I’ve been thinking about just adding water to the soup.
There are eight of us now in our immediate family: our son Brendan and his daughter Iris, who is fourteen years old; our daughter Shannon, her husband Chris, and their two sons, twenty-one-year-old Jesse and Joe, who is eighteen; and Becky and I (ages available upon request). We recently returned from our annual summer week in a rented beach house on Balboa Island, a southern California enclave in Newport Harbor. Lots of reading, 500-piece puzzles, paddle boards on the bay, surfing in the ocean, eating without discipline, and the best part: enough time for long conversations, whether one-on-one or around the large dining room table.
As Becky and I drove back to Pasadena at the end of the week, I kept thinking about my dad.
On the final day of my junior year in high school, my friend Dave and I went to the beach and came back to my house for dinner. I asked if he could spend the night and Dad’s predictable answer was, Of course. Dave stayed for the summer. His mother had recently died, his dad was drinking heavily, and he was safer and saner sharing a room with me. In mid-summer my dad took him shopping: two pairs of Levis and two white tee shirts. He went home on Labor Day, the day before our senior year began. My dad hugged him goodbye.
I am one of twenty first cousins, and when my cousin John needed to live in our school district so he could play football for our team, my dad said, Sure. So John and I shared a twin bed in a twelve-hundred square foot house that included Mom and Dad, my brother Stephen, my three sisters and, for a spell, my mother’s father. Come on in, we’ll make room somewhere.
On one of these hospitable occasions, when asked if someone could stay for dinner, my dad’s immediate response was, Yes, of course. We’ll just add water to the soup. The phrase stuck and is to this day, fifty years after his death, an extended family mantra when invited or unexpected guests arrive.
This hospitality has played itself out in our married life. In 1968, Becky and I came back to Hollywood for a month-long vacation from my work as a young pastor in New Jersey. Shannon was less than a year old and Becky was four months pregnant with Brendan. My brother Steve was at the height of his problems with cocaine addiction and on the last night of our stay, at dinner at my parents’ home, I got so mad at him for spoiling yet another evening that I got into the only physical fight of my adult life. I knocked him down near the front-yard rose garden, grabbed his long hair and pounded his head into the grass. Mom and Becky, holding Shannon, stood over us yelling at me to stop.
Sobbing and shouting, I carried on: You have a choice, Steve. Either you go into residential rehab, or you get on a plane and come live with us in New Jersey until you straighten yourself out. I didn’t glance up at Becky, but she later told me she was horrified at the thought of my addict brother living with us with our baby and a second on the way. He came, stayed most of a year, got sober, married when he returned to Hollywood and, with only occasional relapses, lived until the shit he’d put in his body for too many years crystalized his lung cells, inhibited his breathing, and put pressure on his heart which finally gave out. He died at thirty-nine.
In the mid-seventies, with a ten year old girl and an eight year old boy, Becky decided she could raise one more child. She didn’t need to be pregnant again, so in the fall of 1978 we adopted two-and-a-half-year-old Jesse from the LA County Department of Adoptions. The first several years were difficult, which is often true with adopted kids. He couldn’t or wouldn’t bond with Becky, which was understandable because she was his fifth mother. Even as a two-year-old, he had a different mental pace than the four of us, and as he grew up he marched to mental music none of us could hear.
Brendan loved Jesse from day one and was the most stable, reliable person for Jesse for a decade. The rest of us wrenched our way into the necessary adjustments, and by his teens he finally settled in. He went to the University of California at Santa Cruz, signed up for the Peace Corps when he graduated, and died in January 2000 in a tragic auto accident in Guinea, in West Africa. To this day, Becky and I say that giving this kid a chance at a life he may not otherwise have had is the best moral choice we’ve ever made. Shannon named her first son after him and all of us miss him every day.
A decade ago, one of our adult cousins was recovering from cancer, out of work, living in an untenable relationship, and told us she was moving into a woman’s shelter. No, she isn’t, Becky announced. She lived with us for four months, got her health in order, found a job, and is still thriving.
You just add water to the soup.
All of this came to mind in the reverie that occupied me at the end of our recent vacation. For our first three days at the beach, Brendan’s new partner, Sev, joined us. During a raucous dinner on our second evening, she was joyfully defined not just as his friend but as his Main Friend, an unfamiliar designation that arose out of our fun experience of getting to know her. Also around that table was our grandsons’ friend Beckett who came for a 24-hour visit, as he had last year. There were now ten chairs around a table made for eight; we just squeezed in.
Sev and Beckett left on Monday. On Wednesday, Chris’s sister came to drop off her thirteen-year-old daughter, Iris’s cousin and for the remainder of the week her paddleboard and shopping companion. More chairs around the table. Then Friday came! Just before noon, the Paks arrived, Shannon and Chris’s friends with their two daughters exactly our grandsons’ ages and pals for a dozen years. Volume up! Especially late in the afternoon around the end of the dining-room table where a loud, highly competitive card game broke out, Pak girls versus our grandsons, with others gathered around them to join in the shouting.
At 5 o’clock, Sam and Sharon arrived: our close friends for forty years who helped us raise our kids and are very close to our three generations. Our first cocktail hour, then barbecued salmon and chicken. Fourteen of us for dinner. With not nearly enough room at the table, a second bunch gathered on the front patio. After dinner a walk to the gelato shop for dessert, back home for more conversation that finally broke up around ten, when the Paks and Sam and Sharon headed home.
As I thought about the week, what I loved was the way the routine flexed to welcome in and send off each new addition to our extended family. We added chairs to the table, ran for more groceries, had multiple conversation across family and generational lines. Each coming and going was embraced with hugs, and the only conflicts were over card games. It was an expression of my dad’s spirit in the family I grew up in: Is there enough room, enough food? No problem: Come on in, we’ll find a place for you and just add water to the soup.