Being Together

Just because you’re sitting next to people at the dinner table doesn’t mean you’re actually close to them.

Take for instance my memory of the first time my wife Joy and I shared Thanksgiving dinner with my father, his wife, and his in-laws from that marriage.

Joy and I had tied the knot three years earlier. We were living in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. She taught in a social services program at nearby Edgecomb Tech. I held a position on the North Carolina Wesleyan faculty.

We dutifully if unenthusiastically drove the five and half hours to tiny Louisville, Georgia. Louisville’s quiet Main Street offered no diversions from what we imagined would be an immersion experience in family dysfunction.

Thanksgiving arrived. Eight of us gathered around a six-person table jammed into one side of an already cramped living room. My father, his wife, her sister, her sister’s husband, their two adult…