"I am grateful for what I am and have. My thanksgiving is perpetual."
"Thanksgiving dinners take eighteen hours to prepare. They are consumed in twelve minutes. Half-times take twelve minutes. This is not coincidence."
Shuffling around a little more slowly than usual today, this Tuesday before Thanksgiving. I'm never a ball of fire this truncated week, doing as little substantive, billable work as I can get away with, catching up on continuing ed, and falling into my annual reverie about all those Thanksgivings that came before.
We always did Thanksgiving big in our house growing up. Mom was no cook, but Dad was a restauranteur, so between the two of them the spread was impressive. We rarely lived near family back then, moving every year for Dad's work, so some years it was just the four of us. For two Thanksgiving holidays we were in southern California, right down the road from my grandparents, and gathered the tribe there.
But most years our table was ringed with the lost souls from Dad's office, a motley assortment of the sorts of people who often end up in the restaurant industry. There was Mr. Kroenicke, a lispy, mustachioed dandy of a fellow whose sexual orientation these days would not have been in doubt, but homosexuality hadn't been invented yet. Likewise Mr. Rust, Dad's boss who was a little more on the alpha male side of that lifestyle group. And cranky, croaky, chain smoking Miss Strelka represented the sensible shoes contingent. All funny as hell, irreverent and a little loud.
Come to think of it, we sure had a lot of gay folks at the house those gray November Thursdays. And my father a Nixon Republican. Go figure.
But not all were of that orientation. There was also glamorous Jean St. John, blonde and beehived and slender in her Jackie O wardrobe. I think she ended up being Katie's godmother somehow.
Of course the house was filled with cigarette smoke along with laughter and the smell of cooking turkey and the tinkling of hiball glasses. I'm pretty sure every one of them is dead now, over fifty years since those scenes faded into oblivion.
I guess my most memorable Thanksgiving, except maybe the feast in the chow hall in Dhahran during Desert Shield, came in 1978. We had been living in Richardson, Texas for nearly a year, Dad working all the time (as usual) in his new gig as division manager of the lower Midwest for Howard Johnson's. As it turned out, his absences weren't entirely vocational, as my mother learned a couple days before Thanksgiving when Dad's secretary, now my stepmother, called Mom and spilled the beans about their relationship that began right around the time we moved there. As was and is customary, Dad was invited to take his stuff and go find somewhere else to live. It was a distressing time, seeing Mom so visibly upset despite the fact that the two of them never really got along. Maybe both fantasized about moving on into another, better life without the other. Now here it was.
At which point Mom declared her low back had gone out, and retired to the master bedroom to lie propped on a pile of pillows. I remember thinking, being raised a sexist and only now working through all of that with the loving cajoling of P, that this was some sort of feminine hysteria. Then Mom underwent something like eight spinal fusions over the next few decades, and it dawned on me that her back really had let her down that week.
So Thanksgiving Day rolled around, the Macy's parade on the television with the promise of a bad Detroit Lions football game midday. Katie was eleven and, being trained by Mom, had no idea what to do in a kitchen. There was no such thing in 1978 as driving to the Kroger and picking up a pre-cooked feast. Mom had bought all the fixings for dinner the weekend before the bad news arrived, but now she was in no shape to cook anything. What to do?
At fourteen, I'd always enjoyed crafting things in the kitchen. I invented the "Grape Julius" one year and tried to get Dad to start selling them at his Whataburger stores. That didn't go far. Another time I cooked the family lasagna, but failed to boil the pasta beforehand. Edible, but not optimum.
I may not have been the perfect choice to save Thanksgiving dinner, but I was manifestly the only choice unless Mom answered the phone as Dad repeatedly called asking to come home, but that wasn't going to happen, ever. So by ten or so it was time to get to work.
I laid out the daunting array of uncooked delights and kitchen implements on the counter, and tried to figure out a sequence for all of this. In later years I'd write out a Thanksgiving checklist by hand a couple days before, editing as I remembered something from past iterations of this once-a-year event. The turkey hit the oven first. Then I found the sweet potatoes and, stuffing them with butter and brown sugar and wrapping them in foil, popped them in next to the turkey. Sometime later I assembled the green bean casserole out of canned french cut green beans, Campbell's mushroom soup concentrate, and Durkee's canned fried onions (Peg's probably throwing up into her mouth a little as she reads this). Finally, there was the Stove Top brand boxed stuffing, Pillsbury canned crescent rolls, and gelatinous blob of canned cranberry sauce (this was my mother's menu, after all).
With every step, I'd peer around the corner from the kitchen to the master bedroom to ask Mom for advice about whatever was boiling over or starting to smoke. She gave commands like a dying Wolfe on the Plains of Abraham, achieving a great victory for this rump of a family in her moment of extreme infirmity.
By three or so it was done. But Mom couldn't leave her bed--she tried to sit up, but the pain dropped her back onto the pillow. So Katie and I spread a tablecloth over the bedspread, made three plates, and we feasted there in the dimly lit bedroom. I recall even lighting a candle or two to make it all "fancy". No one got food poisoning, so overall the meal was a success.
In later years I was always insistent that I would fix the Thanksgiving meal, marking that weird, grim, pivotal day in our lives like some Jewish holiday celebrating some milestone on their walk that generally involved getting kicked around by their neighbors. Folks thought I was being maudlin or gloomy; in fact, I loved the memory of doing something useful, of the first day of being the man of the house, not by choice but because there was no one else around to do it. These days I'm perfectly happy to let Pam do the cooking at the Reeve feast. My contribution, such as it is, involves me and Steve, another lucky soul who's married into this tribe, doing the dishes and telling airplane stories (he's another old military aviator, and a great guy).
Speaking of aviation, it seems like every hour the forecast for the Northeast this week gets a little froggier. They're calling for mixed precip here in Corning this afternoon, with the threat of ice and snow right up until just before we leave to fly over to Boston. It'll be fine, we'll make the big dinner one way or another, even if it's in the car. Looking forward to being a part of that tradition again, and making more memories.
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