Holidays and the grand wannabe family reunion

‘God gives us our families,’ some wag once said. ‘Thank God we get to choose our friends.’
X Mas is the time many a family get to ‘get together,’ more often than not, in the boondocks/ushago/ countryside/ rural homestead.

 If it is a happy get together, always, then well done for the close knit clan. Keeping a happy wider family front takes some elan.

But as Tolstoy said, and this is one of my all time favourite quotes: “All happy families are alike; but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Including wannabe families.

Here is a true story that, like a Canter that is careening cantankerously down a steep hillside, the disaster is unfolding even as you read this (you’ll understand why by the end of the article).

There’s this wannabe country song called ‘My Girl Friday’, and I had a real life uncle called ‘Friday’ (just because he was born one Friday in 1940, and someone said ‘Freddy’ and a wannabe misheard and wrote ‘Friday’ on the birth record, and so the story goes).

Anyway, Uncle Friday grew up to be one of those good time guys who marry late; and when he did, he married a woman half his age in 1980.

 (Go on, do the math, with all the data provided above. We’ll not allow that mbuzi you’ve just chewed for Christmas go to waste in your digestive tract. Some of it must be used in your oblongata to do arithmetic).

They quickly got a daughter, then a son, in succession, and Uncle Friday, a bit of a joker till then, became serious about life (kids often turn wannabe adults into men); so much so that he was able to sponsor his half brother Fred, twenty years his junior, to go to America in 1991 in search of greener pastures.

By the end of his life (cancer) in the November of 2010, Uncle Friday owned a small hotel, student hostel and one of those shady night-and-morning boarding & lodging roadside motels beloved of drunk truck drivers and ladies of the night.

His widow, let us call her *Aunt Fridah, now fifty, immediately sold off the student hostel (too much maintenance) and the seedy ‘lojo’ (deep hatred of the place!) and bought a truck, lorry for lumber and a Canter with the proceeds.

She also made their long term hotel manager, ten years her junior but who had been in their hotel for fifteen years (the hotel is in their hometown), the new ‘transport manager.’

Wacha her son, upon doing a motor vehicle search, found out that the new vehicles were all under the name of their old hotel/new transport manager and got him locked up in police cells only for Aunt Fridah to bail him out, and inform her son that soon, ‘Gitau will be your new daddy.’

Wacha the daughter, who is in Saudi Arabia, found out that all those years Uncle Friday, whom she adored, was shuttling between Kisii, Eldoret and Mai Mahiu to keep his businesses in the black, Gitau was shafting Aunt Fridah, who was ‘so lonely and felt neglected.’

The daughter has now taken her mother to court to get a-hold of the hotel.

Worse still, shortly after getting the vehicles, Gitau took off with all three. Wata-do? The log books are in his name, and last they heard, he’d married a young lady from Kirinyaga.

Aunt Fridah now lives with her son in the house he grew up in (he’s not well off), as well as with his wife and her two grandkids, and the two women are forever at loggerheads, fights complete with insults.

‘I’ll throw that esese out of my house.’ ‘Let her try! In fact, she better watch out what she eats here.’
It is into this wannabe family cauldron that Uncle Fred, blissfully unaware of the goings on, is coming for Christmas, with his big idea to re-locate to Kenya complete with resources saved in the last quarter century.

His niece comes in from Saudi Arabia Friday the 23rd, and the idea is they all spend a week under aforementioned roof.

As they say in the ‘Hunger Games’ series: ‘Let the (family war wannabe) games begin.’

tonyadamske@gmail.com