Living in the Body

This weekend I saw my brother and my cousins and my aunts and just about everybody else I'm related to on my mother's side at the wedding of one of my first cousins once removed. We are a big family--both individually and in terms of how many of us there are. I looked around at cousins I hadn't seen for thirteen years--since the last big family wedding--and noticed that some of them looked a lot like their mothers now. The groom looked a lot more like his father than he did the last time I saw him. He married a red-headed woman, which will probably add to the already large number of red-headed cousins.

All the resemblances made me think of Joyce Sutphen's poem "Living in the Body":

Body is something you need in order to stay
on this planet and you only get one.
And no matter which one you get, it will not
be satisfactory. It will not be beautiful
enough, it will not be fast enough, it will
not keep on for days at a time, but will
pull you down into a sleepy swamp and
demand apples and coffee and chocolate cake.

Body is a thing you have to carry
from one day into the next. Always the
same eyebrows over the same eyes in the same
skin when you look in the mirror, and the
same creaky knee when you get up from the
floor and the same wrist under the watchband.
The changes you can make are small and
costly--better to leave it as it is.

Body is a thing that you have to leave
eventually. You know that because you have
seen others do it, others who were once like you,
living inside their piles of bones and
flesh, smiling at you, loving you,
leaning in the doorway, talking to you
for hours and then one day they
are gone. No forwarding address.

But I taught my kids a family game called "Nine Magazines," which we've always told the children is a mind-reading game that only those related to us can play. A number of cousins, aunts, uncles, and in-laws stopped by to demonstrate their mind-reading ability and further frustrate the kids until they finally caught on, making them part of a tradition that stretches further back than my childhood, back to when my great-aunt had us all running in and out of her house and the relatives for whom we were named and who we would grow up to resemble were still in town, still married, still alive.

I meant to take more pictures, but I kept getting distracted, as usual, so the number of my mental snapshots far exceeds the number of actual ones, which are the ones we'll look at in years to come and marvel at how young and attractive we were then, and who-all was alive then but left their bodies after that occasion. The bodies change, but many of them look the same. There's something reassuring about that kind of continuity, don't you think?