Approaching Thanksgiving

Holidays are coming. My son David comes to celebrate Thanksgiving with me. I’m thrilled and grateful to him for leaving wife and children in California to spend the holiday with his aged mother.

My brother Don will meet David at DFW on Tuesday evening; then on Wednesday, Mary and Don will drive up to Oklahoma for Thanksgiving with her relatives.

My friend Sally invited David and me to have Thanksgiving dinner with her family. Every day, not just at Thanksgiving, I am thankful for this friend and for others who, in difficult times in my life, provided comfort.

Sally and I have been friends since high school. Hers is a true “only in America” story.

Sally came from a Pennsylvania German family. Her grandfather was a doctor. Her mother studied Latin and archeology at Bryn Mawr, read Montaigne’s essays in the original French, and met Sally’s biological father, later a famous research scientist, when he was a medical student at the University of Pennsylvania. It was at their house that I first picked up from the coffee table and read The Atlantic and the New Yorker.

The family came to Texas during World War II, when Sally’s stepfather, Lt. Commander Charles Hastings, was in command of the Navy’s air station in Fort Worth. After the war Sally stayed in Texas to graduate from Paschal High School and to go to college with me at Texas State College for Women.

Sally dropped out of college to marry Hugh Pegues, whose family, like mine, has been in Texas “since the days of the Republic.” She was a Democrat; he was a Republican. She was high church Episcopalian; he was Church of Christ. They had five children and were still skinny dipping together when he died, just before their 60th wedding anniversary.

Their children and grandchildren are totally Texan. The great sorrow was losing their son Alan to a brain tumor when he was only 52. His two sons are now in college, one at Rice and the other at nearby North Texas University in Denton. I don’t know if they will be with us for dinner on Thursday.

Now 82-years-old and a widow, Sally raises prize beef cattle on the farm near Decatur. Daughters Amy and Cece live nearby and help with the farm, as does son Guy. The third daughter, Sara, is flying in from Maryland for Thanksgiving. It should be quite a party. Amy wants to cook the turkey with cornbread stuffing – the kind her Texan grandmother made.

On Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving, David and I will go to the Kimball Museum in Fort Worth to meet Emma Hill, another friend since college, . We’ll have lunch, see the Caravaggio exhibit, and take time to sit and talk.

Speaking of art (Kimball and Caravaggio) I will detour from my travel blogs to write about art. Then I promise to get back on tour with my discovery of Tilman Riemenschneider (that's spelled correctly)in Wurzburg, Germany.