Thanksgiving Memory (for class)

Here's a piece I wrote yesterday for the Sarah Lawrence Writing Institute class with Cindy Beer-Fouhy

 

One turkey pardoning another, circa 1970

THANKSGIVING

 

 

My biggest thanks every Thanksgiving for the past three decades is that I am no longer required to have the meal with members of my family of origin.  This year I enjoyed a Friendsgiving hosted by Dr. Amy Harper, my friend and a professor of anthropology who studies foodways. Sadly, I was without my former companion at her meals, dead now since last Boxing Day.  Nevertheless, I enjoyed Amy’s theme for this year: an indigenous feast, complete with smoked turkey and rice-stuffed squash.  And it was fun seeing folks I hadn’t visited with since last year.

 

In my distant youth, when family was the center of the holiday, Thanksgiving was often fraught, especially after the two older girls were grown up.  One Example: picture if you will, a large rectangular, maplewood table, covered with a fine white tablecloth and set with china and silver.  Six high-backed straight chairs with carved legs matching those of the table have been joined by a piano bench because the two older girls of the four-child family are now married and the husbands have been invited.  Or rather summoned.

 

The room is heated by the large square furnace outlet between the living and dining rooms that, combined, make up the east side of the house.  It’s the only furnace outlet in this house built in 1896.  Over the years electric baseboard heaters were added in some rooms. My mom remodeled the old place and now the flow-through dining and living areas look like an upscale 19^th Century whorehouse, with red carpet and red, gold, and cream flocked wall paper.  In ordinary times, the room hosts the dining table without its leaves, an antique couch and side table, a piano, and a large console television set.  Above the TV is a three-foot high black and white drawing of teenage Jesus teaching in the temple in Luke’s version of the Gospel.

 

My mental picture of this late 60s Thanksgiving dinner has eight of us around the table: my folks, my 6^th grade sister, my high school freshman self, and our two older sisters and their husbands.  I have probably been eating so much that I’m a little sick and wobbly.  My younger sister may be avoiding as much food as possible.  There’s probably been the turkey, dressing, gravy, potatoes, green beans, pie and complaining about the dryness of the turkey from its chef, my mother.

 

My strongest memory of that meal is desperately wanting to escape the table while also desperately wanting to eat.  My flight or feast mechanism.  Intense familial disagreement triggered my flight response.  My sister Sally’s husband, Adrian, was a bearded Catholic socialist hippy.  My sister Maja’s husband, Don, was a somewhat more conservative Green Beret, on leave from Fort Brag.  Late into the consumption of food and alcohol, an argument, probably about politics, erupted.  My Mom and sister Sally kept trying to ignore the emotions with conversation changers:  “Would you please pass the sweet potatoes?” “Have you had a chance to see the movie downtown?”  But nothing worked.   I could sense what I considered the “real” existential tensions beneath the superficial argument about national politics and they frightened me.

 

I don’t have a story with a beginning, middle and end for this memory.  Just a silent, cinematic mental image of Dad, a centrist Humphrey Democrat, raising his voice over what I now suspect were Adrian’s left-wing support of Clean Eugene McCarthy and Don’s militarist support of Republican Richard Nixon, just elected president. Dad, red faced, spittle on his lips, pounding the table, insisting that he had the right to be right in his own house.

 

And me, shrinking inside myself, hungering to put more and more flavor on top of an already full stomach.

 

One of my therapists, the one who’s going to sit with me during the ketamine treatments, suggested I picture a happy memory rather than the one I just shared. But most of my happy memories of Thanksgivings make me sad right now.  Because they were spent with my true home, the home I found in the person of my beloved, now materially gone forever.

 

And I have to just fucking get used to that.

 

So thank God for Amy, an agnostic, and her tradition of Friendsgiving.  She gave me the opportunity to create new holiday memories, which will now always be just a little bit blue.

 

Cue Elvis.