I've been thinking about Thanksgiving.
I was about ten years old on the first family Thanksgiving I remember. On this occasion my mother, three of her siblings and their families – numbering over twenty – rented the banquet room at a Hollywood hotel that could accommodate all of us, not the kind of luxury our working-class families often indulged in.
We were dressed in our Sunday best, men with frayed collars and wide ties, women in faded festive dresses, like all the boys I had on a tight-fitting jacket and a clip-on bow tie, while the girls wore taffeta and Mary Janes – each of us equally uncomfortable. My mother’s father, an unemployed and therefore embittered Baptist minister loomed over our clan like the patriarch he once but no longer was. To pander to him, he was invited to say grace before we were served.
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And this is why I remember that meal. His prayer went on for several minutes and was more of a sermon about the greatness of America, the wonder of our family, and meditations on three or four of his oft-recited Biblical admonitions – Pride goeth before a fall; Weeping may last for a night, but joy cometh in the morning; He leadeth me in paths of righteousness for His name’s sake.
I glanced at my lapsed-Catholic impatient father, his eyes wide open, shaking his head and clucking FaChriSake under his breath; across the table my eleven-year-old cousin Lyn, my best friend at the time, stifling his laugh with his hand pressed over his mouth. My grandfather’s long-awaited Amen was echoed by a loud and grateful group Amen, the joy that cometh on this holiday afternoon.
There is a certain irony in the fact that I followed my grandfather into the Christian ministry, though as a Presbyterian and not a Baptist. His foul mood had driven my mother and her five siblings out of the church by the time they reached adulthood, so I never attended a worship service or a Sunday school class until I was ten years old.
That year my parents sold the only house they ever tried to buy and moved into a huge old stucco two story house in Hollywood: my parents, their five children, my aunt and uncle and their two babies, an unhoused family friend and my grandfather. The house was surrounded by the buildings of the First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood, which at that time was the largest Presbyterian church in the world and soon became my sanctuary from the chaos at home: too many people, too little money, too much alcohol.
First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood, August 1964
After school I slipped out the back gate into the church gym and played basketball with older kids until I could hear my father hollering for me to get home for dinner, which I scarfed down to the din of the mealtime tumult, and again slipped away to the gym. Over the next decade, the church nurtured me, celebrated and enhanced my ability to speak comfortably and creatively in front of a crowd, trained me to be a leader, and gave me a faith and a set of values that still are the bedrock of my character.
Though there were probably millions of families who were as complex and confusing as mine, the popular vision of an ideal American Thanksgiving dinner was already well established, and it looked nothing like our day at the hotel or an ordinary holiday dinner at home.
In 1943, two years after I was born, Norman Rockwell painted a Thanksgiving scene he titled Freedom from Want as a cover for The Saturday Evening Post. Over the next two decades this picture became the iconic representation of the American fantasy of Thanksgiving: three generations of a white family with a patriarch and matriarch at the head of the perfectly set table, each person properly dressed, smiling and engaged in animated conversation. The models for this painting were Rockwell’s Vermont family and friends, and the woman serving is Rockwell’s family cook. The table itself, with its silver serving dishes, stalks of celery, a bowl of fruit, and of course a monstrous turkey, represents the abundance of America.
Since this picture is so unlike my family’s gathering in the hotel or any subsequent gathering of our extended family, I wonder what is NOT being shown in this gathering. Is one of the men out of work and reliant on his parents to feed his family? Are the dark-haired woman and/or the friend she’s leaning across the table to talk with enmeshed in an affair? Does the smiling little girl next to Grandpa have a learning disorder? Surely someone is pissed off at a sister or brother-in-law or, heaven forbid, at the autocratic patriarch.
The likelihood of these complicated family circumstances makes more difficult the always troubling feelings of obligation that arise around Thanksgiving. Complaints begin as we’re getting ready or while we’re driving to the gathering place. Do I have to go? Do I have to talk with Aunt Louise? Is your brother bringing his kids and that young girl he’s been dating? Let’s stay only through dinner ’cause I’d like to see the end of the Dallas/Detroit football game.
And then there’s the perpetual anxiety about Uncle Fred, who’s become more of a curmudgeon each year since his divorce a decade ago. Everyone knows he’s had two stiff drinks before he arrives, he’s got a bottle of something under his car seat which he takes a slug from each time he steps outside for a cigarette, and he pours each glass of table wine to the brim, all the while lying in wait until the moment he can humiliate one of the children and drive them crying from the table. If not Uncle Fred, then whomever in your family fills that chair.
Why do we put up with this year after year? Why don’t we take him off the invitation list, or escort him to his car before he ruins yet another gathering? Over the past several decades, I know of only two occasions when I've escorted that particular holiday’s Uncle Fred to the curb and stuffed him into a taxi. On both occasions they were beloved members of the tightly knit gathering, and on both occasions they became obnoxious, one because of alcohol and the other for having forgotten to take their meds. It was the right thing to do both times, but in following years they were back again because, well, you know, we’re family and everyone gets a place at the table.
The expectations that these obligations might lead to various levels of open combat is why, when we finally gather at the table, the first thing Mom or Grandma says is Can’t we just have a nice meal together? Hope endures!
For Becky and me, Thanksgiving has recently taken an unexpected turn. In 2019, she and I returned to Pasadena on the day before Thanksgiving from what we imagine is our final trip overseas: two weeks in Salzburg, Budapest, Prague, Vienna, and a final week with friends in Berlin.
We knew that our grown children and their families had plans to be with their other grandparents, so late on Thanksgiving afternoon we showed up without reservations at our favorite restaurant, sat at the bar as we usually do (the two of us spend so many meals one-on-one at home that we, and Becky especially, like to mingle with the bartenders and diners seated next to us), and had a traditional Thanksgiving dinner – as our parents called it, turkey with all the fixin’s.
This is now our holiday tradition, so a few days from now we’ll once more be seated at our favorite corner of the bar. Becky will catch up with the bartenders about their love lives and family situations, the owner/chef will come by to say Welcome back, and we'll check in with our friends at the bar next to us while our families dine elsewhere.
