Big G Gathering, Family Flag Line, Family

The Big G gathering is about to commence. 

As we prepare to come together to celebrate family, well, not exactly celebrate, more experience. Yes, experience family, our hearts are lifted in joyful anticipation, and Jeff has captured the perfect way to symbolize that. A flag line.

A flag line that excludes no aspect of our family, from Marines to rainbow your flag is welcomed, as are you. Political - team Bernie, religious - Christian, affiliation - Girl Scouts, sport - I don't dare, hobby - what ever it may be. Signs we are all alive, active, participating, thinking, feeling humans.

We have survived no scourge, no racial cleansing, we've had no barriers put up to impede our progress through life. We have moved freely and easily from state to state, marital or geographical. Our intellectual ideas can be cleanly and clearly followed, affiliated with any ideal we chose. We don't have to risk our life to follow Christ or be born gay.

No one will be beheaded at this clan gathering, no one will be knighted or risen in stature. Our life passages are the human ones; marriage, babies, deaths. Human beings living human lives with a hundred divergent flags floating about our heads.

For years we have made this pilgrimage. Many years stand out as special just as some years are lost in the mist of time past. This year will be special for me because for the first time my whole family will be there. Three sons and a grandson. No grand processional parade will ensue, no feasts, festivities or games will honor their appearance, but it makes my heart soar as high as Jeff's Flag Line. What a comfortable sweet spot I will inhabit. No cloud on the horizon except one I would put there. Like I said, no cloud on the horizon.

I am passionate about family, from the Taylor Clan to the family of man. I feel passionate about Jeff's Flag Line. The point isn't the division, the point is the acceptance of diversity. Humans in all their glory, messy diversity.

I took a piece of material to Connor so he could design a flag for the flag line. He worked hard and diligently and drew a beautiful flag (I'm not sure he even understood the concept of a flag line) but he labored over the task. When he was done there was some space still available at the bottom of his flag, I said you can draw something colorful here. He looked at me with shocked disbelief and told me, forcefully, that that space was for his research materials. Research materials. What do they teach in the first grade now?

No, we aren't special, or as I once said about my beloved grandson, "In the history of the world he isn't even in the top ten." yet here we are stretching from some ancient ectoplasm type goo or star stuff all the way to Jeff in an unbroken line of lives, of survivors. To Jeff and beyond to a gaggle of grandsons and gals. Jeff who dreamed up and is executing a flag line from the most distant to now in some kind of congenial human prayer.

God I love family, and soon we will be breaking bread under the Big G Gathering Family Flag Line.