Food Unites Family

 I can't believe we've already had two weeks of school! This week, I attended a pair of events, one personal and one professional, that combined food and family perfectly.

Back to School Staff BBQ

On Friday, we had the most delightful lunch at school. Our wonderful caretaker, Jan-Michael, was the Grill King and coordinated, along with our principal, a Welcome Back BBQ for our staff. Michael personally marinated all the pork skewers himself for days. There was so much food - pork and chicken kebabs, veggie burgers for the vegetarians, green and potato salad, and watermelon and cake for dessert.

Can a school be a family? It sure felt like it at this event. All of our staff members were invited. We had our vision itinerant and social worker attend, as well as a teacher on maternity leave. We even had "extended family" come by - principals from neighbouring schools. They couldn't pass up a free lunch, especially one as delicious as the one served at our school!

I know my school board wants to recapture that "family feeling". This is why TDSB has, once again, renamed its internal organizational structure. No longer are there four learning centers and nearly two dozen learning networks. Now, we are in Ward/Family of Schools 21 in Learning Centre 2. You can see this post explaining the new configurations. Here's a map showing all the groups.

You can't just assemble people, call them a family, and expect the unit to operate like a family. You need to bond over shared experiences (or good food), care about each other, and have some kind of relationship. Easier said than done, but our BBQ really helped to connect us all in a comfortable, casual, social way. 

Visiting Cousins

My first cousin, Julian DeRyck, and his wife Ingrid, live in Arizona. They came up for a wedding this week and so his older sister (Helena) arranged a gathering at her son Mark's house. My husband and I attended and we enjoyed ourselves tremendously. Ingrid hadn't been in Canada for nearly twenty years. 

I remember Uncle Julian and Auntie Ingrid (there's an age gap between us, so often in West Indian culture, one uses the "Uncle" and "Auntie" labels more fluidly) so well. My mom used to like to muss up Julian's hair and Ingrid was such a beautiful bride. My sister and I had our ears pierced at Uncle Julian's house by a family friend, Joey, at the same time that their daughters had their ears pierced. I tried to find a photo of Julian and Ingrid's wedding, but the best I could do was a photo I took of their family at a different wedding from 1991.

I saw first cousins of mine that I also haven't seen for many, many years. Here's a photo I took on Saturday night of me and my first cousin Terrance. (He's 75 and I'm 52. First cousins in large families can have big gaps in ages - we almost look the same age; he looks great!)

It was funny how many family members said I was the striking image of my mother. When Terrance and his older brother Brian saw me, they greeted me with a wink and a "Hi, Gloria!"

Once again, the food was huge in quantity and scrumptious in quality. The location for the gathering was perfect. The weather cooperated so groups mixed and mingled outside and inside. There was no animosity in the air - only great stories and shared laughs. I appreciated hearing my relatives talk about their fond memories of my parents. Someone said my parents were very close to each other, "like batty and po". I know this expression but when I tried to find the exact meaning online, these were the closest definitions I found:

• be as close as batty and po (or batty and bench) be bosom companions (batty being the Caribbean English folk term for buttocks).

("Wind can't pass between them" - i.e. they are very close.)

We used to have large gatherings like this in the past, but they became fewer and fewer. There are many reasons why they aren't as frequent. Families get bigger, live further away from each other, find it hard to have a location to fit/suit everyone and/or the "glue members" (the ones who seem to tie everyone together) die, leaving no one to arrange these rendezvous. I am thankful that we were able to gather like this, instead of at a funeral. As we departed, the common refrain was "We should do this again sometime."

Actually, it was at both events that everyone kept saying, "We should do this again sometime." True, true.