My brother and I met at the airport in Louisville. He had flown from Chicago and I from Austin. He rented a car and drove us to Berea.
Berea, Kentucky is not all that large, and Boone Tavern is hard to miss. We found it despite my dubious performance as a navigator, and we pulled up at the doors. As we walked in, standing right there inside was a large contingent of our family.
Our cousin Jenny Bea was there. Our aunts Vicki and Bette were there. Our mother was there. And although we missed them by mere minutes, Mark and Jack and Julia and Katherine had just been there. You could almost hear echoes of their voices in the hall.
So there we are standing there in front of the gas fireplace, which for all its ambiance put out no heat when someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned around and there standing just a foot away was my cousin Burt and his wife Jenny.
“Aaah!” I shouted.
The plan was for my arrival to be a kind of surprise, and yet he ended up surprising me—with that gotcha grin that he’s given me so many times over the years.
No greeting could have been more appropriate.