Actually Mr. Geeky is no black sheep, but he is the only sibling to have left his hometown and only one of a handful of people in his extended family to do so. So his visiting his hometown is a big deal. On the road on Friday, we got many phone calls. What’s your schedule? When can we have a huge gathering for you? A family gathering for the Mr. Geeky family is no less than 15 or 20 people. I think it’s kind of sweet that the family really wants to see him, but the whole concept is pretty foreign to me. My extended family lives everywhere. Most live on the east coast, but they live in different cities mostly. The ones that live in the same city only see each other occasionally, like for holidays and things. For instance, my mother’s two sisters live in the same city as her, but they only get together on Christmas or Thanksgiving (sometimes both). They don’t live that close together and heck, they have their own friends and stuff. My dad’s siblings are all spread out and so are my cousins on that side. This is just the way things are and everyone’s cool with it. No one freaks out if you travel to a city where a relative lives and don’t stop in.

Mr. Geeky’s family thinks what we just did is a little odd. We came to town for a high school reunion, dropped the kids at his sister’s and checked into a hotel. Why would you do that, they say, when there are any number of people you could stay with for free? Maybe we want to be alone or something, I don’t know. A gathering did occur but it was low key. Mr. Geeky’s brother had us and his dad over for lunch. We thought, because we heard that an aunt and the sister in law were fighting over who was having the thing, that the whole family would be there. It might have been nice to see more people, but it worked out well, I think. Afterwards, we went shopping alone and sat in a hot tub alone and then went to a fancy party thing.

I needlessly worried, of course, about how I looked. I was, quite honestly, one of the best-dressed people in the room. Mr. Geeky’s class is huge and made up of people from every economic strata, so there were people in really fancy stuff, people in dressy casual stuff, and people in jeans. At one point, one of Mr. Geeky’s classmates actually said to him, you did pretty well for yourself in the wife department. I wanted to roll on the floor laughing. I met some interesting people, though. Everyone was friendly and generally pleasant to talk to. Mr. Geeky and I are reunion goers. We’ve both been to all our high school reunions and I’ve been to all my college reunions (Mr. Geeky’s school doesn’t have them). It’s just nice to remember where you came from.