Fried Green Tomatoes

The trip to DC was basically uneventful. I drove home yesterday (it takes about two hours from school to home) and then we drove all the way back up today to Framingham to take the Logan Express in to Logan. The flight was very short and very uneventful. We were right on the wing so I had to lean really far back into the person behind me or get on top of the person in front of me in order to look out the window (which I did, cause I have no shame).

I finally finished Fried Green Tomatoes while at the airport waiting to leave this evening. I don't get much time for leisure reading but when I have the opportunity I take full advantage of it.

My God, what a good book. I feel like I've never read anything like it before. I feel like my heart hasn't ached so badly for something to not be over in a very long time. I remember the same ache when I finished The Last Battle in the sixth grade and I cried for a week, not because all of the kids on those beautiful pages I had known and loved for an entire summer had all died in a train crash after seven books (I'm refering to The Chronicles of Narnia in case you are unfamiliar) but because it was over. The magic was over. Sure I can (and do) reread the Narnia stories, but there is something different about reading them as a child, and there is something absent when you reread a story. The mystery is dead, you turn a page and it is the same as the last time you turned it.

The point is, I am very achey right now after having finished Fried Green Tomatoes. It might not have been a good idea for me to read it around Thanksgiving, either, because now I am not only aching at the fact that it is over, but I severely miss the old days.

I miss the old neighbourhood, with Grampa Fred and Mary and the tomatoes that grew bright red along the chain link fence, with Miss Bubba and Turbo who would greet me every day after school. Miss Bubba would take me into her arms and hold me like I was her own little girl, and Turbo the little Sheltie would run across the street and shepherd me onto the sidewalk like a good babysitter. Grampa Fred got cancer when I was five. I still remember being ushered into the house to say goodbye to the man who had loved me like a grandfather and seeing all the machines helping to keep him alive for a little while longer. Mary died after we left the old neighbourhood. Daddy always told me she was alive and well, but after he died I found out he had only been lieing to me, to keep me from being too upset. Miss Bubba always smoked like a chimney. I remember bringing her one of my favourite stuffed animals and telling her she could have it, if only she would stop smoking. She took the toy and told me she would do her best. I went back a few years ago to visit her and saw the black and white dalmatian stuffed animal on the back of her couch, and the lingering smell of decades of smoke perfumed the air. But I think she quit, I have to think she quit. I love her so much still, and I know she loved the little red haired girl who would bring her beautiful leaves and art projects from school. I remember running into Mary and Grampa Fred's house, completely uninvited but completely welcome, in search of the peanuts I knew they always had.

My parents told me of the time that a transformer exploded right outside the house and they couldn't get out of the front gate, so they handed me (I was an infant) over the fence to Grampa Fred and Mary to keep me safe. They were the closed people I had to true grandparents, besides my maternal grandmother who has lost all her faculties at this point in time.

I miss Thanksgiving with my family in the old days. Mom and Dad and I would drive up to New Hampshire to my aunt's house and the whole family would be there. My four aunts and their husbands and my uncle and his wife, my eleven cousins and their spouses and their children, and my grandmother if she could make it. There was a kids table, where I sat until I was twelve years old, and then Thanksgiving stopped being a family tradition and I never got to sit with the adults (SUPER upset about that aspect of this whole shenanigan). And then the family drifted apart, and now we are lucky if we see each other sporadically in the span of a year. We all live up and down the East Coast, from New Hampshire and Vermont to North Carolina, Virgina and Florida.

I just want to hold my Mom and Dad's hands and walk into the warm mud room of my aunts house, being greeted by warm smiles and hugs and kisses that make your cheeks raw and red, hugs and kisses that you dread until they are long gone and then you want nothing more in the world than to be hugged and kissed by your family and your neighbors who you can never see again. I'm not a little girl anymore, I can't take my parents in each hand and walk into the bright kitchen and ask my aunt for a glass of tap water and head down the hill to the trampoline with my cousins. I can't get out of the little red Horizon and watch Turbo scamper across the street and greet me with a wagging tail. I can only see those things in my memory, a memory that I cherish so much these days.

I love and miss you all, my family and long lost friends. You made me who I am today, all of you. Happy Thanksgiving, wherever you are.