Every year at Thanksgiving, we take a group picture. It's always the same crowd, with an occasional noteworthy absence, an occasional noteworthy (or at least snicker worthy) add-on. Thank goodness we weren't digital until recently; the albums filled with indelible images of unwelcome strays who have tempted various relatives over the years to stick their heads in the oven alongside the turkey still provide us with hours of entertainment and fodder for conversations when the stuffing knocks the small talk out of us.
Though he joined us with a well-timed phone call from Japan (we were all subdued and bloated as we shoveled in our last forkfuls of dessert), my son, for the first time in group picture history, was not present. My cousin will photo shop him in, but it won't be the same. (One year he photo shopped his sister in, looking incongruously slim and elegant in a cocktail dress while the rest of us offered up fake smiles and our aching bellies rested heavily on our laps.) I had already missed the first attempted call from across the International Date Line, so I set the ringer on my cell phone to "rude and obnoxious" and tucked it inside my boot to ensure I could continue my gluttony freely and not miss him again. I summoned my daughters and my brother for a turn. The cousins were happily occupied with our newest one year old, and my mom wouldn't hear him anyway. I would just let her scream into a dead phone later, and tell her her grandson enjoyed hearing her voice.
We look forward to holidays. Even when we dread them, there is a piece of most of us that needs them -- the connection, the catching up, the unique feeling of belonging in a room full of people where everyone has some variation of the same familial blood flowing through (or close enough to) their veins. As painful as the long day of idle conversation and gluttony can be, we create our memories this way. (Our most cherished memory, by the way, is the group picture memorializing the visit one year of a cousin's trashy girlfriend; she somehow ended up smack in the center of the group picture, larger than life, and to this day, though we don't remember her name, we miss her terribly.) We approach each year with optimism, lying to each other about how great we look, promising not to fall prey to the annual gastronomic disturbances, pretending we give each other more than a passing thought during most of the intervening months, professing our supreme devotion to family as we deny our preoccupations with the realities of our everyday lives. The haze of alcohol and too much food clouds our brains, and we actually start to feel a fondness for the Pilgrims, folks who probably would have viewed our mad bunch of Jews and Jew lovers as another tribe load of savages standing in their way. The polished Tory Birch buckles on our ballet slippers notwithstanding, the fundamentalist Pilgrims would not have been fooled, would have run us out of town faster than you can send a smoke signal. Just sayin'.
My son is as cynical as they come, and I at least pretend to be. On the phone, I was as nonchalant as I could be, told him about some of the day's craziness, acted as if I did not resent at all having to hand over the phone so my daughters and my brother could have a turn. I did my best to conceal my impatience as I waited for them all to finish their inane conversations, so I could continue mine. I demanded that they pass the phone to me once more, so I could tell him...tell him what? Absolutely nothing. He filled in the silence, telling me about his work, his travels, the Thanksgiving dinner he would be attending over the weekend and how difficult it is to find chocolate turkeys in Japan. Blah blah blah, I heard, as I could feel my meltdown beginning to form behind my eyeballs. Why aren't you here with us? I wanted to scream. It fills me with pride to tell people my son -- the adventurer, the writer, the worldly savant -- is living and working in Japan. It will fill me with pride and great joy to tell people my son -- the adventurer, the writer, the worldly savant -- once lived and worked in Japan, and has returned somewhere closer to home. But don't tell him I said that.
I had to pry the phone out of my fingers after he hung up. As bored as he sounded, I know him well enough to know he felt some inexplicable sense of longing for our hectic, drawn out, often incredibly infuriating annual family get together, not quite as overwhelming as the sense of loneliness I felt without him there, but close. No amount of photo shopping will fool me. His absence is, to say the least, noteworthy, and, hopefully, temporary.
Time marches on though. Our newest family member (you may recall his ill-timed birth last year caused us all to miss Thanksgiving as we know and expect it to be, and we are still recovering from that blow) is older than my son was in his first annual group picture. I can remember when his dad, now well into his thirties, was born. Weird. My mother is the last of our parents remaining, which means my generation of the family tree will, before we know it, be the fragile branch at the top. Thirty-somethings and forty-somethings, kids I could swear were just in diapers, will soon be in charge. Moving up the family hierarchy, when you get to be my age, is anything but a promotion.
Thank goodness we'll always have the group pictures, to remind us of how things were supposed to be. With an occasional temporary glitch for comic relief.
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