A Gathering In the Lake District of England

All Americans have vacation dreams that our ancestors could never have imagined coming to fruition.

Indeed, if we scroll back to before our nation's founding, we find a time where the vast majority of the masses struggled for mere subsistence.

"Give us this day, our daily bread," in fact, was a lofty goal for many ancestors who immigrated to America.

Notice there wasn't a guarantee to that prayer beyond trusting in God.  It was a risky journey, one which could leave a wife with young children widowed on the crossing.

None of this occurred to me growing up in idyllic Westminster, California, where my loving parents always made me feel blessed.

Considering my dad had started working at a dairy when he was seven to help chip in for the family finances during the Great Depression and my mom was literally born in a house without indoor plumbing and only rudimentary electricity, I am even more amazed at the security they provided me that I carry to this day in my heart.

How blessed I am to have been born to those parents, and hopefully you feel the same about your own well-nurtured childhood.

When my dad died, it caught me totally by surprise.  He was only five years older than I am now, and I was sure he had at least another good decade to spend with us.

Anyone who has lost a parent knows it's not something you ever totally get beyond.  The best you can hope for is to not have regrets about how you handled the last days and the aftermath, and unfortunately few of us can honestly say we handled the situation ideally.  Sometimes it feels like we booted it completely.

When my mother passed away another decade later, I was once again shocked.

While I was fortunate to have a very close relationship with Dad, working him daily during what I guess would be called my working prime of life, it was Mom who was the glue that held our family together.

I never fully appreciated the way she pulled us all together for family meals and card games until she was gone and I'd tried to do the same with my own children.

Mom had moved away from her own childhood family when she and Dad moved to California shortly after I was born.  Every summer, however, she would return to Alabama, and it turns out she also served as the magnet that brought that extended nuclear family together at least once a year.

When I was a child, I thought all my country cousins, aunts and uncles got together on a regular basis, which made me cry when we packed to return home at the end of our sojourn, despite the fact that I lived in perhaps the most perfect place to be raised ever in history, southern California from the birth of Disneyland through the birth of the Eagles.  Mark Twain's childhood life that led to his Huck Finn adventures had nothing on Westminster of our era.

Mom's parents always gave her that same deep sense of security, despite their own financial well-being having been tenuous when they started their family life together.

We've all understood the great privilege to be Americans, with control of our own destinies.  We've never considered ourselves hyphenated-Americans, having accepted we had been blessed to be born in the best of all possible worlds.  When Mom helped me write reports, however --- and she would be very amused that I still write "reports" despite not having a teacher assigning me to do so, because I always procrastinated until the last minute to take on the dreaded task --- she imparted in me the sense that our family roots were British.

Years later, she brought over thick stacks of paper tracing the lineage of her parents' surnames beyond what could be found in their hometown cemetery.

The more recent advent of technology brought about the opportunity to explore deeper into those ancestral roots to England.

We realized that following our family tree further back brought us to an ancestral home, Sizergh Castle, where they lived as the privileged class, but even with that advantage not having nearly the opportunities to travel that the average American takes for granted today.

Upon learning this, taking a family trip to visit Sizergh Castle became the top of my bucket list.  As I said, all Americans have vacation dreams, and coordinating those dreams in this new era in which we live, where we have unlimited choices, seems impossible sometimes.

It's especially true if your children have the financial wherewithal to be able to pursue their own dreams, as ours have proven time and again.

This summer, however, there seemed to be an improbably advantageous crux of events where Gina's little family would be attending the wedding of her husband Laszlo's uncle in Scotland, Jay would be in Portugal for his fiancee Sasha's sister's wedding, and Amy would be visiting her boyfriend Lukas's sister in Germany all in July.

We made a plan to all meet up in Grasmere, a little village in the beautiful Lake District not far from Kendal, where Sizergh Castle is now owned by the National Trust but where distant cousins still live.

We set a date, rented a house, and against all odds, our children paid their own way to join us at our ancestral manor.

And another seemingly impossible dream came true.