Camping and thoughts about family

Last week in Texas it was spring break. The campground was filled with many families. Yogi Bear campgrounds cater to kids. There are activities like tee shirt painting, hay rides, Yogi Bear visits and outdoor movies. There is also a waterpark with slides and a huge bucket that empties water onto all the screaming kids. It was crazy here. Kids all over the place. They were all having fun riding bikes, roasting marshmallows and fishing at the lake.

Our jobs were cleaning the bathhouses, security, pool duty and I worked in the snack bar one day. I also went around meeting people, especially those near our RV. There was a guy, Bob, who played his guitar for two nights. Most of the people around us were families.

The neat thing was that many were groups of families. I meet the families of two sisters. They invited me for a margarita. Yum. Across the street from us was a big group: three siblings with their families and Grandpa and Grandma. Each had their own RV parked next to each other. I loved watching Grandma pass around the new grand baby, who was about four months old. These families went to the pool together. The uncles took all the kids fishing and at the end of the day they had a great feast around the campfire. Laughing and drinking as the kids roasted hotdogs. A large group of related people tented together and had a big fire everynight.

These families are lucky. They have discovered a way to keep the family connected and bonded together. So camping is a great way to bring families together.

Many of us however, come from fractured families. The ones where someone doesn't talk to the other because some thing that happened 20 or 30 or 40 years ago. I come from one of those. It makes me sad to think how fractured my family is. Most of them seem like nice people. They all profess to be Christians, yet they can't follow the Golden Rule and certainly have no compassion for people who are different from themselves. Traditionally it was the variety of talents that made a family strong. People don't seem to care about that anymore. Too many view their families in terms of greed. I'm too poor to be around my brother's kids.

Many of you have the same story. So what we "black sheep" have done is created our own family. A family of dear friends. We watch the children grow and love them as our nieces and nephews. We watch each other get older. We probably could spend more time together, maybe we could all go camping...