Seeing Them in Others

Abstract The last Nagel reunion took place one summer day in 1981 at my Aunt Gertie’s home in suburban Chicago. We called it the “Nagel” reunion because my Grandma, Mom, and her siblings were Nagels. Grandma had died several years before and her daughter, Clara, nearly twenty years before her. Her eight surviving children were there. Mom and her sisters Christine and Hilde were widowed. Gertie, her fraternal twin Mary, Herm, Billy, and Dick were there with their spouses. A dozen or so of the eighteen in my generation were there, most with spouses and little and growing children of our own. There were somewhere between thirty and forty of us. It was in many ways like so many of the holiday gatherings that I counted among the most wonderful experiences of my childhood. Though they had more character etched in their features and more white hair, my aunts and uncles were as lively and sometimes chal-lenging and frustrating as ever. My aunts’ features only hinted at resemblance to Grandma. My uncles resembled more than ever the grandfather I knew only through photographs. My generation was filled with grown-up versions of the bodies and personalities I remembered, some difficult but most endearing.