I did not grow up enjoying Thanksgiving

I did not grow up enjoying Thanksgiving. It was a tense time and my father and my mother always managed to have a huge fight. I hated some of the traditional foods—sweet potatoes with marshmallows turned my stomach. To this day I do not enjoy creamed onions. The turkey was always dry. Etc. But it wasn’t the food I resented but the tension and the commandment to put on a nicey face for company no matter what shouting march had occurred up to the minute they arrived. While I was in college, at first I came home and worked the long distance board at Michigan Bell, a split shift that meant blessed leftovers late in the evening when I took the bus back. The last two years, I stayed put in Ann Arbor. Once I had run out of money and food and my best friend Eric was supposed to loan me money before he went home to Detroit, but he forgot. Four days I lived on first a stew of whatever I could scrounge in the mark-down bin at the super market, then watered, then finally just flour and water. When I was married to Michel, the French don’t celebrate Thanksgiving so I was given a reprieve. Between marriages, I was too poor to give a damn. With Robert, the early years we went to his family which was mostly just dull. However, his mother was a decent cook and the food was pleasant. After we moved to Cape Cod, we began to have Thanksgiving with friends. Robert felt a turkey was too common, so I roasted a goose according to a complicated Julia Child recipe he found acceptable. One memorable holiday, he was annoyed I had invited a friend with children. In anger, he used the electric knife carelessly and cut a finger almost off. Dinner stopped with a visit to the emergency ward. It was some months before his finger and the nerves were successfully reattached. It was, of course, my fault. With Woody, we went on having a feast with friends. We continued with goose for a number of years, I’m not sure why. I do like goose, but I also like turkey very much. Julia Child’s elaborate recipe was forgotten. Goose got too expensive and we switched to turkey. Finally we got tired of all the work. Friends came, ate and vanished. We had spent two days cooking, cleaning and now had the dishes and pots and glassware. The last straw was the year the invited poets talked among themselves and ignored us. I realized I had become grandma, although I am, frankly, a much better poet than any of them. Fortunately we began having the holiday with Lois and Ramon, who have a far bigger house than we do and a much bigger table. They do much of the work – the turkey, stuffing, etc. Every one of the guests makes part of the meal. This year I made apple-cranberry sauce [my own invention], rum pumpkin pie and Woody made a salad. We had made gravlax earlier in the week and brought that as an hors d’oeuvre. It felt very warm and wonderful – nobody I wasn’t happy to see and talk with and great food, if way too much. Even the dogs were well behaved and Bunny appreciated the little pieces of gravlax I slipped to her under the table. She curled up next to me, and if she were a cat, she would have purred.