Wednesday, September 23, 2009

family dinner

For us, this means enchiladas, and family means everyone. I'm pretty lucky to have one of those inclusive families, instead of an exclusive one. We say "cousin" and it could mean practically any degree of actual cousin-ness. Sometimes it even means that you just feel like you should be related. It seems that "Papa" is a term for any older male in the family, and if you don't fit that, you're probably an "Uncle." Roxanne's grandson is really starting to talk, and he's so cute (of course, that's a baby's job, so that people will take care of you) and he tends to call all females "Mama" and he may even put your name with it too. It pleases me that one of my good friends from high school married into the family... and his father and sister have made themselves quite comfortable in the melee.

So tonight's dinner felt really good, can you tell? Besides being really yummy enchiladas that tasted good. There were two purposes behind tonight's dinner as well - beyond the normal one of, by golly I want an enchilada. First, we celebrated Carl's birthday. Yeah, I know, it was last week, but we were busy. Second, we toasted the departure of a family member. One of my cousins (see definition above) passed away this week. He had been fighting liver cancer, and finally the cancer just took over. I wasn't as close to him as some of my other cousins were, since we were not of similar age or interests, still, I'm glad we got to toast him, and wish him well on his journey to whatever comes next. I'll go to his services tomorrow as well, so his wife knows people care. After all, she's still part of the family.

1 comment:

Fran said...

I'm so sorry about your cousin! It's hard, no matter what.

But man, enchiladas were in the air, weren't they? We had to have some tonight -- green chicken enchiladas, made with New Mexico chile. For a brief moment, we were back home with you guys!