We Gather Together.

Since Daughter was born, my family has spent every Thanksgiving having a picnic on the beach. We do this for a number of reasons, the most relevant being that we’re a little strange. This year it rained the day before Thanksgiving but the day itself was clear and windy. Within minutes of arriving, Daughter found a girl exactly her age playing on the beach with her father, both of them staying out of their house so that her infant brother could nap. Daughter and this girl quickly discovered common passions for doing cartwheels and squealing at algae and her father and Consort had been in the same business in the past, so the four of them spent the better part of the afternoon down by the water, talking and frolicking. I didn’t mind, as this gave me plenty of time to read, eat the stinky blue cheese that only I like and glare threateningly at the seagulls who were trying to annex our sandwiches.

I usually don’t start ideas by saying “There are two kinds of people…”, because the only logical answer is “Yes, Quinn. There are two kinds of people. Lazy people who begin thoughts that way, and people who actually put some reflection into what they’re writing.” But, here goes. There are two kinds of kids: Stay and Go. Let me explain.

As a parent, one of the things you learn about your child as they grow is whether or not they are temperamentally inclined to be near you or not. Stays go to college nearby; they arrange to work in the city in which they grew up; their idea of heaven would be to buy their childhood house from their parents and live there forever. Go people might love their family dearly, but they’re born wearing walking shoes. College is chosen at least partially because it’s as unlike home as possible and graduate school or the first job is three time zones beyond college. The Go person dreams of filled passports and inoculations against exotic diseases. A Go would see the predictability of the Stay life as something akin to being buried alive.

I know this is overly simplistic. Most people’s lives are a combination of choices they make and choices made for them. Someone inclined to travel might spend his entire life living at home town taking care of a relative. Someone who longs for the comfort of her first home might fall in love with someone in the military and never live anywhere longer than two years. But as I was cooking up this theory, I started quizzing friends about whether they thought their kids were Stay or Go. It was fun how definitively the mother would answer the question.

“My daughter will go, but she’ll come back and visit. My son will stay, because he likes clean laundry more than autonomy.”

“My two older kids will be around. My baby would go to boarding school for second grade if I let her.”

One friend sighed of her adult daughter, “Oh, she thinks she’s a Go, but she’s a Stay, and I’ve got the guest room to prove it.”

I rarely talk about Daughter’s personality quirks, because it’s her personality and not my trove of writing material, but I will tell you this. My daughter will go. She will go away to college, and then she will go further than that. When she calls us, my first question won’t be “How are you?” but “What day is it there?” She has been wired since birth to stare outwards and plan adventures. I don’t take it any more personally than I take her wavy hair or her thin feet -- two other traits she didn’t get from me. I lived at home until I was 21. Until I was thirty I never lived farther than five miles from the house in which I grew up, then I moved to San Francisco for three months and came right back to Los Angeles. I am SUCH a Stay.

At the beach, I watched Daughter frolic with her new friend and I thought about the time when she won’t be with us on Thanksgiving because she’ll be in some part of the world with no word for “Turkey” or “Green bean casserole.” And then I thought about the bloodbath in Mumbai. On the first day of the siege, the criminals had taken hostages, looking specifically for people with British or American passports. Mumbai is the economic heart of India, so it’s safe to say that some of those British or American hostages were there for work, and perhaps some of them had sighed in dismay when they were posted there by their companies, preferring the comforts of home. But some of those hostages were in Mumbai because their souls had been whispering “Go” for as long as they could remember, and India was where their journey had taken them. Then again, before I start wishing Daughter were the kind to stay around her parents, I’d best remember that there were victims who were residents of Mumbai, killed in their own city. Homebodies live in the same dangerous world that adventurers do.

Right now, I have Daughter near enough to touch. Right now, if she’s going somewhere she still has to get my permission. Right now, everyone in the extended family is reasonably healthy. Right now, there are no nasty reviews on Amazon of my book. Right now I don’t have a copy of the quarterly report on my mutual fund. If I start thinking about the millions of right nows that might be ahead of me, and all the myriad ways they can go wrong, I get dizzy and I get frightened. So this year, I’m thankful for right now and I’m going to try to live in it as much as I can.


The sun had nearly set and the temperature was dropping fast. It was time to leave the beach. I packed up the food, throwing three Brussels Sprouts to the gulls for the pleasure of watching them squabble, and I walked over to my family.

“It’s time to go,” I said softly to Consort, but Daughter heard me. Enamored with her new friend and the beach, she wailed, “But I don’t want to go!”

I said, “Yeah, I don’t want to go, either. But it’s time.”

We said our goodbyes to the other family and, holding hands, walked back to the car to go home.