Thanksgivening stories

Fire up that Bird!

It was Thanksgiving Day in the early 1990's, and we were living in a small ranch home at the Jersey shore with our three girls. I had cleaned and stuffed the turkey, and was waiting for the small wall oven to preheat to the desired temperature. Mentioning to my husband that I thought the turkey he purchased was a bit too large for our oven; he insisted everything would be fine. I began vacuuming and putting away toys, as we were expecting family for dinner later that afternoon. The oven timer buzzed and my husband said he would put the turkey in the oven for me.

I went into the kitchen to check on the turkey a short time later, ready to give the bird it's first basting. Opening the oven door, I noticed that the turkey took up every inch of the small space. I called to my husband and informed him that in order for the turkey to properly cook, it needed some air flow around the bird. Again, he insisted it would be fine. I don't think he was prepared to eat those words!

About an hour later, I was startled by the sound of the smoke alarm and a burning smell permeated the house. I ran into the kitchen to see flames shooting out of the closed oven door and licking up the cabinets towards the ceiling. I screamed and my husband came running in from the yard, where he had been playing ball with the girls. "Where is the fire extinguisher?" he yelled. As I grabbed the closet door handle I remembered, "We gave them to my uncle last month to recharge!" I yelled back.

I picked up the phone and began dialing. My husband was a local volunteer firefighter, so instead of calling 911, I contacted the firehouse directly. Sean, one of my husband's friends, answered. I told him our oven was on fire and we needed some help. Expecting he would come over with a fire extinguisher, I thanked him and hung up the phone. "Honey, I called the firehouse and Sean is coming over!" I shouted into the kitchen from the living room. "NO! Call him back, I put out the fire!" he replied. My husband dialed the firehouse to cancel the call, but he was told that Sean dispatched the entire department and four trucks were on the way! I cringed. . .this was going to be quite embarrassing.

Within a minute we could hear the sirens and rumbling engines of the firetrucks. They pulled up in front of the house, and over a dozen firefighters jumped off the trucks and ran towards the house. "Breach this wall, bust out the windows in the front!" were the commands bellowed out by the Chief as he laughed

A Modern Meal

I feel sorry for my father. His favorite holiday just passed, yet he hardly recognized it.

Thanksgiving has always been Dad's annual opportunity to enjoy a feast while surrounded by a loving family. However, for him, this tradition has changed in too many ways. Children and grandchildren still arrived early Thursday morning with hugs and kisses and the head of the house still enjoyed himself in many ways.

But in the back of his mind he knew.

Dad recognizes that the past is slipping away and the future brings with it uncertainty and fear.

"Tofu turkey!" he yelled when I arrived with my covered dish. "Are you out of your mind?"

Dad's concern is understandable. He may yell, but really he's just wondering, "Where did I go wrong?" The man has had a life-long relationship with dead animals and is now surrounded by fanatics who are trying to change all that.

My mom still served his stuffed bird, but he couldn't help feeling depressed when the rest of us turned away and requested a moment of silence. To him, vegetarians are as bad as liberals. And now he's related to several of both.

"Cheer up, dad," my sister told him. "This means more meat for you."

He tried to smile and focus on the positive. There is something funny about a boiling turkey neck forcing everyone in the house to breathe through their mouths.

However, my father's smile faded while watching children prepare a meal that is foreign to him. He always hopes for the familiar. Instead, a man who would never set foot in a health-food store has to accept some healthy yet hard choices. There's no talking to him about certain things. He ignores assurances that mashed potatoes don't have to include milk. He shrugs off organic apple pie and warnings that traditional desserts will kill him. We all must get used to the grumpiness. Even my children learn to think happy thoughts when Grandpa holds one of them hostage for old-fashioned gravy.

"And would it kill anyone in this family to buy butter?"

He didn't even get that old standby - cranberry sauce shaped like the can. One of his crazy kids served fresh cranberries and he's supposed to act appropriate?

I feel for him. I really do.

At the end of the meal, my father swore he was still hungry and sadly made his way to the television for beer and bonding. Dad convinced himself this last tradition still stands - women waiting on men watching football. When my brother passed out bottled water and grandchildren successfully pressured him into watching A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving - on DVD of course - he sighed the sigh of a defeated man.

The rest of us, male and female alike, gathered in the kitchen to clean up the feast. One of us tried to convince him that drying dishes can be fun, but Dad didn't listen.

He just sat quietly and thought up ways to avoid all of us until January

The Gangster, The Grandmother & The Amnesiac

Those who know my family, know that none of us are not really 'all there'. Just attempting to describe the various personalities would take a week! From the oldest to the youngest, we're never short on personality.

One of the highlights of this Thanksgiving was my grandmother coming down to visit. We literally had to bribe her with $$ to get her to visit, b/c she hates the Maryland area. She feels that if she visits that she'll be held hostage and won't be allowed to ever go back to NJ, b/c of all of the worrying we do because she's basically up there by herself now.

I can only take my grandmother in small doses. After a couple of hours, typically, I have to either leave the room she's in or just tell her to shut-up. The woman will talk your ears off with her complaining, nit-picking and about all of her ailments. This year, she couldn't stop talking about her close friend, Frank Lucas. Yeah, that Frank Lucas. Mr. American Gangster himself.

See, for the past 8 yrs, Frank Lucas has been my grandmother's next door neighbor. For the longest, I've heard stories about the man in apt. 703 of her senior citizens building. Every time I would go & visit her, Mr. Frank (is what she'd call him) would be sitting in front of the building in his wheel chair smoking a cigar. I'd always politely wave at him or give him a hug. When I had my son with him, he'd give him a $5 bill or a stick of gum. He seemed nice enough to me. I guess I never realized how much of a 'gangster' he really was back then, b/c of his present condition after the suffered a stroke a few years back.

Anyways, my grandmother wouldn't keep quiet about him. Frank this, Frank that. To make matters worst, she wouldn't shut up during the movie that my mother brought over. Now this is where I introduce the "Amnesiac" aka my Uncle Vinnie. The reason I call him the "Amnesiac" is because about 3 yrs ago, my uncle suffered a brain seizure which in return created a domino effect on a few other medical issues he's been dealing with, such as kidney failure (he got a new one a few months back) and a tumor on his brain that had to be removed. He's somewhat fully recovered BUT his memory is shot. If you've ever seen the movie, "50 First Dates" with Drew Barrymore & Adam Sandler, he's somewhat like her, but not as bad. Over the past year his memory has gotten alot better, but it's still blotchy in some areas.

Anyways, my uncle back in his 'hay-day', dabbled in drugs. His drugs of choice

We searched for the ghost of fifteen-year-old Constance Hopkins in the bowels of the reconstructed ship “Mayflower II,” rolling gently aside a pier in Plymouth harbor. Where volunteers dressed in period costume answered tourists’ questions, Constance had once huddled, miserably cold and damp, as fierce storms buffeted the ship.

“According to the usuall manner,” the old records relate, “many were afflicted with seasicknes.” As the ship had only the crudest of conveniences and no sanitary facilities of any kind except the traditional bucket, the air in the narrow, crowded quarters below deck must have been nauseating at worst and at best simply staggering.

Constance and her younger brother were responsible to keep track of their three-year-old sister who was always scampering among the various families camped side by side in the hold’s cargo compartments. It was all their mother could do, great with child, to brace herself as the “Mayflower” heaved in the heavy Atlantic storms. As Constance watched a tiny brother was born on the high seas, christened “Oceanus.”

Since the “Mayflower” had left England nine weeks behind schedule, the New World’s harsh weather threatened their very survival. The men went ashore in December to construct rude shelters; women and children spent the winter aboard ship anchored in the bay.

Winter took its toll. Journal entries feature the same melancholy theme week after week, for months on end:

“… Aboute noone, it began to raine … at night, it did freeze & snow … still the cold weather continued … very wet and rainy, with the greatest gusts of wind ever we saw … frost and foule weather hindered us much; this time of the yeare seldom could we worke half the week.”

That winter more than half the heads of households perished. Aboard ship only five of eighteen wives lived through the ravages of scurvy, pneumonia, and tuberculosis. An entry for March 24th reads:

“Dies Elizabeth, the wife of Mr. Edward Winslow. N.B. This month thirteen of our number die. And in three months past dies halfe our company … Of a hundred persons, scarce fifty remain, the living scarce able to bury the dead.”

My daughter Annie, a descendent of Constance, tried to imagine the terrors of that winter for a young teenage girl. When not lying sick herself, she would doubtless be tending whimpering children, preparing food for their stricken mothers, and comforting the increasing number of orphans aboard the “Mayflower.”

But spring finally came, and by the third week in March the weakened survivors rowed ashore in the longboat to take up residence in New Plimoth.

How could the Pilgrims talk about thanksgiving in the midst of life’s most difficult trials? we wonder. Why not just curse God and die? They gave thanks for God’s presence in their adversities because they knew that struggles did not have to make them bitter; struggles could make them better. These remaining Pilgrim daughters and sons, mothers and fathers, placed their trust in their God and laid the enduring foundations of a nation. Thanksgiving Day, 1621, did not just celebrate wild turkey and Indian corn; it celebrated the human spirit reaching out to God in gratitude for the blessings the Pilgrims still did possess.

“Yea, though they should lose their lives in this action,” ancient documents say, “yet they might have comforte in the same … All great & honourable actions are accompanied with great difficulties, and must be both enterprised and overcome with answerable courages.”

No, the Pilgrims did not lack for courage.

Our family poked around in a windswept burying yard until we found the tombstone of Constance Hopkins Snow, age 72 years. And as my wife and daughter laid a bunch of hedge row wildflowers on her grave, we stood for a moment of silence, meditating on our brave and very personal link with that first Thanksgiving.

We searched for the ghost of fifteen-year-old Constance Hopkins in the bowels of the reconstructed ship “Mayflower II,” rolling gently aside a pier in Plymouth harbor. Where volunteers dressed in period costume answered tourists’ questions, Constance had once huddled, miserably cold and damp, as fierce storms buffeted the ship.

“According to the usuall manner,” the old records relate, “many were afflicted with seasicknes.” As the ship had only the crudest of conveniences and no sanitary facilities of any kind except the traditional bucket, the air in the narrow, crowded quarters below deck must have been nauseating at worst and at best simply staggering.

Constance and her younger brother were responsible to keep track of their three-year-old sister who was always scampering among the various families camped side by side in the hold’s cargo compartments. It was all their mother could do, great with child, to brace herself as the “Mayflower” heaved in the heavy Atlantic storms. As Constance watched a tiny brother was born on the high seas, christened “Oceanus.”

Since the “Mayflower” had left England nine weeks behind schedule, the New World’s harsh weather threatened their very survival. The men went ashore in December to construct rude shelters; women and children spent the winter aboard ship anchored in the bay.

Winter took its toll. Journal entries feature the same melancholy theme week after week, for months on end:

“… Aboute noone, it began to raine … at night, it did freeze & snow … still the cold weather continued … very wet and rainy, with the greatest gusts of wind ever we saw … frost and foule weather hindered us much; this time of the yeare seldom could we worke half the week.”

That winter more than half the heads of households perished. Aboard ship only five of eighteen wives lived through the ravages of scurvy, pneumonia, and tuberculosis. An entry for March 24th reads:

“Dies Elizabeth, the wife of Mr. Edward Winslow. N.B. This month thirteen of our number die. And in three months past dies halfe our company … Of a hundred persons, scarce fifty remain, the living scarce able to bury the dead.”

My daughter Annie, a descendent of Constance, tried to imagine the terrors of that winter for a young teenage girl. When not lying sick herself, she would doubtless be tending whimpering children, preparing food for their stricken mothers, and comforting the increasing number of orphans aboard the “Mayflower.”

But spring finally came, and by the third week in March the weakened survivors rowed ashore in the longboat to take up residence in New Plimoth.

How could the Pilgrims talk about thanksgiving in the midst of life’s most difficult trials? we wonder. Why not just curse God and die? They gave thanks for God’s presence in their adversities because they knew that struggles did not have to make them bitter; struggles could make them better. These remaining Pilgrim daughters and sons, mothers and fathers, placed their trust in their God and laid the enduring foundations of a nation. Thanksgiving Day, 1621, did not just celebrate wild turkey and Indian corn; it celebrated the human spirit reaching out to God in gratitude for the blessings the Pilgrims still did possess.

“Yea, though they should lose their lives in this action,” ancient documents say, “yet they might have comforte in the same … All great & honourable actions are accompanied with great difficulties, and must be both enterprised and overcome with answerable courages.”

No, the Pilgrims did not lack for courage.

Our family poked around in a windswept burying yard until we found the tombstone of Constance Hopkins Snow, age 72 years. And as my wife and daughter laid a bunch of hedge row wildflowers on her grave, we stood for a moment of silence, meditating on our brave and very personal link with that first Thanksgiving.