‘Someday’ Is a Terrible Word

So it’s that week of the year when people make trips across the country that sound as arduous as the Apollo 13 mission. (Okay, not fires in the ship, but boredom in the car. Painful nonetheless, they tell me.)

I never made those car trips much, never flew to see any Aunt Edna in Des Moines or Uncle Moishe in Brooklyn or any such thing. As a kid, my house was maybe just like yours: Holidays were the worst days of the year, days when someone (maybe someone specific) could be expected to drink a little too much and go off the handle.

Years on, various gatherings with my often satisfying friend-family and other odd Chinese take-out meals scattered in between, somewhere close by, somewhere in the vicinity of me, a father on the East Coast comes to his daughters with this over the e-transom today:

“Have a great Thanksgiving. Maybe someday we'll celebrate together again.”

I have no kicker.


[Technorati tags: Thanksgiving, dysfunctional families]