Thanksgiving 2015

We're back from Thanksgiving in Memphis. Joe's aunt (his late mother's sister) puts on a feast every year. Aunt "Nadly" as she is known, and Uncle Jimmy have two daughters, Molly in Memphis, Katie in Austin, Texas. Each daughter has a husband and a son and daughter. Aunt Nadly's two granddaughters are now sixteen; the boys are fourteen. Joe's sister Martha lives in Memphis; Joe's brother Henry often comes from rural southern Louisiana.

There is a cousin of Joe's mother and Aunt Nadly, known as"Anty," who comes from Buffalo, where the family started out. She has a married son and daughter. The daughter has two young sons; the son married last June and has a new baby daughter. Joe co-officiated at their wedding. Anty has two younger sisters. One is Marny, living in Humboldt County, California, who we saw often when we lived in Crescent City. She has a married son, Sascha, in Portland. We attended Sascha's wedding in Portland in 2012, a month after our move to Morgantown. Joe officiated. Anty's other sister, Annie, lives in Boston.

There is a tradition of people bringing their new "significant other" to Thanksgiving. I was that person in 2007. One year, Sascha came with his then-girlfriend Sara. This year, Molly's sixteen-year-old daughter brought her boyfriend. He is handsome and smart and put up with the silly games and the singing of old obscure songs. She seemed serious about him. He seemed too young to be in a serious relationship.

In my family, there is no older generation. Of this whole crew, I am closest in age to Joe, but closer in age to the old folks than to Joe's siblings and cousins. There is a fiction that everything is the same every year, but it's not. Most obviously, the children have gone from six and eight to fourteen and sixteen. As teens, the kids seemed less happy to be with family than they were as children.

We flew this year on Wednesday and Sunday, and while everything went surprisingly smoothly, this was physically hard for me. We arrived home by car from Pittsburgh airport at 1:45 A.M. We ate  unhealthy amounts of salt, sugar and fat, despite a relatively healthy menu on Thanksgiving Day.

My maternal grandparents, Nanny and Poppy to us, made Thanksgiving in New York just about every year. We got together with our Long Island cousins. My grandparents cut us off when I was eighteen and a freshman in college and they were seventy. They sold their New York house, and moved to a small apartment near Miami.

I don't remember details about those Thanksgivings, I only retain a warm glow thinking of my grandparents at this time of year. This year Thanksgiving was November 26, my Nanny's birthday. She would have been 118 this year. My parents, aunts and uncles are all gone, too. I have to rely on Joe's family for an older generation. I'm friendly with my cousins on my mother's side, but we don't routinely get together. I never see my father's family any more.

Next year, we will probably go to my sister Robin for Thanksgiving. She gets together with her son Evan and his girlfriend Kelli and a close friend of hers and her kids, one of whom has known Evan since preschool. Robin always laments when we go to Memphis that she and I are not together and with other family members.

This year, more than others, I felt the passage of time at Thanksgiving. I hope Joe's family can stay together, more than mine has, and that we'll be able to travel to Memphis again to be with them.

Joe, Martha and Henry sing out at Thanksgiving in Memphis