Under the Raydar — 12/2/10

One thing that always comes into clarity when I am home for Thanksgiving is that vivid line between being a child and being an adult. This distinction is always reinforced due to the fact that, in my family, one is only allowed to graduate from the “kids” table upon marriage, so it becomes a strange emerging-adulthood limbo land in which my older cousins and I drink wine and get tipsy while listening to our little cousins tell us about songs they’ve made up, baseball, magic,and Hello Kitty.

I have always detested the rank of a “kid” at that table, until this year.

Over the break, my aunts, cousins and I went out to brunch with two of my three-year-old cousins, who wore dresses, smiles and glittery shoes. When they marched across our tiny lawn, lined with a rusted fence and dead flowers, one gasped, “What a beautiful place!”

The other smiled and said, “Today is just going to be the best day!”

After piling everyone into a minivan, we pulled up to the kitschy diner, Koffee Korner. It’s a narrow building with a clutter of round tables. My aunt waltzed in and began ordering the waitress around, asking her to move the tables this way and that way so to fit us all in just the right arrangement, and as the waitress and I rearranged and re-rearranged, nothing seemed right.

“I guess this’ll just have to do,” my aunt finally sighed as the waitress brushed off her hands.

As we sat down, embarrassed, my sister murmured, “Let’s never grow up to be like that.”

Over the course of brunch, the cutlery was not clean enough, the window shouldn’t have been open and the food took too long — according to my aunt. According to my little cousins, the muffins were the best, the spoon was an instrument and nothing was more exciting than the idea of braiding our hair later.

Now, I know that my particularly grouchy and picky aunt is an extreme example of how an adult can behave (and this simplified retelling neglects the tantrum my cousin had on the way to the diner), but the variations in conversation between the adult table and the kid table — at whichever tables we occupied over break — made me feel thankful to be stuck at one.

Instead of revolving conversation around what was going wrong with the world, my cousins reminded me that sometimes we possess the ability to forget the world and create our own.

In The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry writes about how grownups love figures, how they love order and qualifications and monetary worth, how they see things in a way judged by the exterior and forget the magic of seeing things with the heart. My aunt saw a room full of clutter and dirty silverware, when moments before, instead of seeing a rusted fence and an untamed garden, my cousin saw something beautiful. Saint-Exupéry writes: “If you were to say to the grown-ups: ‘I saw a beautiful house made of rosy brick, with geraniums in the windows and doves on the roof,’ they would not be able to get an idea of that house at all. You have to say to them: ‘I saw a house that cost $20,000.’ Then they would exclaim: ‘Oh, what a pretty house that is!’”

Thanksgiving has reminded me to keep looking for the beautiful things that are so simply apparent to the not-yet-adult eye. I want to be able to wake up and decide that this is going to be the best day just because in my world, it can be, without weighing in all of the factors in my planner or my over-assessing perspective. I’m fine with sitting at the kid’s table for a while longer, where a dirty spoon is an instrument instead of a mistake.