Chicken fingers in Gettysburg
My mother just got her favorite album by the Mamas and the Papas in the mail…she’s downstairs now, dancing around the living room, happy as any Philadelphia clam.
Yesterday we went to Gettysburg to visit my immortal great aunt Mary, who’s the cutest thing to ever set foot in Pennsylvania, and some of my second cousins. My cousin Erin wants to set me up with her Buddhist guy friend. She also wants me to hurry up and buy that flat I always talk about buying in Philly, so she can visit whenever she wants. By the time I left, I was promising everyone I would move back within the next few years (5 years, actually, but they don’t need to know the specifics). Now I feel like I made a pact with God or something, like if I don’t live up to these shallow promises, they’ll be just that — shallow.
But life is long, and there’s time for Boston, Berlin, South America, and lots of places in between. The troubling thing is how family grows old while you run away to various new places, and they may or may not excuse your absence, so I’ll always feel bad regardless. These are the things we contemplate at the holidays. With records from the 70s blaring on the floor below.