Short story-thing 4th and last

Beautiful Chaos

When you come from a family as big as mine, you know that you’re not getting away from a big Sunday lunch without having to discuss your personal life. Just imagine thirty people in the same house, the women all blabbering nonsense and criticizing everyone else, the men gathered around the grill with my father, discussing whether the meat is going to take long to cook or how long it took to get the fire going. There’s children running and screaming all around, an occasional cry because someone fell or a full blown freak out because the children went somewhere they weren’t supposed to go.

So here I am, towering above everyone as usual, stuck listening to my mother brag to my aunts about my older brother’s medical career or about my younger sister’s new job, because my uncle sent me to the women zone to grab a drink and I got held up when my mother asked me to remind her of the name of someone I really should’ve said I didn’t remember. The upside of being tall like me – I am 6 feet 4 – is that you hear every single thing everyone is saying but you can pretend like you didn’t catch all of it which is what I normally do when the conversation starts to move in my direction, and right now they’re starting to do that so I just give my aunt the fakest smile there is and I walk as fast as I can towards the grill. As soon as I reach it, my father grabs his beer and asks me to let everyone know that the food is ready.

A series of things unfold after that announcement. First, all the women start moving fast to get the salads from the kitchen to the table, the men move like a unit and clear the tables so that everyone can find a spot to sit and have their lunch comfortably. Second, my cousins and siblings – myself included – get a scold from our respective mothers because we didn’t move fast enough or because we didn’t guess that they needed help, so we rush to see what our tasks are. Third, I am charged with grabbing the children because I am the biggest and strongest of all, so it’s easy for me to take the five mini humans and bring them to their moms. Fourth and last, everyone starts moving towards the salad table or the grill to grab whatever they’re eating. Personally, I wait until almost everyone is seated because I don’t feel like pushing anyone for food.

Once everyone is served with something to eat and to drink everything gets a little calmer. That’s when I get my moment of peace, those two and a half minutes when everyone starts to taste their food, the meat is good and the homemade corn cake and cheese corn bread never tasted better. That’s when I take my time to really look at everyone and realize that it doesn’t get better than this. Yes, they’re annoying and they all get in your business, but it’s my family and I wouldn’t change a thing.

The peaceful minutes are gone, and I laugh out loud when I see my sister slapping my cousin on the back of the head and my mother yells at her for doing so, then my other cousin says something which gets him a slap as well and just like that the peace is gone and everything is back to beautiful chaos.