The first Thanksgiving dinner I made is a vivid memory. My two children were toddlers; we didn't look forward to the four-hour long drive to my mother's house and even less to the traffic-delayed return trip--six to eight hours stuck on the New Jersey Turnpike. Suggestions were made. And taken. My mother and brother and his wife would come to our house.
We never looked back. Thanksgiving has been at our house for more than 30 years--through births and deaths and additions of our best friends and their children, plus assorted others. Everyone loves it. Well, that's what they tell us. But life changes. Our best friends are gone; their children have moved away. So have our children. For the past decade, our children and their growing families have piled onto airplanes and come home for the holiday anyway. It's exhausting for everyone but it's wonderful to fill the house with all that excitement--and noise and mouths to feed. It's also expensive: we are talking about 8 airfares plus, this year, renting a van to transfer the family of five [a new baby!] from airport to home and back again.
So this year, suggestions were made. And taken. Thanksgiving will be at uber son's home this year. Alpha daughter and her family can drive over--it's only three hours away. We'll fly up a day or two early. I'll do most of the cooking--my daughter-in-law has her hands full with two school-age children and an infant.
Sounds fine. And it is. And yet. It is the old order changing and yielding place to the new. We say that this arrangement is only for this year, that each year we may do something different--our house, daughter's house. Could be anywhere. And yet it is a sign of passing time and years. Another flattening of the hierarchy, as my friend Marian the psychiatrist likes to say. We are moving even further off the center stage--we've acknowledged that in many other ways--and this is just another Rite of Passage. We don't feel old; we don't feel like we're ready to be flattened. And yet there comes a time when it's Their Time.
I've always loved Thanksgiving. It isn't laden with all the gift-giving or religious symbols of other family holidays. It's just turkey [well, tofurkey for some] and pumpkin pie. It will be fun to put it all together in another kitchen. But it won't be the same. The torch is passing.
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