Sit Silent and Watch
by Dave Donelson
We gather for our family holiday feast, the young folks and a few oldsters like our hostess, my wife, and me. The young family members, the nieces and nephews and their mates and companions, arrive late in their tasty Teslas, parking behind and blocking in my tasteless Toyota. No one notices when I start to protest, so I find a seat to sit silent and watch.
At the appointed time, we gather around the oval table, alternating young couple, old couple, as if our hostess hopes we will connect across the years. The potatoes steam, the succotash gleams, I want to break into “To grandmother’s house we go,” but one look around the table at the young eyes glued to their screens tells me that would be a mistake, so I sit silent and watch.
The holiday turkey glistens. The son-in-law wields the carving knife with swagger and panache, just the way I used to. I lean forward to critique, but my wife pulls me back before I interrupt the ceremony. She doesn’t have to tell me; that’s not my job anymore, so I sit silent and watch.
The oldest niece chatters next to me, fretting over her career path and her struggle up the glorious corporate ladder. I could offer decades of experience, lessons learned, give her a path to starting her own company and building it to multi-million-dollar heights, but that would be boasting, and I know she doesn’t want to hear it, so I sit silent and watch.
Someone passes me their phone, showing me a winning influencer—whatever that is. I stare at it without comprehension of its relevance to real life, then my wife nudges me to pass it along. It was meant for the oldest niece, not me. I twiddle my thumbs while they indulge their tweet and tik-tok obsessions. I live in my own world, the real one, as I sit silent and watch.
Dave Donelson is a freelance writer and artist with some three million words in print. In addition to publishing in numerous periodicals and journals, Dave is the author and illustrator of 20 books of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and memoir. An overview of his work can be found at www.davedonelson.com.
Table Talk, watercolor with pen on paper, 6×6 inches, 24 January, 2023. Click image to enlarge.