holidays, part 2 (Thanksgiving)

We are going to spend Thanksgiving with a cousin of Ted’s who’s in Germany working with the US military, and his family. This is going to be so weird – good weird, but definitely weird. It wouldn’t be so strange if I only thought about it as an adult, but I remember what this sort of thing was like as a kid: these are people we like but only see every few years, and that gets really strange when you’re young.

I met Ted’s cousin well before we got married so that’s maybe 18-20 years ago. He was at our wedding, and we saw him now and then at holidays. I met his wife at their wedding – we were in Phoenix and they were at a military base about five hours away so we went for the wedding. That’s also when I met the oldest two kids (by his previous wife), who were then three and one (and adorable). We saw them a maybe few times a year – we went down to Karchner Caverns once when Ted’s parents were visiting, or they stayed with us a few times before flying out of the airport near us, or we got together with other famliy at holidays. Then they went off to live in Korea, and we visited them there – by now the girls were maybe 5 and 7 or so and the older boy was a toddler. I don’t know if we’ve seen the kids since then; I think we saw the parents once or twice. So now the girls are in their teens and their bigger little brother is in grade school; there’s a whole new family member and he may even be old enough to be in school. Maybe the oldest two will remember us vaguely; the boys certainly won’t. And they’ll give their parents the same strange look that I used to, when they insisted someone was family or a close friend – because how could someone be that close if they hadn’t visited us in my entire memory? Grown-ups are weird. Being one isn’t any less so.