what? no sweet potatoes?

discussing plans for thanksgiving with my mom recently, i was surprised at some of the dishes on the menu, and shocked at some of the omissions. it didn't even occur to me to inquire about the menu earlier; it was the one i had grown up with, so no need to ask, right?

oh, how wrong i was, and the error wholly one of my memory. all those years on my own, planning and preparing thanksgiving dinner for my husband and i, i felt secure in the knowledge of which dishes were family traditions and which were personal innovations. the reality is that i had conflated several holiday menus, serving forth a mish-mash cobbled together from a child's imperfect recollections.

it's not a crisis. the dishes that end up on the holiday table are immaterial to the true enjoyment of the occasion (we even dabbled with lasagne there for awhile), but it's curious to run headlong into the fraility of one's own memory. how much of what i recall actually happened in that fashion, and how much is the reconstructed story i have told myself all these long years?

we each live in our own fairytale, and see the world around us in terms unique to our own inner languages. we each speak to ourselves in a dialect strange and unusual to others. never assume you understand the other. you may be mistranslating their word for sweater with your word for chicken, or thinking you will be eating cranberry sauce when all that will be on the table is a cranberry jello salad.

but how wonderful to think one can be a tourist without even packing a bag, just by listening closely to the conversation of one's companions, just by comparing memories of shared events. we can each of us be an adventure to the other, and each of us an ambassador.