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A July vacation at a beach house for a week can be the perfect antidote to all of your problems. Unless that vacation is a family reunion and the beach house is for thirty people. And among those thirty people are married dads in their forties and fifties who are in good shape. And your girlfriend is Lo. Then, you might have ninety-nine problems, but Lo is the only one you have to really worry about.
That was the case this week. Every seven years or so my extended family decides that we should make a pilgrimage from all the corners of the globe, rent one enormous house on the beach with enough bedrooms and bathrooms to accommodate us all, and stay under one roof for seven days straight. We have been doing this for a few decades now, but we hadn’t had one of these since I started dating Lola.
She hadn’t met most of my family — only heard about them through various stories I told her and, to be fair, with thirty of them, I doubt that she really could tell one from the other without having met them in person. But this week, right in the middle of July, we were all going to be up-close and personal with each other. Foolishly, I hadn’t thought of warning her prior to our departure. This was my family. Did I need to warn her? Apparently so.
You see, if I do say so myself, I come from a very good looking family. My brothers and sisters and my cousins have certain family features…