Jive Turkey
The worst Thanksgivings are occasionally the best.
Piglet noticed that even though he had a Very Small Heart, it could hold a rather large amount of Gratitude.
—A.A. Milne
Thanksgiving is, for me, a no-doubt, second deck, steroid-assisted dinger of a holiday. The best of the lot. Nothing against gift-giving, but the sheer magnitude of Christmas gift obligations is so great that I can never meet it and always wind up feeling guilty, plus it ensures that the entire month of December is passed in a fizz of deadline-oriented panic supplemented by sustained contact with the most crass face of American consumerism. To say nothing of the demolition of my finances. All of the patriotic holidays—Memorial Day, Independence Day, Veterans Day—are fine, but how much does one enjoy Memorial Day rather than merely observing it? Same for Martin Luther King Day. Labor Day is a good one for me since it generally encompasses my birthday, but how good can a holiday be when it merely revolves around the fact that you’re older? New Year’s Day is a reminder that you’re older and have to go back to work soon. Easter involves way too much church. Halloween isn’t bad insofar as it places a premium on candy and doesn’t shy away from drinking, but my main thought when wearing a costume is something along the lines of How soon do I get to take this thing off?
That leaves Thanksgiving, a holiday devoted to being thankful, which I am, and eating, which I do, in quantity. I have family members that enjoy cooking—which is great because I really don’t—so I generally contribute by fixing things around the house. Thanksgiving doesn’t require weeks of planning, it’s usually at least a four day vacation, and it’s a chance to see the family. What’s not to like?
So like many of us I look forward to it every year. And like many of us, my 2020 Thanksgiving is going to be weirdly attenuated. [1] That’s bad, but I still look forward to it, and I have a feeling it’s one I’ll remember. I can conjure in my imagination the general sensation of Thanksgiving and I can picture everyone around the table, but honestly I can’t say I can pick out specific memories of great Thanksgivings past. The Thanksgivings I remember best are the ones that were unusual and occasionally unpleasant.
Leaning toward the unusual end of that spectrum was Thanksgiving 2001, the year my wife Katherine and I celebrated the holiday with a couple friends in Boston in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, when we were still leery of getting on a plane. It was the only Thanksgiving we’ve ever celebrated where we weren’t with other family, until this year. We had a small kitchen and a pretty weak selection of cooking gear, so there was a lot of improvisation and balancing of dishes full of food in precarious places while we rearranged for whatever the next step was. We did have silver and nice dishes, all of which were wedding presents and rarely used. Some of it might have seen the light of day for the only time in our lives together, before or since.
I remember Thanksgiving at my sister’s house, which is not at all unusual since we did this for years (and was certainly never unpleasant), but there was the one year my cousin’s dad came. My sister Ashley arranged three tables end to end and threw a cloth over the whole assemblage. We were crammed into her small house like cocktail weenies—she and her husband John; Katherine and I plus our kids Sailor and Satchel; my mom [2]; my aunt Susan; my cousin Doug and his dad Randy. Randy had left his wife and Doug’s half-brother behind in Tucson to come celebrate Thanksgiving with us, which was delightful but a little strange. He’d suffered from a terminal health issue for probably fifteen years in spite of a prognosis that gave him ten, so there was some speculation that he’d come to say goodbye. We ate and watched O Brother Where Art Thou. Randy flew back to Tucson a day or two later and has gone on living another ten years and counting. I suppose he just wanted to see us.
My sister is definitely the best cook in the family these days, but my grandma could whomp up a storm in the kitchen. She always cooked like she expected an army of farm hands to come through the door at any moment. I remember some of her dishes—her chicken and dumplings were a standout, and I have half a mind to try to reproduce her lemon bars this coming Thursday—but I don’t think I could put my mental finger on any single Thanksgiving meal. The one occasion that does stand out does so only because I made something called Indian bread, a flavorless brown bread from a kids’ recipe book, and she spent half the afternoon loudly praising my staggering preternatural baking talent—a talent which, truth be told, never really panned out. Panned out! Get it?!
Anyway, I guess it’s true that all happy families are alike, because the good Thanksgivings like this are just a vague substrate in my memory.
Correspondingly, my worst Thanksgiving is burned into my mind. Not that it was that terrible; it was just very notably not a Thanksgiving in any sense I recognized. This was probably long about 1992, while I was in college. I worked in Nashville as a dishwasher at Ruby Tuesdays on weekends and summers, and as it happened, this particular day. I walked over to my grandma’s house and wolfed down what little food was ready to go at about 11:30am so that I could get to work by noon. I worked a twelve-hour shift that day, doing endless prep for the anticipated Black Friday crowd. As the lowliest guy in the kitchen I got the worst prep jobs—slicing blocks of cheese the size of artillery shells, scraping the guts out of hundreds of innocent potato skins, filling ranks of hungry ketchup bottles. Pure shit work. And of course I had to wash every goddamn thing—not as many plates and glasses since the restaurant was closed on Thanksgiving, but lots of pots and pans, which are worse.
One of the things we did that day was to prepare a vast, toothsome Thanksgiving feast. We labored on it all day on it and it contained the works—a colossal turkey, a quantity of dressing sufficient to mulch the entire lawn at The Hermitage, a vat of collard greens soaking in bacon grease, a mountain of garlic mashed potatoes with an actual cartoon-scent ribbon rising from its cratered surface to wend its serpentine way across the kitchen and into my nose, and of course cranberry sauce—the real stuff, not the wobbly ruby cylinders with the can’s corrugation etched onto its surface. All of this had been prepared with quality ingredients purchased from an upscale grocer rather than being shipped frozen to be unloaded by the ton from the back of a dirty truck.
Around eight o’clock, all, as in every scrap, of this mouthwatering meal was shifted from the kitchen to the dining room, where all the managers ate it. Leftovers were bagged and sent home with them. All we saw were the dirty plates, which I cleaned.
Dinner for us kitchen staff consisted of mozzarella sticks purloined from the freezer and fried on the lowdown, to be eaten from an empty sink and covered with a bowl between bites.
I remember that Thanksgiving like it was yesterday.
So that was a bad Thanksgiving, though bad is a relative term here. Nobody died. I got paid time and a half and was presumably free to fritter all that extra money a couple weeks later. We may have been formally excluded from the fancy dinner we made for the managerial staff, but we goddamn well stole a lot of it. And I got a memory and a story out of the whole tamale.
I don’t intend to use this space to excoriate you for not being thankful enough, because we all have our own row to hoe, and I don’t know but what yours is a cornucopia of horrors. Our duty at Thanksgiving is two-fold: be good to each other, in the spirit of which I give you this brief(er) essay; and be thankful, which I am. I’m thankful to have a paycheck and a place to live. My family are all healthy and safe at least for the moment. I have access to this crazy worldwide network which enables me to communicate with friends and family in spite of the ongoing pandemic. The violence I expected to erupt from the November 3rd elections has not. At least not yet. A vaccine is coming. Today is a beautiful day—the sky is blue and the neighborhood is, if not harmonious, at least silent save for the distant thrum of an air compressor and the attendant tattoo of a nail gun. Sounds of growth and perseverance, if you want to be generous, though I do wish they’d cut it out.
And of course I’m thankful for all of you, friends and strangers alike, for reading what I’ve been laying down. I’m not entirely clear to me where it’s all coming from, and I do hope it keeps coming, but to this point it’s been a lot of fun, and that can’t be undone by anything the future holds. Cheers y’all, and have a delightful Thanksgiving.
[1] On top of the weirdness we all share, a repairman just came to check out our broken oven and told us a) it’s broken, and b) it will be two weeks before he can fix it. Stove Top stuffing, here we come.
[2] Lora, in the interest of parallelism.