Scene from a family holiday.

The scene: it's Thanksgiving, I'm in New Jersey with my family, and it's exactly what I wanted the day to be.  Including all the strange interludes. 

Mid-afternoon, we're still a couple of hours away from turkey, but the appetizer courses are in full swing.  The uncles are watching television in the living room, and a few of my cousins are in the basement playing video games.  I'm in the kitchen with the aunts and the rest of the cousins, eating shrimp cocktail and clam dip and our other traditional pre-dinner snacking foods.  Cousin Lo is trying to figure out which of the family's traditional appetizers she can make for a potluck with her friends from work.  I wonder if this is some kind of retro thing--I love eating this stuff, but I've never been able to convince myself that my friends will also want to eat clam dip or asparagus rolls or what-have-you.  Lo seems to think it'll be a hit, though, with her fashion-industry friends. 

Talking through the family recipes, and the inevitable vows of secrecy that accompany the sharing of family recipes, we somehow end up, as we always do, in family stories.  The collective chain of thought starts with the clam dip but ends up with my mother, age four, the oldest of the siblings, being sent off to kindergarten and having to ride the public bus.  The township schools had school buses, but didn't take four-year-olds; the Catholic school took four-year-olds, but had no buses. 

"I couldn't even reach the cord!  You know, to ask for a stop."  We've heard this before, a hundred times, but we all like to hear the stories again, and everyone's already laughing, knowing where this goes.  "I had to stand on the seat to reach the string!  And my legs were too short to even get on the bus without help, the bus driver, every day he had to stand up and hold my hand and pull me up, and he was a big man!  It was hard for him to stand up, even, but he helped me.  But I still had to stand on that seat to pull that string, and sometimes I couldn't do it.  I would miss my stop, and then I had to walk all the way back up that hill to the school."  She's laughing too, but also looks outraged at the memory of her four-year-old self on the public bus. 

Cousin Noelle looks a little outraged too.  "Why did Grandma let you do that?"  When my friends and I were in elementary school, our parents worried about our safety enough that we weren't ever supposed to be alone, and had to ride our bikes or walk to school in groups.  Noelle is ten years younger than I am, and parental nervousness ramped up even more in those ten years, to the point where they never walked or rode their bikes at all, but got driven everywhere by their parents.

Her mother explains to her that things were different when they were growing up, people didn't worry like they do now.  "It wasn't like it is now," she says.

"It was always like that," my mother says.  "We just didn't know." 

Comments

[Benjamin Rosenbaum]

One of my favorite things about Switzerland is that Aviva can walk to school by herself. In fact all the kids are supposed to walk to school -- the teacher threw a little fit at back to school nite about kids coming on self-propelled scooters, which then end up in a pile that he has to clean up, but part of the fit was predicated on the notion that by not walking to school they are missing out on an important formative experience.

It isn't actually, statistically, that much like it supposedly is, even in America. It's just that in a country of 300 million people, one stranger abduction somewhere is worth millions of dollars of media play, whereas the Swiss don't think that crimes in France -- never mind Moscow -- are particularly interesting.

[Jackie M.]

Ben, I think the playground pictures you were showing a few months ago really tell us everything we need to know about this particular cultural gap.