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November 2018

A New Thanksgiving Tradition

Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday because it’s about food and gratitude. But after many years of Cambridge Thanksgivings, it was time to pass the hosting on to the next generation.

(After all, I am eighty).

Fourteen of us, ranging in age from twelve to eighty-eight gathered in Silver Spring, Maryland. Our son Jeremy and his wife Katrina were in charge.

The wild rice stuffing and French Silk Pie were the same as they had been in Cambridge, but Katrina brined the turkey for the first time and the next-door neighbors brought some vegetarian dishes for their non-meat-eating family members that our meat-eating family ate with pleasure.

The food was divine, and there was plenty of good conversation, although some of the teenage vernacular had to be translated into English for the older generation. The readings from our Grateful Jar were funnier than ever. But what I loved the most was the six kids, singing and dancing to music they asked “Alexa” to play for them while they did the cleanup, thus allowing the cooking-weary older generation to rest and hang out together.

The joyful conversations we have when we are surrounded by kids are what I miss most in my eighty-year-old life. And one of the best things about Thanksgiving.


Break from a Break

In all the years of writing this blog, I never asked readers how they found me. But I spent a good part of today with a reader I had met briefly when she came to my bookstore signing for 70-Something: Life, Love and Limits in the Bonus Years. (Shameless plug!)

An early Peace Corps volunteer in Senegal who (after a long teaching career), started Intercultural Dimensions, a non-profit that offers experiential trips to Senegal, she had invited me to tour a newly revived East Cambridge with its multiple bio-tech organizations and new high rise apartments built to accommodate all their Generation Z workers.

At the end of the day, I asked her how she happened to start reading my blog. “Oh,” she said, “Some years ago, I was sitting in Charles de Gaulle Airport near Paris waiting for a delayed flight and started talking with a woman whose flight was also delayed. She recommended “70-something.” and I’ve read it ever since.”

Small world.