A Thanksgiving reflection
Thanksgiving is many things: A chance to watch football on the couch, a time to be with family and of course, a reminder to acknowledge the things and people in this world for which we are grateful.
At college, Thanksgiving also becomes a benchmark for the proximity of “real life.” For us, who are neither kids nor adults, returning to our childhood homes is a yearly identity check.
My family spent Thanksgiving weekend in our usual way, with our “family by choice,”—close friends. It’s not for lack of aunts or cousins but more a difference in priorities. If we are going to spend a holiday together, it’s going to be the Jewish New Year or Passover. The fact that they are scattered everywhere from Austin, Texas to Tel Aviv, Israel doesn’t help either.
Last Thursday, I found myself at the home of Susan and David, attempting to wash down my turkey with chocolate, marshmallow, coconut and nutella birthday cake. The occasion was Grammie’s (Susan’s mother, but I can’t remember the last time I heard her actual name) 85th birthday. She blew all the candles out on the first try. “Never stood a chance,” she remarked, looking ponderously at the still smoking candles.
On Friday, dinner was at the home of David and Ilana, who are not actually my aunt and uncle, but might as well be. It was another Simcha (Hebrew for, “a happiness”), their oldest son’s 23rd birthday. Naturally, I broke the promise to myself from the day before about not eating until I can’t move. Their younger son, Amir, is my best friend, although he wasn’t home. This is because he is taking a break from his rigorous academic career at Hampshire College to study Marine Biology in Mexico. Or Jell-o shots. Whatever.
Saturday afternoon I had lunch with Danny Douek and his wife Beth. Danny, he of the disarming British accent and caustic, flippant sarcasm, is one of the world’s leading AIDS researchers. Naturally, when one gets the chance to talk to someone who might win a Nobel, you complain to each other about whose mother ranks closer to Darth Vader on the list of the all time great super-villains. You’ll also be happy to know that post-infection HIV treatment is making amazing strides. Part of what makes college college is that for the most part, it lacks both kids and adults. At the same time, it is delineated not only by class standing, but segmented by vacations. So while you are not a child or a grown up, your progress between the two is extremely clearly marked.
And so, each year, the conversations over break say the same; school, politics, nice Jewish girls—but your experience of them changes. With your family by blood there is something immutable that goes beyond DNA. Basically, you don’t choose your actual family, or at least you generally shouldn’t.
Not so with your parent’s friends, which is why it can feel weird to go to their homes and to be conversed with as an equal. That weirdness is the barely submerged realization that you have the choice to cross the threshold from “friend’s kid,” to “actual human being with a job and rent,” or even possibly, “friend.”
Whether you think of them as friends or second parents isn’t really what matters; either way they’ve contributed some parenting. And so, it’s the feeling of going home and remembering who made you, and appreciating the ways that they and you continue to change. This is what makes the holidays special for a college student.
Which brings me to Saturday night and reuniting with my high school friends. Of the five people at the table, two are literally stand up comedians. One is an intern at 30 Rock. You get the idea. Good times all around, unless you were dining at the table next to ours. It was classic dinner and a movie, that is if you consider five college juniors going to see The Muppets on a Saturday night classic. You could call it a kid’s movie, but that wouldn’t exactly be right. Perhaps, it would be most appropriate to call it a movie that asks you to remember being a kid.
For us, this meant remembering a decade, the 80s, that none of us experienced. But as I said, it also meant remembering a mindset, recalling and enacting a child’s curiosity and innocence, if only for a couple of hours.
Memory, like being a kid, has a lot more to do with imagination than actuality.
And then, more or less, that’s it for another year. Or until everyone’s vacations and internships and lives match up once again. And that many days closer to what society considers adulthood. In the meantime, it’s back to semi-adulthood and another family by choice, the surrogate siblings and parents of the Colby community. The people we live with, the people we work with and eat with and hopefully love. We even have that uncle that everyone hates. But soon these precious reunions will become just as periodical as those at home; don’t let it take a holiday or graduation or the death of a classmate to cherish them.
(Belated) Have a happy and meaningful Thanksgiving.
