Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving Day. I hope this is a happy time for you.

Robert, our handyman, took me to dialysis yesterday. As we drove along Northwest Highway he told me he was debating whether to have dinner at his mother’s house here in Garland or to go with his wife to her mother’s in Arlington. He tries to watch his weight and does not want to overeat. I told him, “Go to both places and eat dinner in each of them.”

Sometimes family harmony is more important than any diet.

I’ve forgotten more Thanksgivings than I can remember. Some happy, some not so happy. None of them have been exactly like a Norman Rockwell painting.

Once, alone in Albuquerque, I took a Banquet frozen meal out of the refrigerator and heated it in the microwave. The sliced turkey was as thin as the paper in my copier. And nothing on television but football games. I thought about the big turkeys I baked for Thanksgiving when my children were little. Those were good times.

The next year I came to Texas for Thanksgiving with my brother Don and his wife Mary. I’ll be going to their house again today for a feast. Mary’s sister and nieces will bring cornbread dressing and green bean casserole. She said I didn’t need to bring a thing, just come and eat.

My son David says all he remembers from his first trip to Texas as a child, to visit my parents, was, “The biggest table I ever saw in my life.”

When I was a child, my family always went to my grandmother’s for Thanksgiving and Christmas. The oak dining table seated twelve, but my brothers and I always ended up eating in the kitchen. I was in college when my parents bought the house from my cousins. I knew I was grown up when I sat next to my father at the big table.

My Thanksgiving will be complete later today when I’ll drive to DFW Airport to meet David, now 45 years old, married, living in California, and father of two young children. The joy of having him here makes me realize what it meant to my parents when I brought my children from Chicago or Detroit, or wherever we were living, to be with them for even a little while.

I hope you feast with family today, and, if not, I hope you can be thankful for happy memories.