You never realize how much you like your roommates until you realize how eerie your house is without them moving around and laughing in distant rooms. My mom and step-dad drove down from Mansfield so we can all three work in the morning, then commute back for one more day with my grandparents after, and I'm home alone while my roommates are still all gone with family. Even one home aside from me would make the house profoundly less empty.
It was a good Thanksgiving, yummy and funny and sad all rolled together. My mom's mom (I have a lot of grandmothers so I always have to differentiate) slaved in the kitchen all day long, getting progressively more flustered as the dishes became done in an amount her two hands couldn't handle. Papa (what we call my grandmother's husband) made a superb turkey, the melt-in-your-mouth kind where even the white meat is juicy. Yes, I prefer dark meat, and am still incensed at McDonald's for discontinuing dark meat in their chicken nuggets. We all ate to the limit and my mother and I laughed and compared our Thanksgiving Buddha bellies and tried to out-fat one another. Unlike my petite 5 foot 108 pounds mother, though, I realize how not-fat she and I both are - that's muscle below the Buddha belly, baby!
My great-grandfather came to dinner as well and seemed to wander the house with only a touch of his sense of humor and with the distinct aura of being lost. A couple of weeks ago his wife passed away - I drove up to the funeral and was even asked to read some Scripture at the last minute for the ceremony. A very Catholic funeral in a very beautiful church; my favorite part was being able to see the incense smoke swirling upward in the light colored by the stained glass windows. When I came upstairs today after a sound defeat in a game of darts to say hello and ask how he was, he pulled me away after the hug and looked at me very seriously, saying "You did a good job"
"...At Giant Eagle?"
"At the church. You did a good job up there."
He looked at me with watery blue eyes full of sadness and shuffled off. Later in the day I saw pictures of he and her that my grandmother had dug up - they were all cute pictures, them flirting and laughing even as an old couple who sometimes tended toward the grouchy oldness in them. He was her second marriage - her first had happened to an abusive man after she got pregnant at 14, but this one had been, as one of her great-nephews referred to it at the funeral, "the love of her life". When I realized they married around the same time in their lives as my parents are marrying at now, I got a better concept of their relationship. I hope, however, that I myself don't keep in my family's tradition of not marrying the love of my life the first time around.
All meal long I kept waiting for my great-grandmother's cigarette-cracked laugh to break open suddenly, but obviously it never did. It's like being in my house right now - you don't know how weird the absence of a person is until they are absent.
It was a good Thanksgiving, yummy and funny and sad all rolled together. My mom's mom (I have a lot of grandmothers so I always have to differentiate) slaved in the kitchen all day long, getting progressively more flustered as the dishes became done in an amount her two hands couldn't handle. Papa (what we call my grandmother's husband) made a superb turkey, the melt-in-your-mouth kind where even the white meat is juicy. Yes, I prefer dark meat, and am still incensed at McDonald's for discontinuing dark meat in their chicken nuggets. We all ate to the limit and my mother and I laughed and compared our Thanksgiving Buddha bellies and tried to out-fat one another. Unlike my petite 5 foot 108 pounds mother, though, I realize how not-fat she and I both are - that's muscle below the Buddha belly, baby!
My great-grandfather came to dinner as well and seemed to wander the house with only a touch of his sense of humor and with the distinct aura of being lost. A couple of weeks ago his wife passed away - I drove up to the funeral and was even asked to read some Scripture at the last minute for the ceremony. A very Catholic funeral in a very beautiful church; my favorite part was being able to see the incense smoke swirling upward in the light colored by the stained glass windows. When I came upstairs today after a sound defeat in a game of darts to say hello and ask how he was, he pulled me away after the hug and looked at me very seriously, saying "You did a good job"
"...At Giant Eagle?"
"At the church. You did a good job up there."
He looked at me with watery blue eyes full of sadness and shuffled off. Later in the day I saw pictures of he and her that my grandmother had dug up - they were all cute pictures, them flirting and laughing even as an old couple who sometimes tended toward the grouchy oldness in them. He was her second marriage - her first had happened to an abusive man after she got pregnant at 14, but this one had been, as one of her great-nephews referred to it at the funeral, "the love of her life". When I realized they married around the same time in their lives as my parents are marrying at now, I got a better concept of their relationship. I hope, however, that I myself don't keep in my family's tradition of not marrying the love of my life the first time around.
All meal long I kept waiting for my great-grandmother's cigarette-cracked laugh to break open suddenly, but obviously it never did. It's like being in my house right now - you don't know how weird the absence of a person is until they are absent.
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