Don't Forget to Write

Thanksgiving Dinner

In the morning I rode the LIRR train into Mineola for a Thanksgiving Dinner at my grandmother's house. Well, it's my aunt's house, now. I read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas until the train screeched to a halt at the station. My cousin Holly, eager to drive anywhere now that she had her license, picked me up in a bright green Kia Soul, those lunch-box looking cars. Wasn't it just a year or two ago she was grabbing my hand to cross the street and asking for piggy-back rides? Now she was driving cars and preparing for college and working a job. She was becoming an adult, the poor thing.

Holly took corners too fast and stopped too abruptly and generally drove like a typical 17-year-old maniac. Despite my best instincts, I didn't reach for the handlebar above my head, or tap my foot on the floor when she should have been braking, or tell her what to do. Her parents yelled at her enough, it was my job to be supportive. She spoke enough for the two of us, excited to share with her big cousin the important details of her life, like making the High School Varsity team her latest driving adventures.

The house sat one block away from Jericho Turnpike - a street booming of business and industry with McDonald's and CVS stores on every corner. The small front yard of the home was filled with flowers and shrubs courtesy of my Grandma. Even in the limited space of a Nassau county home surrounded by highways and concrete, she found room to grow lettuce, tomatoes, peaches, and other fruits and veggies. Walking through it reminded me of everything good from my childhood, things that were gone now.

It was a full house including my family, aunts and uncles, in-laws, cousins, children, even some relatives of in-laws. As was customary at family gatherings, plates and silverware shook as fists hit the table and the walls rattled with roars of the men yelling over each other arguing over which one had shittier job while half a dozen empty wine bottles rolled around. When I was younger, I used to get annoyed with adults for being so angry all the time, for complaining about their jobs and their lives. But, now I was starting to get it. Most of us never get to live out our dreams. Most of us are just getting by, and doing it by a thread. You can't blame people for being stressed and emotional when their whole livelihood is in constant jeopardy.

When the food came out we all held hands and my uncle said a prayer for my grandmother, his mom. After we all said amen, I opened my eyes and looked at the empty seat that used to be hers. Suddenly I wasn't as hungry.

I chose to sit at the kid's table. My cousins were all girls at the ages of 23, 17, 13, 9, and my sister who was 17. Between the bullshittery happening at the adult table and the array of age-oriented conversations at the kid's table I picked up on something that is contrary to popular opinion - the older you are, the less you have life figured out. Adulthood, it seemed, held nothing but anger, bitterness, death, and depression. You worried about things like money and work and making people happy. When you're a kid, the only things that matter are laughing, good company, food, and water.

Mary, the 23-year-old, was four months away from bringing a new life into the world. She and her boyfriend, Juan, were launching a marine-life pet store - a career that started as a hobby in the basement of their Brooklyn apartment. A couple of online fish and ray sales turned into an immense breeding project that gave them the money and opportunity to start the business. The older generation thought launching a pet store was an outrageous idea. All of them offered Juan a job in their construction companies. He politely declined. They called him a jackass. "How will you support your family?" "Are you even thinking about the baby?" Juan calmly said he knew what he had to do to support his family. He also knew construction was not it. Not for him, anyway. He was fully aware of the risks of starting a business, so was Mary. I admired them for taking the chance. It's comfortable, or at least less scary, to enter any old job and work your life away for somebody else and claim it as for the good of your family, but there was more of a challenge, more margin for error, to chase a dream and make it work. Juan sat at the kid's table with us and made Mary and the children all laugh with his impersonations of loony characters.

Further down the table, my sister and Holly were discussing boys who may or may not have flirted with them in class and the freedom of finally being able to drive a car. The 13-year-old, Andrea, talked to me anybody who would listen about how much she loved playing soccer but wanted to quit because of all the "girl drama", like who was snapchatting who and what boy walked them to class.

The 9-year-old, Stacy, found us all very uninteresting. She called from the end of the table in her naturally echoing voice; "all you people are complaining about nothing and talking about even more nothing." She walked away from the table without a look back, the family dog following closely at her heels. Nobody paid them any attention.

The food wasn't very good because my grandma hadn't made it, but I respected the women's attempt to imitate her mastery. I finished everything on my plate and kissed my oldest aunt on the cheek. "It was great, Tia," I told her, in Portuguese "just like grandma's cooking." She flashed a genuine smile in response to my white lie. Making someone smile - a real smile, one of those that brightens the eyes and makes their skin wrinkle - is so pure that sometimes it's worth lying to make it happen.