The Name on the White Reunion Shirt

I found out at the registration table, with a paper cup of church-basement coffee in one hand and a pan of scalloped corn under my other arm.

Sandra had the shirts stacked in four cardboard boxes from the print shop in Owatonna. Navy blue, gold lettering, folded in squares with a strip of masking tape on each one that said a size and a household.

The front said Lindgren Family Reunion, 100 Years, 1927 to 2026. My grandmother’s father had started it the summer after he paid off the home place, and except for a few rained-out years in the church basement, it had never missed a second Sunday in August.

Sandra held one up so everybody coming in could see the back. “Every branch,” she said. “I wanted every branch on there for the hundredth.”

There were thirty-one family names in two neat gold columns. Lindgren at the top, of course. Then Olson, Berg, Hanson, Kruse, Nygaard, Pederson, Swenson, all the names the Lindgren girls had married into for a hundred years.

I read it the way I read a check at the bank, top to bottom, then bottom to top. I have been a teller at the bank in Waseca for nineteen years. I know when a line is missing.

Volk was not there.

I set the corn down on the end of the table. “Sandra,” I said, “I think we got missed.”

She did not look up from her clipboard. She had a pen in her hand and was making little check marks next to names as people came in, the way she had done for twenty years.

“I didn’t know how you wanted to be listed,” she said.

I stood there and let that sentence sit in the air between us. Behind me, the Nygaard kids were already pulling their shirts on over their T-shirts and comparing who got a small.

“Volk,” I said. “The same way it’s on the Christmas card I send you every December.”

She made another check mark. “Well, I didn’t want to assume.”

Twenty-four years

I married Mike Volk at St. Joseph’s in Waseca on the first Saturday in June, 2002. He was twenty-five and so nervous his hands shook on the ring. I was twenty-three and so happy I did not notice who was missing until the reception.

Half the Lindgrens did not come. Not in a loud way. Nobody wrote a letter or made a speech. They simply sent a card with a check in it and found that they had something else to do that Saturday.

I was raised at Bethany Lutheran, the little white country church on the county road with the bell they still ring by hand. Sandra was confirmed there four years ahead of me. Our grandmother taught Sunday school in its basement for thirty-one years.

Mike was raised Catholic, the third of six Volk kids from a dairy farm outside Janesville. He went to Mass because his mother did, and later because he wanted to. He has never in his life tried to argue anybody into anything.

When we got engaged, there were conversations at Lindgren kitchen tables that I was not invited to. My mother told me about some of them later. She said it was the old people, and that the old people would come around.

Some of them did. Some of them got old enough to stop worrying about it. And for most of twenty-four years, I would have told you the whole thing was over and done.

We go to Mass at St. Joseph’s. Our kids were baptized there. I still sing the old Lutheran hymns in the car with the windows up, and Mike knows every word of “Beautiful Savior” now because I have sung it at him for two decades.

We came to the reunion every year. We put twenty-five dollars in the reunion fund every August, in the old Folgers can Sandra keeps at the registration table. We brought the corn. We stayed to stack the chairs.