Dinner Conversation

The ex and I got invited to the same Thanksgiving dinner this year.  I'm going, and he's not, but it doesn't really matter at this point; we're fine with one another, so it wouldn't have been a big deal. It might even have been fun -- reminiscent, even, of our first Thanksgiving as a married couple -- and not in a romantic way but a hilarious one.  That year, the eccentric old artist we'd bribed into being our elopement witness (bribed with alcohol -- it had been late enough in the morning by his standards) -- had invited us to Thanksgiving dinner.  The dinner was being held at his ex-wife's apartment and included not only her but a bunch of his screaming, yelling batcrap-crazy old friends whom he'd grown up with in Coney Island.  It was an experience.  Political conversations with lots of one person interrupting the other and a loving "shut up" interjected ever so often.

I guess you could say that it was the kind of divorce we would have aspired to.  And, in some ways, the one we got.

When Steven and I had first started splitting up, one thing I found hurtful was the fact that he saw our commonalities -- the things that had, in part, brought us together as friends and eventually more -- as sudden liabilities.  Because I remembered afternoons when my siblings and I would raid the refrigerator for ways of creating new types of condiment sandwiches (with the only "food" that was sometimes left at the end of the month) -- and because he remembered how he and his sister probably could have died of a Flintstone's vitamins overdose after munching down several handfuls of those things to ease a sweet tooth because their stomachs were growling -- we in some ways understood each other. Because each of us had fought our ways all the way to master's degrees but still just couldn't seem to get ahead, we had some common causes, one could say.

But that also meant, he pointed out, that we had the same bitterness and rage, deep down, against the world.  Our bitterness only exacerbated the other's, he told me; we didn't know how to keep each other in check. 

I don't know that I ever came to agree with him on that, but at this point that hardly matters.

I want to tie this up with a clean, neat ending somehow -- with what? "You live and learn" or something of the kind?  But I guess the things we truly learn in life are never so cut-and-dry, are never really simple prescriptions for future choices -- what to do vs. what not to do. Our experiences are all a little bit like that  Thanksgiving table back in 2002:  a mixture of laughter and curse words;  people you'll see again and  people who will just be passing through --  men and women whose names or even faces you won't remember; a table full of potluck dishes we appreciated but forgot to even unwrap.  A carcass all but picked clean.  A feeling of at least having moved beyond desperate hunger.