Who are YOUR people?

     "Who are your people?" Back in my hometown for a Christmas visit to my mom's, I took my granddaughter Marley to "the Monkey Park", Opelika Municipal Park, so called because it once housed monkeys. They kept escaping and were removed in the 1970's, when I was a little kid, and all official correspondence has referred to it as the Municipal Park for 40 years, but the name still remains. The Monkey Park has it all-three or four sets of swings and slides, old-fashioned see-saws and animals mounted on springs, a miniature train, creeks and bridges.
     While we were going up ladders and down slides, over and around the bridges and streams, we encountered an old lady walking an overly friendly dog, who immediately questioned me as to whether I was a native Opelikan. Upon finding I was, she wanted to know about "my people". Meaning who I am related to. Turns out she knows-or knows of-most of my family. Not hard to do in a town of 25,000 with deep roots. In case you don't exactly know the family lines named in this type of game, you are always safe with "I went to school with some Smiths." High school graduation dates are pulled out, examined, compared, cousins can be cross-referenced, neighborhoods are sketched in.
     Most Opelika folks I run into know some of "my people", so I am part of the narrative, the lifeblood of this tiny little community. Although I moved from Opelika to Auburn in the 1990s. Although I moved from there to Pelham on the outskirts of Birmingham right about 1999. Although I moved to Texas last year. When I go to Opelika I am still "home" since folks know "my people" and accept me as part of the native population.
     So its pretty safe to say that in my little corner of East Alabama, if you know Barbers, Burdettes, Harringtons, Sassers, Griffiths, Alexanders, or even Ducks, you might know some of my people.
 
     Which brings up my wife's family. I spent Christmas evening and the next couple of days in Clanton with her aunt and uncle and their grown kids and their families. Tales were told. Coffee-from a Keurig, even!-was consumed, in large quantities, as was homemade soup. Kids abounded, gossip was recycled and fudge disappeared in industrial quantities.
     Driving out to the family home, down Lay Dam Road from the big Peach on the side of I-65 in Clanton, I felt the same way I feel when driving to my ancestral homes. Remembering all the visits of years past, the nostalgia of childhood dreams fading into the glow of maturity, the bittersweet tang of memories of those who have died. Just like I feel when I drive past my grandmother's.
     Because, you know, it IS exactly the same. When I started dating Stacey back in 1987 and started spending holidays with her family, it started this quarter-century relationship with all of them. In particular, I was very close to her Grandmother Peggy, and would often take the kids to visit her even if Stacey was in school or working or otherwise unavailable. Peggy always had high hopes and plans for Stacey-because I think all the family realized how brilliant Stacey was from the time she was a young girl-and when Peggy made sure that I shared her high opinion of her first-born granddaughter, we got on famously.
      When Peggy died, it felt to me like I had lost my grandmother as well. I have related before that I still murmur my Grandmother Lessie's name every week in church during the prayers for the departed, but I have to confess that I murmur Peggy's name as well.
     Because, you see, she was the first grandmother I lost.

      So all these Pettys and Martins and Curetons and Burkes, all these aunts and uncles and cousins and babies and such that live in Clanton on the way to the lake, those are "my people", too. Most emphatically so, since I chose this bunch out of my own free will. And up in the Carolinas, those Campbells and Swansons? Yep, those too. Just can't seem to turn around without finding more of "my people".

     I can't even think about all the people I am related to by not just blood or marriage but by something as powerful and simple as just friendship and love!
   
     In the final summation,  it's not just about where you come FROM, its where you are going to, and who you are on a journey with.
      So-who are YOUR people?

But Ruth said, “Do not urge me to leave you or to return from following you. For where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God.  Where you die I will die, and there will I be buried. May the Lord do so to me and more also if anything but death parts me from you."