably a terrible idea.

But, it was perfect.

That is how it has always been when we are together.

Some families gather and play cards. Some sip coffee and talk quietly about the weather.

We create minor public safety concerns.

But beneath all of those stories –  the fires, the mud, the shopping carts, the sleepless tents, the chaos – there has always been something deeper holding us together.

We show up.

We show up for weddings and baptisms. We show up for birthdays and graduations. We show up when someone needs help moving their kid into a college dorm, and we show up again when it is time to move them out.

We have driven to Whitewater, Platteville, Champaign, and wherever else our children’s lives have taken them. We have stood beside each other on some of the hardest days of parenthood, especially the day you leave your eighteen-year-old at college and drive away pretending you are perfectly fine with the idea of them living unsupervised among other eighteen-year-olds.

And sometimes, because grief and pride and panic need somewhere to go, the ride home turned into a bar crawl.

That is family, too.

Not the polished version. Not the greeting card version. The real version.

The people who know your stories. The people who know your parents. The people who watched you grow up, make mistakes, get married, have children, lose your patience, lose your keys, lose your mind, and still invite you to the next gathering.

What moves me most now is watching our children carry it forward.

They are not just showing up because we told them to. They have their own relationships now. They text each other. They make plans outside of the family parties. They support each other the way we supported each other. They have their own memories, their own inside jokes, their own version of the fire pit.

That may be the greatest gift of all.

We did not just maintain a friendship between two families. We built something sturdy enough for our children to inherit.

A chosen family.

A loud one. A loyal one. A muddy, laughing, fire-hazard of a family.

And somehow, after all these years, we are still here.

Still celebrating.

Still showing up.

Still making room at the table.

Still laughing at things we probably should not have survived.