~a column by Colleen O’Brien
Hopeful ideas for Thanksgiving get-togethers are fading. Invisible coronaviruses are running rampant across the country – total deaths as of last weekend? Two-hundred and fifty-one thousand, two-hundred and sixty-eight souls. A few governors are now clamping down, closing schools and bars, talking about mandatory masks and social distancing, even cancelling sports.
So, even small clan gatherings for our favorite holiday – well, at least the favorite of adults, because it means a delicious dinner with pie, family stories, football games, not having to buy presents or hide Easter eggs or come up with Halloween costumes.
The looming holiday without friends and family fills me with nostalgia – I’m refusing the sadness; it would be too much to get over, so I’m not going there. But I think of the days of old when we invited everybody we knew who had no family around, or who had to go to work that night, or who didn’t know how to cook. I think one year we mustered 24 guests, but usually it was around 18 to 20. I roasted the stuffed turkey and made the gravy. Everyone else brought their specialties. Or wine – lots of wine from those bachelors. My favorite guest dish was the potatoes mashed with garlic, sour cream and a pound of butter; complete heaven that I’ve never been able to duplicate.
As the years went on, the bachelors brought girlfriends; soon it was wives. And then of course babies who by the next Thanksgiving were kids running down the hall. The little mob of children were corralled by our older children and one youngster more mature than her years who loved to organize games for the little ones. Hide-and-seek was one of their favorites, and I remember being startled by one 6-year-old when I grabbed a coat off the hall tree to run outdoors and help an older woman get in the house…and there, standing suddenly revealed, was my grandson. His eyes narrowed at my exposing his hiding place, and he slipped to the other side of the hall tree and disappeared under a different coat. I admire his ingenuity to this day.
I have one friend who never goes anywhere, so I asked if she was willing to come over for the holiday next week. She said she could, so she and I will constitute the celebration. I asked her if she wanted turkey or steaks. She doesn’t care. My dilemma is willfully introducing the scent of Thanksgiving into my house, the anticipation of all those smells involved in the work it takes to make a turkey dinner…for a crowd of two. I’m thinking that if I’m going to have to break tradition, I better go all the way – T-bones for the two of us.
I’ve talked to friends and family across the country, and Thanksgiving is a worrisome point to most of them – no home-alones so far, but plenty of husbands and wives without kids and grands. A few close neighbors – usually singles – will be sharing a table. Many are just ordering in a dinner from a restaurant. The idea appeals to me also – if I can’t have a crowd, surely I can spend that money on somebody else roasting the turkey and delivering it to me. Or maybe I’ll opt for fettuccini Alfredo.
This entire 2020 will go down in history as the curse of “interesting times” – unusual, heartbreaking, catastrophic. I’m hoping it’s not the harbinger of the same kind of years to come, except for the kindness we’ve shown to one another this past year – the helping hands and handouts, the money donated not to politicians but to out-of-work folks, fetching groceries and medicines for housebound older folks, offering kid-watching to essential workers. Kindness predominates in a world of hurt, whether the hurt comes from elected leaders or a virus loose across the globe.
By the time Thanksgiving is come and gone next week, we will have given in to the inevitable and dined alone or tete a tete; maybe we’ll have four people spread out on the deck or around a table built for 12. We’re learning just another way of doing what must be done in a world that even before this version of it was hardly a guarantee.
Change is the only permanent. Truth is variable, we’ve learned. And we either despair or hope, even when we set aside a day for thanks. And we eat. Something to be thankful for right there, at least for most of us.
