My summer was filled with family.
In July, I picnicked with 65 members of my extended family at my boyhood home in Burien. And a couple of weeks ago, I rented a Lincoln City beach home with Marge's family from New York City.
As a kid, I figured two annual Mathison rituals would go on forever.
The five Ted and Bernadine Mathison kids still get together along with our greatly expanded families to eat, sing carols, and exchange gifts on Christmas Eve. With Dad and Mom gone, the party has moved to older brother Phil's house.
However, the annual Mathison summer picnic with Dad's four siblings and their families petered out after 2002.
Dad moved to Judson Park in Des Moines. And, although his brothers and sisters sailed along in good health well into their eighties and nineties, they all eventually died within a few years of each other.
Phil and Leona occasionally talked to the cousins about reinstituting the picnic.
"We are the oldest generation now," Leona likes to remind me. As the baby brother, I refuse to acknowledge that.
There were reunion obstacles.
Our former private venue was now a public park. Somebody was living in the old house and parking in the carport/food set-up area.
The biggest sticking point was the lack of a restroom. I volunteered to drive people down to my nearby office restrooms. Unfortunately, now that we are the older generation, I would have spent all my time ferrying and no time picnicking.
But it was really parks maintenance supervisor Myron Clinton who made the picnic feasible. Caretaker Clinton allowed us to use the whole area and even threw open the old house for us.
So we all gathered again on July 25. The cousins looked a few years older, but none too worse for wear.
We had 65 descendants of the five original Mathisons, the offspring of Jakob and Ellen Sophia Torgerson Mathison, Snohomish dairy farmers and immigrants from Norway in the early 20th century.
Twelve out of the 15 second-generation cousins showed up with 16 out of the 39 third generation also atttending. They came from as far away as Utah and California.
Changes opened up some new picnic activities.
With the new neighbor, the third runway, we could stand on the top of the hill, wave to the airline passengers coming in for a landing and watch them wave back.
And the goats that the parks department brought in to munch away the stickers opened up the back woods to exploration for the first time in many decades.
We were able to wander the woods, argue over where the "big kids" camp had been and swap stories about creeping through the scary forest as little kids with killer geese on one side and killer wiener dogs on the other.
A great reunion bonus was a surprise 60th anniversary party for cousins Paul and Virgina Kinch from West Seattle.
Sixty years. Amazing! I certainly understand what goes into maintaining a long marriage. I've been married 34 years. Not to the same woman, of course.
My wife's family also has an ongoing summer tradition. Every August we rent a beach house on the Oregon Coast with Marge's sister, brother-in-law and nephew from New York City. This is another annual event started by a parent that lives on after the parent's death.
The New Yorkers usually stay at our house for a while before and after the Oregon trek. They're urban-we're suburban. They're low-cal--we're low-carb. But we get along pretty well.
So what scenic sites do the East Coasters want to see? The Space Needle? Pike Place Market? Mount Rainier?
No, they love shopping at various Value Villages. They particularly love the Burien branch because they can walk across the parking lot to Azteca for lunch.
Well, I guess I shouldn't be too critical.
The highlight of my beach vacation this year was the Chubby Checker concert at the Lincoln City casino.