I went to a family wedding yesterday and I have a lot to assimilate. This family is not close to me, though they are to each other, large and close-knit. I am the (widowed) sister-in-law of their matriarch, a 90-year-old woman they all revere and I am included in funerals and wedding celebrations out of clan loyalty and respect to her. The result is an invitation to a special gathering about avery three years, long enough for me to forget most of the names and faces. I think I have already reported that I suffer from prosopagnosia, face blindness, an inability to remember faces; it's an awkward social defect. So right from the start I am struggling to put names to faces I don't recognize. It's a good thing I'm old and female because they don't expect much of me. (My sister-in-law's late husband said to me shortly after my husband, her brother, had died, and I was starting a belated writing career, beginning to be published and to make enough to support my four kids and me - he said, "We knew you were smart but we didn't think you were that smart.") So there I am, quiet and smiling and watching, watching, as most writers do. And I am reminded of that line of T.S Eliot's in his play The Family Reunion, "You all look so wrinkled and so young." We go on, we go on, and some of us don't change.