Giving Thanks

For twenty-seven of the past thirty years, I have cooked a traditional Thanksgiving meal for someone; twenty-two of those years for my family in Rhode Island. But even after I moved to South Carolina I continued to cook turkey, mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie introducing some of my new Southern friends to a traditional holiday side dish, French-Canadian meat stuffing. This recipe, with a few variations also comprises the filling for tortieres, the French-Canadian Christmas Eve meat pies.

 

My first turkey was cooked for my then soon-to-be-husband. We had just moved into our first apartment and he was changing the lock on the door (from the outside). As the turkey cooked, I sat in our new living room watching “Start the Revolution Without Me,” starring Donald Sutherland and Gene Wilder. I laughed and laughed, not paying any attention to the hammering and banging going on outside the apartment. After a long while, I heard a noise at the living room window. I got up and looked outside and there he was, tossing rocks at the window and shouting to me to open the door! Turned out that the banging wasn’t normal installing-a-new-lock banging but, I’ve-locked-myself-out-and-want-to-come-in banging!

 

The most difficult Thanksgiving was the one immediately following my father’s death. His absence created a huge space, but no one talked about him. It was as if everyone thought that if we didn’t speak of him, we wouldn’t be in pain. Human beings can be so foolishly wrong. There we were, without the man who had always been there; the one whom to us, had been larger than life; the one we loved more than any other and we were pretending as if he had never existed. At some point, I realized that the only way to ease some of the pain of that day was to talk about him.  I lit a candle and put it in the window. My son asked what I was doing. I told him that I was lighting a candle for Pepere. As we sat down to dinner and ate, I invited my father into the room. “Remember when he……?” And then it began. All the memories spilled out from all of us and we were, I think, better that day because of them.

 

It has been my custom the past few years to make a list of those things for which I am grateful. A bit cliché, I know. But here they are…those things in my life for which I whisper a tentative “thank you” to whomever or whatever is listening:

 

• For a family who loves me in spite of myself
• For a home that feels like home.
• For winters without snow.
• For living a mere three minute's drive from the Atlantic Ocean.
• For having more fun at my work than anyone has a right to (except for the grading papers part).
• For music that enriches my life beyond measure.
• For music stores that have sidewalk sales and sell old vinyls for 25 cents.
• For poetry and good books that contain sentences so perfect I read them over and over again.
• For planes that fly to NY and bring me to my children.
• For stars so beautiful, I want to learn the constellations.
• For lazy Saturday mornings accompanied by coffee and last Sunday’s NY Times crossword puzzle.
• For good meals and good conversation shared with friends.
• For yummy bottles of wine.
• For singer-guitarists who call me up to the mic to sing Joni tunes with them.
• For cowboy boots bought at 60% off at a shoe store in SoHo.
• For golden angel snow globes that play “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” when I crank them up.
• For a gorgeous four-poster, hand-carved, mahogany rice bed with clean white sheets into which I slip at days’ end.
• For life, which brings one damn gift  after another….