Thanksgiving

My memories of Thanksgivings past are varied and vivid. Growing up, we would always go over to my grandmother's house for Thanksgiving. It was over the river and through the woods to grandmother's house we go.

We used little place cards with cheesy Thanksgiving clip art to indicate where each person was sitting at the table. As a kid, I found this curious because our family was so small. I didn't think our Thanksgiving dinner actually warranted using place cards - we weren't that many people. Even as a kid, to me, place cards seemed to be reserved for huge dinner parties with dozens of guests.

Thanksgiving was the only time of year when these place cards were brought out. One year, my ever frugal grandmother brought out the place cards from the previous year and used them again. Later on, I realized this was just the beginning, and I grew to expect my grandmother to reuse anything and everything possible.

Thanksgiving is essentially a holiday characterized by an overabundance of food. At my grandmother's house, there would be three pies in the kitchen: apple, pumpkin, and pecan. I thought this was surprising. It seemed like Thanksgiving was the one holiday when it was normal to purposely have five times too much food for one afternoon meal.

All the pies were great, but at the end of the day, who needs three pies at one meal? Unless you have a gigantic family gathering together - that would be fun. I think Thanksgiving is really meant for large groups of people. That is a party. With a small group, you may just as well be having dinner together any old day.

We were always a small family, and as the years went by, we became an even smaller extended family. Alas, divorces do not mix well with Thanksgiving, and fewer people means more concentrated interaction with those present.

It is odd that Thanksgiving is a holiday that has no music of its own. I suppose a lot of holidays are like that, though. Valentine's Day has no special music unless you consider the Rogers and Hart standard "My Funny Valentine" or the other thirty thousand songs written about love and romance. There are a few hymns about Thanksgiving and being thankful for the harvest and so forth, but that is about it. There is probably no other music associated with Thanksgiving because the holiday is so short - it is always celebrated on the day of and after that day, it's over, and the Christmas music starts!

One Thanksgiving in the '90s, my Mom and I left home to drive over to my grandmother's house. My Dad and my brother were there already. I was in the passenger front seat, and my Mom was driving the car. This was before I got a drivers license. It was raining, and the road was slick. We were one minute away from home when a car in front of us stopped to turn, and we stopped. A guy driving a small sporty car came flying over the hill behind us and crashed into the back of our Explorer.

His car was totaled - the entire front end of the car was literally crumpled, like an accordion. He and his passenger both survived and were fine. They were less than a mile from their destination - he said they were running late, which is why he was speeding. Our Explorer was pushed forward from the force of his car and had a ding in the back bumper. We were uninjured but thoroughly shaken up.

On the phone, my grandmother wanted to know why we were no longer coming over. She perceived everything as being perfectly fine. We were okay, but getting into any kind of car crash zaps your energy instantly. My mother said it was a bad omen so we canceled the trip over to my grandmother's house that Thanksgiving day. We went back home, and my Mom made Indian Pudding for our Thanksgiving dinner.

Later on, we celebrated Thanksgiving one year with just my grandmother and my uncle. We thought it would be fun to have them over to Block Island and have Thanksgiving there for a change of scene. That day, my grandmother and my uncle each took turns talking - talking to anyone who was in the room, and talking about anything and everything with no logical sense or real flow of conversation. It was two people alternating monologues continuously. This lasted for eight solid hours and gave new meaning to the words: migraine headache.

In addition to this, my uncle and my grandmother both kept saying how cold it was inside the house, so the heat was repeatedly turned up. The house eventually felt like a sauna. The rest of us had to go outside to avoid spontaneous combustion. At the end of the day, all I was wishing for was silence so I could rest my brain and to sleep with the windows open.

One Thanksgiving was a different sort of logistical nightmare. The details are hazy, but it involved making a trip over to Block Island and then coming back to the mainland. On Block Island, home baked pies were for sale as a fund-raiser for the school, so I bought an apple pie to bring back to Connecticut with me.

I took the ferry to the mainland only to find that I had left one of my college textbooks in a friend's car on Block Island, and I needed the book for an upcoming exam I was taking. Back home, I brought everything from the car inside the house and left the kitchen unattended for a while. When I returned, our precocious black Labrador, Jazz, had swiped the apple pie off the kitchen counter and devoured it.

On another Thanksgiving Day, our yellow Labrador, Shadow, was dying. She had been sick for some time but was on medication and for a while, the medication seemed to help. Eventually, Shadow became more and more ill, and she died on Thanksgiving. That was heartbreaking.

I played piano for a couple of hours at a family gathering that afternoon in someone's apartment in Boston overlooking Boston Common. Before leaving for the gig, I spent a lot of time with Shadow. When I got back home, she was still with us but was very weak. I lay back down on the kitchen floor with her and said goodbye one last time. It is so heart wrenching to even think about this. She was an incredibly sweet and loyal Lab. I later wrote a song and titled it "Song for Shadow."

On Thanksgiving, people say what they are thankful for, they eat a lot, and sometimes watch football or the Thanksgiving Day parade on TV. I simply hope to get through the day without any unexpected events happening and with my sanity intact.

Happy Thanksgiving!