This year I had five millennials for Thanksgiving dinner and it didn’t really hit me until later that I was the old person at the table. Three were my own children, one was my daughter’s boyfriend, and I had invited a young colleague. It felt like an average holiday dinner, with the same traditional roast turkey and stuffing, mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie that I’d been cooking for decades, the same that my mother had always made. There were as many animals roaming underfoot as any other year, and we even had music. My son played the piano just like my grandmother did when I was young, by ear and memory. But there the similarities ended.
Technology is one obvious culprit. We didn’t have cell phones growing up. You couldn’t YouTube how to carve a turkey, the way my daughter’s boyfriend did. I felt like I was on reality TV as I dished up dinner this year, while my other daughter simultaneously videoed me and posted on her Snapchat with god knows what captions. The only TVs we had when I was a kid were in the basement and my parents’ room, neither of which we were allowed to watch during family holidays. All social engagements happened in the kitchen, the living room, or around the table. The good, the bad, and the ugly.
When the chaos of eating and drinking died down with my millennials on Thanksgiving, I found myself missing the presence of an elder. My paternal grandmother came to every family holiday when I was growing up. She would turn her hearing aids off to quiet the din of our crowd so it was almost impossible to have a conversation with her, but she was still my favorite person to observe at the table. Her face was all lines and crags and sharp angles. She had piercing whitish blue eyes, an aquiline nose, and a head full of snowy hair. In profile she looked Native American. I would watch her push the tiny amount of food she had chosen around her plate with deliberate and precise movements. Her frame was thin and wiry, an athlete’s body set carefully in her chair. I was fascinated by the gold medallion that always hung from a long chain around her neck, a gift from my father that she would finger like a talisman.
I grew up in times of plenty, but my grandmother was a living historic reminder of tougher times. She had become a mother during the depression and those days scarred her, as did at least two of her three husbands, who were alcoholic and abusive. There was a flintiness to her that kept my brothers and I at arm’s length, but she would try to engage. When my parents went out of town and she stayed with us, the ghost stories she told in such dramatic fashion, as if she had been trained for the stage, were so vivid and terrifying that I couldn’t sleep for weeks afterwards. Her Mensa brain worked like a computer, even through the alcoholic self-medication she used to manage her demons. We paid close attention when she taught us how to play gin rummy and poker, but whatever maternal instinct she might have had must have been extinguished by survival. Consequently I didn’t love her in the affectionate way that my kids love my mother, whose warm nature is inviting and approachable.
While I didn’t feel old interacting with the kids on Thanksgiving, I was old enough to be a grandmother already, and one day soon I could be the one studied carefully by a grandchild at the dinner table. I hope that I age with some of my mother’s charm, but also wear the resilience of my grandmother. After all, a little fear never hurt anyone. And the gold medallion she left me will hang from my neck like a talisman.
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