Earlier this week my amazing friends M and V hosted a dinner party.

After the requisite catching up (which took quite a while, as the five of us in attendance hadn't been together in months), and over many bottles of Reisling (me and M) and cab (the others), and after swooning over the amazing meal M made for us (note the cannabilized cheese tray in the second picture), somehow I got to telling stories about my grandmother, Dottie.

I'm writing a story for a local beach magazine and I needed some fodder, so one day over the holidays I interviewed Dottie. It's funny how little we actually know family members even just one generation removed; I know the basics of her life, mostly, but as she sat there one late afternoon, recounting adventures I'd never imagined, I was flummoxed at how much I didn't know about her.

I was laughing as I told some of her funny stories at the dinner party, but I was mostly proud: I come from her, in part, and now her stories are part of my stories, which in turn are now part of my friends' stories; hopefully, probably, they will remember them too, set to a backdrop of wine and organic chicken and a kitchen table in Williamsburg.

Just this morning, I told M that I was "sending Light around her," which is what the characters in Atwood's The Year of the Flood say, and I think it's so lovely and represenative of how I often do think of people I care about, even though Atwood was probably making some sort of sociological comment on the lives of those characters who used that terminology (I'm only midway through the book so I can't say for sure yet, but by the way, HOLY AMAZING BOOK, PEGGY), and I'm only saying all of this because I love M and V and the rest of the dinner party, so it seemed to fit.

*Shout-out to V for giving me the title of this blog entry. She was talking about Dominos Pizza and their new ad campaign. Relatedly, she is a pizza fanatic.