Home for the Holiday
by John Saward
Upper West Side; night before Thanksgiving; here’s a cousin I haven’t seen in many years, and there is some ache in having let things wither like that, letting it go on so long, all those plotlines of our lives rising and falling without sorrow or celebration. But then, through a crosswalk on 72nd Street as a sudden chilling rain starts to fall, and her kids look just like her, in the all-terrain two-seat stroller that is so weightless and smooth-steering you will want to have a conversation about it, about the advancements in rubber technology, and the cousin will remember the time you both were coming back from Rye Playland, mid-’90s, her bear of a father driving, built like a University of Iowa middle linebacker, she will remember it exactly like you did, your little-kid feet drumming into the back of her dad’s seat and now he’s had it up to here, This car is an Infiniti! This is the Q45!, him grabbing your little ankle with his beefy paw wrapped around it like you were a bottle of beer, the two of you howling, and in this, the This is the Q45! you have actually been hanging out back there together a good long while.
Keep us breathing fire!
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