Thanksgivings Past
Thanksgivings Past
Prior to college I don't have any clear or specific memories of
Thanksgiving meals. My Sophomore year in college was a memorable one.
Went with the then-girlfriend to her family's house in Louisville, KY.
Her mother hated me on sight, and made sure to tell me that her family,
once slave owners, treated the help well. I guess she was confusing
Jews with Blacks, or maybe she just lumped all those "poor sorry
non-Christian or lesser peoples" together. That was quite a hoot,
actually.
Went back another year, I think the next year. By this time
the mother and I had a clear and defined, open mutual hate thing going, so
with the cards on the table, it made for a better time. They also took
me to their Country Club for a night-before-Thanksgiving dinner. The
mother told me I might just be the first Jew to ever walk the
premises. A little later in the evening her father, a really nice old
guy with a wicked smile and a great sense of humor, told me there'd
been "a horde of Jews there,". but his wife probably just didn't know it. "Hell, Dayne (that's how he pronounced my first name), summa thaym even played golf! They were pretty good at it, too!"
Fast-forward to when I was a screaming deejay in Raleigh, NC. A friend
of a girlfriend invited me to her family's Thanksgiving meal. The
friend was named Amy, and she and her family were kind enough to hold
the meal off until about 3:30. I was on the air Thanksgiving Day from
10AM until 3PM, and then drove to their house.
It was a lovely meal, abundant with Southern hospitality, and Amy's
parents and younger brother. Her parents had all sorts of questions
about New York -- they'd never been, really wanted to go there sometime
on a vacation, had a million questions, and were wonderful. The
teenage brother, though, managed to create an awkward silence and
awkward moment when he asked if The Jews really ran all of New York and
if the black people were dangerous and mugged white people on the
subways all the time.
I let the moment hang, saw how upset Amy and her
parents were with the kid's questions, and then answered. "No, the
Jews do not run New York, New Yorkers
run New York. There are many Jewish New Yorkers, so a good many of
the politicans and city workers are Jewish. As far as muggings go,
there are blacks and whites who are victims of muggings, but it would
be wrong to pin all the muggings on New York's black community. But
all New Yorkers of many religions and skin colors are truly
frightened of young North Carolinean whites who have somehow developed
this odd view of New York as an unsafe place. New York is where all
sorts of people from all sorts of places get along extremely well,
without incident, day in and day out."
Amy and her parents sighed in relief. Then I asked the kid, "is it
true that all North Carolina towns lynch blacks and burn their houses,
have KKK marches all the time, and want to invade the North and finally
win the Civil War?"
That prompted Amy's mother to announce that we should leave the table,
go into another room and prepare for dessert. She also told the
teenage son to go to his room. Over dessert we discussed music, what
it was like to be a deejay, how Amy and her friend (my then-girlfriend)
liked their college, and the difference in the weather between NYC and
Raleigh. This is a very fond Thanksgiving memory.
Thanksgiving of 1979 remains etched in my memory. That was the year a
79 year old doctor in a gigantic yacht of a car ran a red light and
plowed into me, causing my car to spin and roll over many times and end
up facing in the other direction, across the intersection. I had the
windshield in my forehead, and ended up getting 50+ stitches in my
head. The car was totaled, as was that Thanksgiving. But it turned
out to be a freeing sort of moment for a variety of other reasons, as
clarity on a good many life matters came into view.
One Thanksgiving, about a year after my divorce, my very good friend Larry and his family had me and Susan
and my kids over for the holiday meal. The kids by then were living
with their mother in North Carolina (see how NC just keeps being
important in my life?), so the car ride there and back consumed much of
the actual Thanksgiving weekend time. Larry cooked up a Thanksgiving
feast and we all had a wonderful time.
For the past few years Susan and I have had Thanksgiving with our
friend Bob The Computer Guy (aka BTCG). Bob house-sits for some
friends from October through April, and we take advantage of the
wonderful kitchen over there and cook up a storm each year. We decided
to try out an organic, all-natural pasture-raised turkey this year.
There's a vendor at the local Farmers Market
(boo hoo, last weekend was the final one of the year) selling high
quality natural poultry, eggs, and the like. So we decided to go ahead
and get a turkey from Dines Farms and see how it tastes. If it is anything like the other items we've had from there, this should make for a great meal.
We'll have herbs and spices from the Farmers Market vendors, even the
sourdough bread we use for the stuffing comes from a Farmers Market
vendor. We might even lug over the apple cider from Stone Ridge Orchards, another of our favorites from the Market.
A little later this week I hope to post some pictures taken at the last
few weeks of the Farmers Market, both here and on my Flickr site. I
might also get that cool Flickr graphic link back over on the left
column . . . took it off to test some blog rendering oddities, found
it wasn't due to the Flickr link, so back up it will go.
