Eight of the last ten years since moving east for college, George and his family have invited me to their home to celebrate Thanksgiving in the Poconos, since I wasn’t about to trek to Alaska for a four-day weekend a month before going home for Christmas. It’s time to move on, though, and this year, I’ll be growing up and spending the holiday with Aimee and her family in Newport. It was a year ago that I first talked to George about proposing to Aimee, and since then, he’s turned 30 (sorry, man), I’ve gotten engaged, and judging from last week’s “Last Call with Carson Daly” appearance, where he serenaded “The Boss” with “Hold me closer, Tony Danza…” Marty is a full-fledged rock star. So it’s time to move on. This is not meant to sound as though I’m unhappy to be joining Aimee’s family, but more like an appreciation for a wonderful tradition of kindness that I’ve been happy to be a part of.
As Thanksgiving in the Poconos became a tradition (and by the way, who’s the astute webmaster who nabbed “thisweek.net” for a site about the Poconos? Nice work!), I even began to become one of the familiar faces each year for George’s extended family. I could act as a buffer between conversations, or a go-to guy to avoid a generational political “discussion” by telling a funny anecdote about the children of the wealthy or life in the dot-com world. I saw new people join the family, I hung out with exchange students and high school friends, watched George sell clothes at the outlet mall, and got to know the back roads of the Poconos well enough to find my way around at night. We’d sleep in, watch football, go out to lunch with George Sr. at the Barley Creek Brewing Company, and of course, watch the worst movie we could find at the Foxmoor or the Stroud Mall theaters. Past gems from this holiday tradition include Star Trek: Generations (“Time is the fire in which we burn!”), The World is Not Enough (“I’ve always wanted to have Christmas in Turkey”), Enemy of the State (“In guerrilla warfare they taught us to use our weaknesses as strengths”), Spy Game (“Don’t ever risk your life for an asset. If it comes down to you or them… send flowers”), and Timeline (“There’s one thing worse than dying here, and that’s living here”). That’s perhaps the part I’ll miss the most; George and I will have to trade notes on just how absurd National Treasure is next week.
