Wiklanski Family Trailer

The Reunion Screening

It’s an odd experience to go to someone else’s family reunion and know just about everyone. Or if not them personally, their name, their parents, grandparents, cousins, aunts, uncles, and maiden name. That was our 4th of July.

Arielle and I, Arielle’s mom Michelle, and my boyfriend Dave went to the Wiklanski’s family reunion. Arielle and I met many of the Wiklanskis last July to begin the process of interviewing them for their family history movies. It was just one year ago that we printed out their family tree and hung all thirteen pages across Arielle’s office wall–making discoveries, listing current residences, children. How were we going to keep everyone’s names straight? Seven Marys, at least five Johns. It was a little overwhelming. A lot of calling and emailing and organizing. A lot of 12 hour+ days for Arielle importing and logging and editing. A lot of–is that Steve or Peter standing next to the car in this photo? In the end, there were 2 trips to Michigan, 44 interviews, 1,500 photos to make 14 family movies.

Northern Michigan was cooler than we expected for July, seventies during the day and fifties at night. The morning of the screening, the Wiklanskis came to the auditorium of the Crooked Tree Arts Center. It was a church once; the stained-glass windows let in a soft, colored light. It was a perfect place for the screening, half-holy, half-civil.

Once everyone was seated, Mark Balasa, who initiated, guided, and underwrote the whole process, spoke about how the process of making the movies had uncovered interesting artifacts, especially the audio interviews his cousin Becky Snyder had made of their aunts and uncles in the 1980s. For many of them it was the only extant record of their voice. He listened to the recordings recently and he told a story of hearing one of his aunts talking about working in a certain factory in Chicago. Soon after listening to her interview he was meeting with a client whose father happened to own that factory and made the connection. He wondered what other connections would be discovered.

Becky spoke next, and encouraged all the kids to watch for scenes in the movie that they would like to re-enact at the reunion. (She had brought a closetful of clothes that she and her cousins used for reunion skits when they were kids). Arielle took the stage and spoke about the gratitude she felt for how welcoming everyone had been in the last year and the closeness she felt with the whole family.

The movie was great. Watching it with the Wiklanskis I felt a jittery electricity that I had not felt watching it before. Everyone laughed, sometimes at moments we didn’t anticipate–we didn’t know that “dishrag” in Polish would be so funny. There were some tears, too. I cried even though I had watched the movie several times before. At the credits there was applause. The Wiklanskis had watched their movie–the history that they gave to us shaped by Arielle into something contemplative and moving handed back to them.

The reunion was a dream. Blue skies and fluffy clouds, rolling hills. There was a ton of food, more desserts than everyone could eat even with third and fourth helpings. Kids played on the playground. Men gathered around the keg. Bocce and softball and bags. A relative who lived in the area showed up with a horse and let anyone ride. Uncle Fred, “Cookie,” came with his tractor and a trailer full of hay to pull the kids. A lot of cousins caught up. Inside the hall small groups of families gathered to watch the 13 short films about their parent, their aunt, their uncle, their grandmother.

Later that night, sitting in the rental car on a hill overlooking Little Traverse Bay, the four us again, we watched two groups of fireworks: a couple blocks away in Petoskey and five miles across the bay in Harbor Springs. Too chilled to want to leave the car and join the crowd at the shore, we sat in the car. The Petoskey fireworks finished, and then the tiny ones in Harbor Springs, the delayed puh-puh-puh-puh, puh-puh coming to us after the smoke drifted from the finale. We joked about being a long-lost distant branch of the Wiklanskis, on our pilgrimmage to Petoskey.