Just as the summer of '69 echoed across the changing American landscape, the Thanksgiving of 1969 served as a snapshot, for many of us, of the changes going on in our own families, and forced on us an awakening to the grownup world for which we were not quite ready.

It was my last year at the kids' table, for a lot of reasons.

Family Thanksgiving celebrations were an annual rite of passage as I grew up. We'd travel to the gathering of the Burkes in lower Alabama with an anticipation near unto Christmas. It was guaranteed that my grandmothers and aunts would, to a person, say, "Well I declare! You've grown a foot!" even if we hadn't, and cousins and uncles would all greet us with hugs and handshakes and ruffled hair. "Lord, son, is that what they call a Beatle haircut?"

My mother would bring in whatever dishes and desserts she'd prepared, and added them to the already groaning buffet table. I remember taking a pass through to get a good whiff of the dinner lineup - the turkeys, hams, dressings, sweet potatoes, deviled eggs, casseroles, cornbread and all those desserts - that were waiting for us. Then the mothers would chase us out and the kids would go find whatever mischief we could with our cousins, which was considerable.

The menfolk would sit around outside and smoke if the weather was good, catch up on football and sing the praises of Bear Bryant or Shug Jordan. The senior uncles, I'd often noticed, slipped envelopes in the pockets of other family members during this time. This year, I remember noticing for the first time that there were tears in the eyes of a cousin as he thanked my Dad for his "Christmas card," and it dawned on my teenaged brain that the Christmas cards were full of cash that the Burkes who had it, quietly gave it to whoever in the family was struggling at the time. I remember feeling stupid, then proud.

The changes in the world made this year different for us at the teens' table. My older cousin Larry was a Marine who had just come home from Viet Nam, and we knew he belonged at the grown-ups table now. Looking into his eyes, we saw that Larry had crossed a great gulf into manhood in a terrible way, so terrible he couldn't talk about it. He could talk about his platoon buddies and the puppy they adopted, and the rain and the people, but not about what made that hollow look in his gaze.

Another new thing was hitting our family. Divorce was an ugly word that was only whispered in the '60s, a scary thing that was rare in our circle, but a thing that was now apparently looming close to home. The impending breakup of an aunt's marriage was the hot topic of murmured conversations in the kitchen that Thanksgiving of 1969, and the empty seats at the table showed that it could happen to folks like us, too.

At dinner time, the crowd of Burkes was so large that we had to be seated in three groups: the grownups at the big tables, the kids at card tables nearby, and a separate table for us teenagers. We realized that Thanksgiving that we were seeing the terrible face of the real world in this momentous year, and it scared us. Part of us longed for the simplicity of the little kids' table, where the biggest problem was deciding between apple pie and cherry pie, and part of us longed to race ahead to adulthood no matter what the cost.

So now, 40 years later, we're all the heads of our own Thanksgiving tables, parents and grandparents with growing broods of our own. We still help each other with Christmas cards, and we still welcome our boys home from war, and we still see marriages die slow deaths. The more things change, the more they remain the same.

For that reason, have both the apple pie and the cherry pie.