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Show FamiliGS Find A Hay If your blood relations are scattered to the four corners of the world, does that mean you're alone-without a family? Family relations expert Jane Howard replies with a thumping no. Your friends are your family, and the association can have all the strength and durability of a clan of McGregors upon the heath. "AS A member in six or seven tribes besides the one 1 was born into, I have been trying to figure out which earmarks are common to both kinds of families," she writes in the April Reader's Digest. Some of her conclusions: Good families have a switchboard operator. Someone always, as she puts it, "Plays Houston Mission Control to everyone else's Apollo." It's a self-elected office. , GOOD FAMILIES need to find some way to connect with posterity. Even among childless people, there still should be a link with the young-if not at the center of your lives, as it often is with a blood-related family, at least on the sidelines. Good families also honor their elders. The wider the age range, the stronger the tribe, Howard insists. Finding Find-ing an older person to include is no trouble at all. GOOD FAMILIES prize their rituals. "They weld a family together, evoke a past, imply a future, hint at continuity," she writes. Holidays, birthdays, grief-all of ithese may spark a ritual, and the clan is strengthened each time the ritual is repeated. Who belongs to the family? Both friends of the road, ascribed by chance, and friends of the heart, achieved by choice. Friends of the road Howard defines as the ones we work with or live near, while a friend of the heart "perceives me as one of the better versions of myself." THESE ARE the friends who can bond together as a family. Then, should your blood kin be a continent away, you still have a family to rely on. |