"But it's your future that counts most!" I hear the ignorami cry. Well - consider the merits of the past, then take a second look at that puppy's pudding called the future.
The past is real. It is a mansion furnished with life, meaning and comforting certainty. Our friends and our budgies live on in the past, as do our good deeds and our golf scorecards. The unhappier truths are sugared by our selective memories.
We cling to the past - but we merely wait for the future. It's true we make small gestures to whatever's coming. We give up plastic bags and bio-sort our rubbish, but the future never tugs at our heart strings. It is a deserted, colourless place, where nothing happens.
Now that we've established that the past is a finer country to reside, I can tweak the subject - and indulge in that homage to the past known as a "family reunion".
I've been in Auckland for a reunion of the Seven Cousins who descend from my railwayman grandfather, George Gordon Stewart. The Seven are a good bunch. While it's thought that these Stewarts may be a saner race than my other side, the Lapsleys, this is not a certainty. Both Stewarts and Lapsleys might think themselves as sound as a slab of Whittaker's Dark Ghana, but outsiders would pull back the wrapping and wonder whether they're staring at a Cadbury's Fruit and Nut.
Someone drew up a Stewart family tree, but as the years slog by, its merits grow dubious. We look at our Magnificent Seven (we once were Eight), then chuck in its handful of divorces and its mix of stepchildren plus half-siblings, and we admit that because the family no longer all springs from the same tree's roots, we'd be more honestly called a "family hedge". (Perhaps most Kiwi families are now hedges?)
As cousins, we holidayed together building castles, digging tunnels and winning sword-fights. We slept in bunks, garages, baches and a tattered "thing" known as The Tent of Many Summers.
Skipping along, we didn't understand we'd been allowed all this fun because our three sets of parents got on famously.
While they sat up playing canasta, they gabbed on about the past. We children wouldn't have recognised nostalgia if we fell over it. The Seven lived in the present, and our only nod to the future was the lingering dread that all this must end. (Let's not get too excited. "All this" was nothing more than the school holidays.)
To flourish, kids need more than just their parents. Two people aren't quite enough - children also need their clan; their whanau, with its old, its young, its oddbods, and its lovables, the wider family into which the child is inducted as an inseparable member. The presence of their relatives makes kids realise their clan makes them something greater than themselves. Then years later, it dawns that they too have become part of the clan's legend.
None of the Seven stayed put in New Zealand, but all returned. So we sat with nephews, nieces, children and grandchildren who seemed pleased to listen to the family tales, yarn after yarn after yarn.
So - we get on well. Always have, and always will. At family reunions we know which bits of history to tiptoe round carefully and which can be dug up. We recalled the day Selwyn Toogood and his It's in the Bag show came to town.
In radio days my father was on the Toogood show. We hicks in the country hall had obliged the soap company sponsors by chanting their opening to the production. "R-I-N-S-O. RINSO!" Then Dad stepped up on stage, the family hoping he'd win 30 quid or a fridge, and not some mousetrap. But first he had to answer Toogood's question.
"Robin - this animal's scientific name is a Herpestidae. What is its common name?" the Great Man asked.
It was ridiculously difficult, but if anyone knew a herpestidae from a rhopalocera it was Dad. For God's sake, he'd done Latin and Greek, and had a bachelor's degree plus a First in Obscure Knowledge. Still, he looked uncertain.
"An anteater," he eventually pronounced.
"Sorry Robin," said Toogood sadly. "The answer is (heh! heh!) a MONGOOSE."
While we boiled, Mrs Cook, up next, was simply asked the capital of Australia. What a swizz, but bugger the Kelvinator, it was the principle of the thing. Our Dad had been dudded.
Family is family, be it treed or hedged, and the past is not forgotten. Selwyn Toogood may be remembered by most as a genial Kiwi legend, but to the Stewarts he's a Black Hat.
- John Stewart Lapsley is an Arrowtown writer.
