November 27, 2004 - Saturday
These boys don't know how lucky they are (of course). But when Harry watches a movie it's usually like this: on a very large screen. Actually, the screen is the living room wall with a projector overhead supplying the images. In lieu of weekend naps, Harry has been watching movies frequently on weekend afternoons. Most often lately it has been his Bionicle movie, which he has seen now as many as a dozen times. However, since Jeremy is usually napping, pictured here is his first time seeing for him to see it all the way through. We got home from a belated Thanksgiving celebration at their grandparents' house with enough time for an early dinner and a movie.

The boys did a surprising good job eating pieces of the Thanksgiving dinner, perhaps because the informal nature of holidays at my parents house, with aunts, uncles, and cousins spread across multiple tables, made our job of monitoring and encouraging them a little easier. Or perhaps it's just that they are getting a little older and growing up as time moves forward (although that was less the case two days ago on Thanksgiving at Chloe's house when they just wanted to get up and go play). And that, time moving forward, was kind of an underlying theme of the day today since it may well have be the last time for all of those of my siblings, cousins, aunts, and uncles to collect at the house I grew up in. Harry and Jeremy's grandparents are about to start building a new house on the site of the beach cottage and will be selling this house, presumably in the spring. I will surely be back a few more times before then, as will Harry and Jeremy, but perhaps not for this type of group celebration that happened so many times over the last 37 years. My siblings and cousins are all adults now, some with children of their own, and my parents are ready for a newer, smaller, more manageable house. So, the change is logical, if not for the best. But it is still a change, and symbolically, perhaps, the final severing of just about any tie I had remaining to my childhood. I'm 42 now, so it's not as though those memories are still fresh and vivid. And, I've become fairly pragmatic about this type of change over the years, although with relatively little such change, moving, upheaval, etc. in my greater family when I was younger, it is something that I have intellectually, more than innately, come to terms with. Still, it is the house that I grew up in, with all the corners and spaces and comforts and emotional demons that a kid would have in a childhood home. And in some ways today was much like some of that happiest times I spent there, with many of the same people, talking together freely and easily with the comfort and familiarity of shared experiences of years past. Yet, it was also clearly not the same. There are little kids running around who don't live there and are making childhood memories at other houses. There are grandparents who are ready to move to a different place and out of a town that has changed around them. And, each person of my generation has a life that has grown well beyond the simple happy holiday gatherings that at one time seemed to be the wine and salt of family life.


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