Lunch with an Ancestor

This week I spent a few days in Cooperstown, where my mother grew up, and her father and grandfather before her.  The house doesn't look the same. The big maple trees in the front yard are gone and everything looks smaller than it did when I was a child. 

My grandmother, Sara Meeneghan Coleman, died when I was ten. She was the only grandparent that I knew. I don't have any memories of her eating in a restaurant, except possibly having lunch at the counter at Newberry's, and bringing home a goldfish. They sold them in those white boxes that Chinese take-out comes in now, and they still makes me think of goldfish. Gram cooked family dinners that were shared at the big table in their kitchen. We visited often on weekends, holidays and in the summer.

Spending time in a place where I have many memories makes me think how I would have loved to have the opportunity to take her out to lunch and talk to her as an adult about her experiences. Questions that I am trying to coax out of documents, she could have answered off hand. We would have many new restaurants to choose from: diners to trendy coffee shops, pizza parlors to organic boutiques. Where she might have chatted with her friends at a church event, or over coffee in her kitchen, I often use lunch at a restaurant to meet and get all the news from my friends. I am sure I will make lunch dates to treat my own grandchildren someday.  I wish I could have lunch today with my grandmother, but as she used to say, "If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride."