Tradition (as sung by Herschel Bernardi or maybe Topol)

I discovered, shortly after leaving my parents' home for life in the big wide world, that I just could NOT travel on the holidays. The crowds at the airports were overwhelming and the long drive from the Pittsburgh airport to the small town in which they lived too daunting. Yeah, for all the places I’ve been, I’m a real travel weenie.

Not so long after moving to Boston I was invited to spend Thanksgiving with friends of my family in nearby Duxbury. My father and Jim, my mother and Hope became close friends back when we all lived in Gladstone, NJ where Daddy and Jim taught at St. Bernard’s.

Thanksgiving with the Buechlers was always a huge, happy feast. Hope worked on the Mayflower II at Plimouth Plantation and would return, still in costume, to a house full of people hyped up on great conversation, dark rich coffee and the anticipation of so much fabulous food. All of us would be crowded into the kitchen and dining room, cutting apples, mincing onions, rolling dough and polishing silver.

One of their friends was a Chaucer scholar and visiting professor to Harvard from Oxford. I was spectacularly intimidated -- me being a sci fi reading, pressroom working, punk dive frequenting, angry young bee. I mean, this man had smooth, beautiful polish to spare and I, well, even now I’m challenged to string 3 words together without at least one being a colorful curse. So, of COURSE, at this huge table, I was seated right next to him and was terrified that I’d make a tremendous, world ending ass of myself (a talent of mine, it is).

Derek attempted to start a conversation with me -- asking me all about me. The man had glorious, gracious social skills in bulk. I was tongue tied, sweating, panicky and finally blurted out “no one expects the Spanish Inquisition!” Ah, common ground! We spent the next ten minutes trading Monty Python lines and I felt somewhat less the dimwitted bumpkin.

Dinner in Duxbury was always followed by a long beach walk and games of Dictionary. God, it was grand fun.

Jim and Hope moved out to Taos, NM after he retired from the Duxbury school system and the kids (who are all around my age so I guess we’re all old kids now) have all moved away. I still see them all but it’s not as often and not for Thanksgiving.

Life has a funny habit of shifting and evolving and I can dig that. After Bob and I moved in together we started our own Thanksgiving tradition. The day starts and ends with a beach walk -- Bob and I cook a meal together, visit with Jen and her large extended family and then play our own Dadaist version of Scrabble. We don’t keep score and it’s all about making interesting words. We have extra letters from old sets and don’t let the boundaries, the limits of the board, stop us.

Seems like an apt metaphor for life.