Zoë Georgakis

One of my favorite things about meeting a friend’s family members is seeing all of their similarities. When you’re young, this isn’t really something you pay much attention to: you know your friends’ siblings and their parents from the start. But when you go to college, you become intimately familiar with people whose other lives you know nothing about. Eventually you meet brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers and you get to see a more complete picture of those lives. The strange tastes suddenly aren’t so strange, the idiosyncrasies suddenly aren’t so idiosyncratic. 

This is all fine and good until you start to think about your own family members and how similar you are to them. I often order the same thing as my dad at restaurants. My friends joke at my love of popcorn, but it pales in comparison to my brother’s. My sister and I have nearly identical tastes in television.

Because of typical generational differences, I don’t have much in common with my grandmother. But there are a few minor things that make me think of her daily. First, we use the same hand lotion; it’s nothing fancy, just unscented Neutrogena, but I’ve never seen anyone else carry it around with them the way we do. The other thing is the way we knit straight rows: purling the last stitch and then slipping it on the next row. One time when I was knitting she pointed this out to me; I had no idea she was the one who taught my mom this trick, who in turn taught it to me. 

Both my mother and grandmother have birthdays later this month, and even though I won’t see them today, I am so excited to celebrate such tremendous milestones with them! (60 and 90!)