A Grandmother invites a Thanksgiving dinner stranger during pandemic, but the stranger may not be a stranger anymore.
It was an accidental text that 17 year old Jamal Hinton received from Wanda Dench back in 2016.
Hinton in class at the time and was confused that someone claiming to be his grandma had texted him. She sent a smiling selfie of herself at work. She wasn’t his grandma, but he asked if he could still have a plate.
“Of course you can,” she replied. “That’s what grandmas do … feed everyone!”
Hinton accepted the invite, and the two immediately became friends. Eventually, he and his girlfriend began going on regular double dates with Dench and Lonnie.
“It all has to do with this feeling. There’s just this connection. It feels like we’ve known each other in past lives,” Dench said. “There’s absolutely no generational gap between us. The conversation just flows, we never run out of things to talk about.”
As awkward as some may think it would be having a Thanksgiving Dinner Stranger it turned out to be a feats of fun.
“Whenever we met, we would spend four or five hours, just talking and talking. It was never awkward, Wanda and Lonnie became two close best friends to me,” Hinton said.
“There’s nothing about her that is mean, or uncaring. It feels like I have told her my whole life story, and she always listens and shares her own story. She’s just the most loving person. She’s pretty much perfect.”
The friends recently celebrated their fifth dinner together despite the pandemic. This time it was even more meaningful as Lonnie, the husband of Wanda Dench passes away from Covid April 2020.
Hinton’s memories of him are no different.
“Lonnie was never the quiet guy. Right when I walked in the door the first time I met him, he didn’t even reach out for a handshake. He just immediately pulled me in for a hug,” Hinton said. “He was the kind of guy to always bring your hopes up whenever you felt down. Losing him was losing a best friend.”
“I wasn’t looking forward to it at first because Lonnie wasn’t going to be there. The past seven months have been so difficult, but this was really important to me,” Dench, 63, told CNN.
“I can’t even explain how much joy I had, having good food with my favorite company. We laughed, we had a great time, we reminisced about the past. It was so good for all of us.”
Thanksgiving Dinner Stranger
