At the local Applebee's

 

Granny’s birthday was big, if limited to five guests and herself,

a hundred years and counting. There was Uncle Jack, her son of eighty years, 

and me, age sixty; my cousin’s kid Mathilde who joked last month, “now at forty,

where’s that hill you say I’m over?” Then my kid named Xandy, half her age,

and a baby sort of everybody claimed, now being raised by Uncle Jack (the story

being too intricate to rabbit-hole right now). Granny raised a toast:

 

“To all my DNA, and even you—” she tipped her cup to Xandy, who

had been adopted by my wife and me for struggles with fertility. Granny smiled

with wizened eyes: “you are reasons not to die.”

 

We laughed at that (Jack and me, at least) and toasted back the road

rise up to meet you kinda shite. Mathilde, though, was shifting in her seat:

“reasons yet to live, how ’bout? We’re in the thick of courting World War III,

with litmus tests and loyalties to no one but the corporate king.

Granny, you survived those dicks; tell us how to cock-block ours the same.”

 

“Whoa, whoa,” interjected Jack. “The baby shouldn’t hear profanity like that!”

 

Xandy, who had grown up awfully fast through memes and snaps and chat,

weighed in: “depends on definitions not for you to set. We don’t know

their point of view on any signals yet.”

 

“Their?” asked Granny, “aren’t we referencing young Salvadore?”

[as the baby’s mom spelled out in shaky script upon her doorstep note].

 

“Or Sally,” said their aunt, “or a question mark, like the artist labelled ‘Prince’—”

 

“—Rogers Nelson, to be exact, then whittled down to ‘Prince’;

then, for seven years, a symbol that defied an alphabet. Pretty rad,”

I thought to add, “coming from a Boomer, after all.”

 

“And how do you identify?” provoked Mathilde, “as Generation X to answer

for this mess?” She smirked at me, of course, but threw a glance at Uncle Jack.

 

“I am literally a bridge between the Cold War and its consequence. 

The use of landline phones against the ethos of the internet. 

The paperboy going house-to-house in deference to echoes of a cubicle. 

The need to know beyond a Google search—”

 

“And mansplain everything,” said Jack, surprisingly, as if I’d taken him aback.

Xandy nodded; Granny laughed; Mathilde stood up to check on Baby S.

And I reflected on that bridge—not literal at all, it seemed, at least for now.

 

Daniel Martin Vold Lamken (2025)