All The Trimmings

This Thanksgiving, besides the boyfriend and all the usual suspects coming to our apartment tomorrow to inject gravy directly into their veins, I'll be spending the holiday with another group of hopefully entertaining, though perhaps impenetrable, individuals. You know the types: the ones you don't see all year except the holidays, that you make stilted small talk with about what you've both been up to.

There's the formerly curmudgeonly Uncle Al, who's recently taken up Tae-Bo and "feels like a million bucks!" and then backs his Prius onto your front lawn so everyone can see how responsible he now is. Nevermind he should've been this super-man six years ago when you really needed him to be.


There's your grandfather, who sits at the end of the dinner table with an air of bloated superiority, and makes you feel guilty just by being there, just by the implication of "Why haven't you been to see me yet? Where have you been?"


There's that guy that your father knows from work, who always shows up after dinner so he can just have some booze, who's always going on and on about all the stuff he learned in a philosophy class he took twenty years ago but thinks you'll want to hear about it "... because you went to college, too! You know how it is." But you never know what the hell he's talking about and anyways it always comes back to some girl he was screwing who broke his heart.


And then there's your cousin's husband, whom you totally have a crush on and is always finding you when you're alone in some other room and staring at you with those penetrating blue eyes of his and talking so lowly you have to lean in closer and you can smell that musky, manly smell of his mixing with the sweet aroma of gin on his breath and he's smiling at you and the room seems very small and very warm, and then your stupid cousin comes in and you pretend you're really pointing at some spot on the globe your leaning against and talking about that while you catch your breath.


So I'll be spending time with all these chaps in the next few days, for better or for worse. How about you?
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