Reunion Highs
by Anton Zuiker on July 7, 2024
The Zuiker Family Reunion 2024 is just done and I’m back home in Chapel Hill (elevation: 500 ft above sea level) yet still soaring from the week we spent with my extended family in Breckenridge, Colorado.
While most big families gather for an afternoon picnic, my father and seven of his eight siblings, 15 of my cousins with their spouses/partners and children, my brother Nick and Carolyn and their sons, Erin and our children, and a few other long-time family friends—70 of us in total—committed to a full week in the mountains.
We do these reunions, sometimes called jamborees, every seven to ten years. This is a family that loves to be together, have fun together, sing together, hike together, play together. Our most recent reunion in 2017 in Tennessee, as I reported in this post, included “sing-a-longs and game nights, tubing down the Pigeon River, hiking on the Appalachian Trail in the Great Smoky Mountain’s National Park, a cousin’s wedding, alpine slides, a primer on solar eclipses, my dad’s (labor-intensive) meatball dinner, lots of photos and conversation.”
My cousins Jenny, John, and Justin all live and work in Denver. They took the initiative to plan this year’s reunion and when they selected nearby Breckenridge, the family was all in. We arrived from Colorado, Wyoming, Oregon, California, Arizona, Illinois, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Rhode Island, Texas, and Tokyo. (One cousin called in from Guam, where she is on deployment with the U.S. Navy, and Aunt Judy joined by Zoom a few times.)
Like our previous weeks in Tennessee and West Virginia and Indiana and Wisconsin, this week was packed with activities: an opening-day picnic at Carter Park’s pavilion, a few hikes and a couple of long bike rides, multiple pool parties, another meatball dinner prepared by my father while the rest of us were kayaking on Dillon Reservoir, a family photo—Malia designed a t-shirt with a phrase my Aunt Sue provided: “Life’s climb is better with family at your side”—walking into town to eat or shop, and late-night discussions or game nights.
But there are three highlights for me: the gala dinner and family trivia contest (with a slide show and singing and dancing), the family marching together in the Breckenridge July Fourth Parade (clad in our reunion T-shirts and beaming smiles and handing out candy), and the epic trek that eight of us did up to the top of Quandary Peak.
Quandary Peak is a 14er — the summit is 14,265 feet above sea level. Erin and Oliver and I were part of the group that started out early on a sunny, cloudless day for the long hike to the top. This was our final full day in Colorado, which gave us time to acclimate; still, Erin was feeling the effects of the altitude so she listened to her body and stopped at 13,000 feet. True to her nature, she sat on the mountainside for an hour and reveled in the silence and solitude.
Meanwhile, the rest of us kept going. By the time I reached the top, Oliver had already been up there for 20 minutes with my cousin. I joined them, snapped a bunch of photos, and marveled at the panorama of snow-topped mountains all around. I felt great. I felt awed. I felt strong and satisfied and humbled. When the rest of our group arrived, we took another family photo. (Zach surprised us with the Zuiker Family Reunion sign from our gala dinner!) Back in Breckenridge the next morning, I bought “I climbed Quandary Peak” T-shirts for everyone.
Quandary Peak, Colorado, July 5, 2024
At every family reunion that I can remember, going back to the Zuiker Jamboree at Ravens Roost in 1984, we have sung along with John Denver’s Rocky Mountain High. In Breckenridge one day, three teenage siblings were singing that song on the main street while a block away another singer was doing his version on a restaurant balcony. After our gala dinner, Uncle John on a rented guitar led us in a singalong, another moment to add to an overflowing album of family memories.
Alabama
by Anton Zuiker on April 26, 2024
Earlier this month, Erin, Oliver, and I took a road trip to Montgomery, Alabama. This was just two weeks before Erin’s birthday and it allowed her to meet her goal of visiting all 50 states in her 50 years of life. (Last week was her 51st birthday, but we figure the pandemic year that stopped most travel gave her a pass on the technical 50 by 50.) Congratulations on the milestone, Erin.
More importantly, the reason we traveled to Montgomery was to take in the history and art and advocacy of the Legacy Sites, the work of Bryan Stevenson and the Equal Justice Initiative. The Legacy Museum, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, and the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park are stunning, engaging, eye-opening, and maddening. They document and chronicle the history of slavery, racism, mass incarceration, and injustice in the country. They are beautiful spaces and displays and art that commemorate such horror and evil and sadness.
I wish everyone I know could visit one or more of these sites.
I hope we all can learn from the history.
The most important lesson I learned was about the Thirteenth Amendment that abolished slavery “except as a punishment for crime.” I’d read that many times and thought, ‘that makes sense.’ But at the Legacy Museum, seeing the the language of the amendment in the context of the country’s history, I began to understand that that phrase explicitly allowed states to use the penal system to continue to enslave Black men and women. EJI explains it here. So when we talk about mass incarceration today, we’re actually talking about the continuation of slavery. The disproportionate numbers of Black men imprisoned in the U.S. today makes obvious this enslavement is current, it’s now. It never ended.
How do we battle that? We learn, and we give witness.
For the last few years, Erin has served on the Orange County Community Remembrance Coalition, which is coordinating with EJI to recognize Manly McCauley, Daniel Morrow, Jefferson Morrow, Washington Morrow, Cyrus Guy and Wright Woods, men who were lynched in Orange County, North Carolina (Chapel Hill, Carrboro, and Hillsborough are in Orange County). In February, Erin took me and our children to attend the OCCRC’s unveiling of a marker at Carrboro Town Commons to recognized Manly McCauley.
And we drove to Alabama, despite my reservations about going to the state (its history, it damn football team!). I was surprised, and humbled. Alabama was beautiful in spring, downtown Montgomery calm, the Legacy Sites breathtaking.
And there was a surprise.
While we were walking through the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, with its hundreds of hanging tablets — one for each county with one or more documented cases of lynching — the U.S. Navy Blue Angels flew their coordinated air show overhead, mesmerizing us and certainly the crowd of the Beyond the Horizon Air & Space Show at the nearby Maxwell Air Force Base.
Back at the performance space connected to our hotel, there was choreography on the stage—the Streetz Dance Convention and Competition was taking place, talented young girls dancing in pairs or ensembles, some better than anything we’ve seen on the television talent shows.
On Sunday, on our way out of Montgomery, we went to the air show and saw the Golden Knights U.S. Army parachute team float to the tarmac with the American flag, and later we watched a state-of-the-art F-35 fighter jet and history P-51 Red Tail circle the airfield. We spoke with a Secret Service agent who had been on a recent detail protecting Vice President Kamala Harris in North Carolina, and Oliver donned a weighted vest and did pushups for the Air Force recruiters.
We drove home, and I’ve been thinking about the dance of American sin, patriotism, and national pride every day since.
Constants
by Anton Zuiker on March 13, 2024
I played soccer tonight in Fearrington south of Chapel Hill, on a nice grass field under lights. I hustled and I had fun, and when I left the field, I looked up to see the waxing crescent moon and bright Jupiter. That reminded me of the the nights in my early twenties when I played pickup soccer on the campus of the University of Hawaii at Manoa. I’d finish there, look up and see the moon and one or more planets, then walk home to the apartment I shared with my father in the Makiki neighborhood. Thirty years later, I’m still awed by celestial sites and grateful for the joy soccer gives me.
Decades
by Anton Zuiker on February 6, 2024
According to this Ed Koren cartoon in the New Yorker, my sixties could be a decade of wisdom. I’ll take that. The medical appointments, not so much. But I have six years to go.
When I turned fifty in the pandemic, I wasn’t able to start the new decade with a birthday bash and a new theme like I did when I turned 30 (my decade of writing) and 40 (my decade of narrative). I didn’t really know what that theme would be, though. Instead, I spent the last few years sailing high with a new job and the anticipation of a new house but also struggling to get out of the bottom of a barrel of lifelong, bottled-up emotions.
Last summer, I committed myself to a practice of mindfulness and to more deeply knowing myself and my loved ones. I sat down on a therapist’s couch and learned to listen to my feelings. I started each day with pre-dawn meditation on the new porch. I called my brothers and my parents and my friends and leaned into those conversations. (One of my friends told me he’d long recognized I had managed conversations like an interview, rarely sharing anything personal or showing vulnerability. He’s my career coach now, and helping a better me show up.)
Throughout these years, Sunday soccer has kept me healthy and likewise helped me grow. One morning last fall, I hustled just a bit less intensely than usual, and that minor adjustment made a major difference. I had the ball at my feet, dribbling confidently, going to the goal, aware of the defender, and I held the ball a moment longer than usual, then saw the narrow opening and I shot for a goal. That moment of clarity lingered with me for weeks.
That day, too, I actually recognized something I’d missed in nearly 10 years with these guys — they were having fun. They were joyful, exclaiming in one language or another (most Sundays there are men from five continents on the pitch) about each good pass or trap or goal.
These lessons, I realized, had illuminated an important theme: listening. Looking back through more than 20 years of blog posts, I see that I’ve been yearning for a deeper listening for most of my life. (A key part of the Voices of Duke Health project as the listening booth.) It’s a perfect theme for my fifties, and all the rest of my days.
So, then, an update on my decades: Live in my 20s. Write in my 30s. Tell stories in my 40s. Listen in my 50s.
And the career coaching has me looking ahead to my sixties and a possible theme that might resurrect the long table concept I once explored: I imagine myself at the dining table with family and friends, deep in conversation, telling and listening to stories, smiling in fun and clarity.
Keep growing
by Anton Zuiker on December 17, 2023
“Keep asking for help and accepting it when you can. And if you keep on doing that, you’ll always be moving towards better,” says Leslie Higgins to the Diamond Dogs men’s support group in the great show Ted Lasso.
This past year for me has been full of Ted Lasso, and The Bear, and Drops of God, and other shows and books and podcasts and conversations that have helped me move towards better.
I have ideas for a few blog posts to write about this personal growth and the deeper relationships that are developing through this. For more than two decades, I’ve blogged to chronicle my activities and to record my observations. Over these past six months, as I have asked for help in new and recurring ways, I have learned to listen better and feel more. I am moving slower but towards better.