I should have posted this on Thanksgiving really, but we’re still spending every spare minute at the new house – cleaning, unpacking and renovating (there’s more to do than we thought) – and we don’t yet have broadband there so I’m not getting as much desk-time as usual. Better late than never, though, and this is a lovely little tale from Jeff where a couple look back fondly on that dreaded ‘first time meeting the parents’. I’m reliably informed that this is loosely based on Jeff’s own experiences, and the picture is of the house where it took place!
***
“I’m gonna hyperventilate!” I grumbled clutching the steering wheel.
“No, you’re not,” Matt said, patting my leg there in the front seat of the old pick up. “You’ll be fine.”
“Yeah, I’ll be fine when this Thanksgiving dinner is over with, Matt” I said. “I’m just glad it’s just Mom and Dad and you. Oh, geez!”
“You okay?” Matt asked, getting concerned.
“Yeah,” I said smiling. “Just nothing ever prepared me for introducing my folks to my boyfriend. Hell, they freaked when I bought my first car!”
“Yeah, parents can be like that,” Matt said.
“I’ve only been out to them since this Summer,” I said.
“You had to come out, you had a guy moving out to Kansas from California to shack up with you,” Matt said.
“You make it sound so dirty!” I laughed.
“None of that at dinner,” Matt said, squeezing my leg perilously close to what I called “my functioning area.”
“And none of that either,” I said. “Just Over-The-River-And-Through-The-Woods stuff. And speaking of which…”
I turned onto the bridge over the gully and into the suburban neighborhood I’d grown up in.
“Social note,” Matt said in a fakey announcer’s voice. “Mr. and Mrs. Woody Bulwar announce their son Jake is officially shacking-up with Matthew P. Garcia, formerly of Oakland, California. Introductions and announcements were made at the family’s annual Thanksgiving dinner where they…”
“Oh, stop!” I said with a laugh.
We both laughed, but I could tell my boyfriend was nervous too.
Mom and Dad were waiting for us on the front porch of the split-level suburban house I’d grown up in. That first meeting went well, although I almost held my breath. Mom hugged Matt who was six-foot-one, she was five eight. My Dad shook Matt’s hand. Matt called him “Sir.” They insisted he call them “Woody” and “Linda.”
“It doesn’t feel cool enough to be Thanksgiving,” my Mom was saying as Dad opened the door for us.
“Baseball weather,” Matt said with a grin.
I watched Matt taking in the room as Mom hung up his jacket. A combination living room, dining room with a long table that could seat six at one end and a living room set up at the far end in front of the big, full-length window looking out on the backyard. A couch along the wall to one side of the window by a glass and screen back door and several upholstered chairs angled to face the window. There were binoculars perched on the low windowsill and the bird book next to a lamp on the little table between a chair and the window. I wondered what Matt’s growing up had been like. He and his Mom and sister had lived in an apartment after his Dad bailed on them.
My Dad had Matt sit down on one of the chairs by the big window and I was worried that he would start grilling Matt. Instead, they started talking about family get-togethers. Dad reminisced about the Thanksgivings when he’d been a kid, driving with his folks to his Grandparent’s farm outside of Kansas City. I didn’t sit down. I busied myself by pretending to examine the knicknacks in my Mom’s cabinet by the far wall, my hands jammed in my pockets.
I wasn’t sure how they’d gotten on the subject of birthdays or parents. Then Mom called me into the kitchen, ostensibly to help her with something but more likely to keep me from pacing out in the living room.
“Yeah, Jake was born a week after his Grandmother’s birthday so they always celebrated at the same time,” Dad was saying.
I was in the kitchen, helping Mom pour the gravy when I heard Matt and Dad laughing. I sighed with relief and I relaxed and I spilled some of the gravy on the floor. Everything’s gonna be all right now, I told myself, mopping up the gravy spill with a rag.
We sat down to eat, Matt insisting on helping carry stuff out to the table, I told them there wasn’t going to be as much gravy as we thought and Mom laughed.
I found out later that Matt had told him he’d never really known his father and that he and his Mom had the same birthday. And he’d told my Dad that he was a real father, the kind Matt wished he’d had growing up.
We stayed another hour, which surprised me; our plan had been to show up, introduce Matt, make small talk, eat and get out of there. But we really didn’t want to leave. It really felt like Matt had been part of the family for years. He and I helped with the dishes and then sat down on the couch, feeling stuffed and talked and laughed with my folks until it started getting dark.
Right before we got up to leave, Mom insisted on taking a picture of me and Matt, with the camera she kept by the window to take pictures of the birds in the backyard. I managed not to groan, like I usually did when Mom pulled out the camera and aimed it at me.
This time Mom aimed her camera at “us” and I liked being an “us.”
And that first dinner was how things stayed. We’d usually go out to Mom and Dads, three miles away, for Sunday dinner and we’d always be reminded of that first Thanksgiving dinner, what, thirty years ago, now? That’s why we still love that picture Mom took. Our big smiles are partly smiles of relief that it all went well and that it’s over, and partly the same smiles we had every time we got together. We keep this picture because this was when it was all starting for Matt and me.
RoM/Mantic Reads 