Dimon Kendrick-Holmes: Not a bad place to be

This past Thanksgiving, I was happy to be me.

I mean, I was happy to be neither young nor old, and to be the only person at the dinner table who'd ever heard of a "firenado."

Let me explain.

This year, we spent Thanksgiving in a log cabin in West Tennessee with about 30 members of Bess' family.

Yes, it was a massive log cabin.

As we talked and ate and listened to a portion of the people play bluegrass, I was grateful not to be a young person.

The young people ranged in age from 13 to 21, and they spent the bulk of their time trying to answer difficult questions from everybody else about what they were going to do and be.

A couple of decades earlier, I'd been in the same place, attempting to convince Bess' father that I could support his daughter and future grandchildren without a medical degree.

Now those kids and their cousins were on the hot seat.

The boy who wanted to be a welder and the girl who wanted to be an entertainer on a cruise ship had the most explaining to do. The boy who wanted to be a lawyer and the girl who wanted to be a first-grade teacher had the least explaining to do.

(For the record, the kids doing the least explaining belonged to Bess and me. The kids doing the most belonged to Bess' identical twin sister.)

I had no explaining to do. Here's an actual Thanksgiving conversation about my career choice:

Them: "How's the newspaper business?"

Me: "Great!"

Them: "Really? You need another drink?"

I was also grateful not to be an old person. By old, I mean a grandparent or a great-grandparent.

By old, I mean somebody who has wisdom to impart.

At Thanksgiving, the old people were the ones talking like they personally knew the founding fathers. They were also the ones making the rules.

These rules included flushing the toilet (great rule!), combing your hair (not bad!) and not reading (huh?).

That last rule was established when an old person told a young person to put away his electronic device, and the young person replied that he was reading a novel, and then the old person told everybody to stop reading.

I just kept on reading my book, an open act of rebellion considering it was one of the 1,000-page volumes in Shelby Foote's Civil War trilogy. But nobody noticed me because at these gatherings I'm just a supporting player -- I'm not old enough to have done everything or young enough to be about to do something.

At some point, though, people like me -- the ones in the middle -- should step up and contribute something for the greater good.

Boy, was I ready.

After dinner, during a lull in conversation, an old person asked me what I knew. And that's when I regaled young and old alike with the wonders of the firenado.

Several days before, I'd been in Columbus and asked a guy behind the counter at Kickin' Chicken why the price of a handle of Jim Beam had suddenly jumped two bucks.

He suspected it had something to do with the firenado, which is what happens when lightning strikes a Jim Beam distillery warehouse in Kentucky and 800,000 gallons of fiery booze spills into a retention pond and the wind conditions are just right to create a funnel cloud.

Fire plus tornado, I explained, equals firenado.

I even brandished my illegal electronic device and showed everybody aerial video footage from the Weather Channel.

It wasn't the greatest thing anyone ever said or did at Thanksgiving, but it wasn't bad for somebody in my place in the family.

You know, stuck in the middle. It's a great place to be.

Dimon Kendrick-Holmes, executive editor, dkholmes@ledger-enquirer.com.

This story was originally published December 4, 2015 at 10:18 PM with the headline "Dimon Kendrick-Holmes: Not a bad place to be ."