Thanksgiving has always had a special significance to me because it more or less marks when I moved to California some thirty-seven years ago with my sister Kate. We actually arrived a couple of days before Thanksgiving but every year it’s Thanksgiving that we use as the touchstone to remember our arrival and the following trials and tribulations—and occasional triumphs—since. (Hey, we’re not dead and that is a major accomplishment in and of itself.)
We left New Jersey with about $200 in our pockets and not much else. California was to New Jersey what America is to the world. A place to reinvent yourself or jumpstart your life. (Ah, youth.) It wasn’t a plan; it was a wish!
A day after arriving in San Francisco we got the insane idea of hitchhiking to Santa Fe to spend Thanksgiving with my brother John, who was living in New Mexico at the time. With a loaf of sourdough bread, a salami and a bottle of whiskey (all that an intrepid traveler really needs) we rode the BART train to the end of the line in Fremont.
Walking up to the side of the freeway to begin our hitchhiking adventure, we were shocked to discover that, unlike the East Coast, California highways are very dimly lit and that we were practically invisible to oncoming drivers. Thus stymied (Thank God), we retreated first to the BART parking lot and then to a series of diners, two or three of them. I’m not sure why we had to keep moving; I think one closed and the second one kicked us out when it became obvious to them that we were only going to order one cup of coffee. It was in the last one that I was goofing around, trying out my pathetic imitation of the Beatles’ Liverpool accents that the fun started.
The waitress overheard me and said, “Oh, you’re English?”
“Yes, I am,” I told her. And she believed me. So I went with it. Not only did I keep up the phony Liverpudlian accent with her, I kept it going when Kate and I wandered into a 7-11 store about a half hour later.
The lady working the register was dressed up in a full turkey costume. Not wanting to waste this opportunity for comic gold, I asked her in my best John Lennon voice, “Do all Americans dress up like turkeys on Thanksgiving?”
“Oh, no,” she assured me. “No, I’m just weird.”
I’ve told the story elsewhere how we arrived at the Fort Mason youth hostel in San Francisco and were shooed out of the building; they were setting up for a big Thanksgiving dinner and didn’t want to ruin the surprise for us and the other guests. We wandered away and killed a couple of hours and when we returned we discovered that there was no dinner to be had, the staff and the other guests had eaten it all. So we ended up in a fancy hotel downtown paying through the nose for some overpriced dinner that we ate in glum, depressed silence.
I don’t remember the next few following Thanksgivings; one or two we might have eaten in Glide Memorial Church amongst the homeless and down and out; several, I’m sure, we actually ate back home in New Jersey, back in the carefree pre-9/11 days of air travel, when traveling by plane was merely unpleasant, rather than the frontlines of the War on Terror.
Thanksgiving dinners growing up in my house were nothing short of spectacular in terms of quantity and quality. There were your staples, like the enormous turkey straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting, stuffing, cranberry, yams with marshmallows, mashed potatoes, pies etc but then there was my dad’s coleslaw. Most coleslaw in my experience is tasteless, white, runny mush, a hideous amalgamation of cabbage and mayonnaise (and I hate, HATE mayonnaise! Do not put that on my sandwich, and if you put that on my burger we’re gonna fight). The exception was my dad’s coleslaw, the difference being, I think, that he made it with carrots and green pepper, which gave it a unique bite. Not only was the coleslaw great with Thanksgiving dinner, but it made for the best turkey leftover sandwiches. Turkey and coleslaw sandwiches, we could, and did, eat for days on end. I often woke the day after Thanksgiving still full. I have no regrets about any feats of gluttony; the memories of those dinners sustained me through many, many lean years.
I think the last year and a half in San Francisco we made our own turkey dinners for Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s, a major achievement for people satisfied with eating hot dogs and corn chips for dinner after years of living on ($2.50) Chinese lunch specials because our previous kitchens had been too cockroach-infested to cook in.
The Thanksgiving at the horse ranch in Napa County we went all-out, even got my dad’s coleslaw recipe. I found out that simply knowing the ingredients was not nearly enough, my dad didn’t have any measurements of how much of what to use, it was all trial and error, taste it, add more of this or that. I remember making seven (SEVEN!) trips to the grocery store for more ingredients, almost all coleslaw-related. In the end, it was delicious as always but the family we worked for, although naturalized citizens, were French, and couldn’t have cared less how hard we worked at the dinner or how good it tasted. They spoke in French throughout the meal and never once thanked us or complimented us for the meal. Happy fucking Thanksgiving! to us. (Those miserable creeps.)
Down in Shadow Valley during the decade that I worked six years at the liquor store, we eventually got away from the old turkey dinners. Kate and Jim were stuck making them and it was a lot of work so I started just making big pasta dinners for the three of us on Thanksgiving (something I routinely did on Sundays, anyway). I’d eat a big dinner with those guys and then go in to work at the liquor store, waiting on a handful of customers, some of whom insisted on bringing me Thanksgiving leftovers. It was a nice gesture, I guess, but I never ate any of it. Frankly, my customers’ hygiene was always dubious (male or female), not to mention their culinary skills, and the last thing I wanted after a big pasta dinner was more food.
During my six and half years working at the grocery store, I also worked every Thanksgiving. Having to work every holiday can really sour a person on them. It’s bad enough dealing with stressed-out customers and long lines the whole shift; the worse part was having smirking bosses tell me to “just deal with it, it’s not that bad, one day a year, blah-blah-blah” bullshit. Easy for them to say, they didn’t have to do any work, and they all left well before closing time.
Since then, I buy some sliced roast turkey and candied yams from the grocery store’s deli, make my little side dishes of wild rice and stuffing (out of the box), Kate makes green beans with lemon, butter and black pepper for the three of us and we sit around and talk about our health problems like the old people we’re turning into.
“At least you have your health,” old people used to tell us. When you’re young, it’s such a mystifying remark, like who the fuck doesn’t have their health? Then you get older and you find out. (The hard way.) You get old or you die young, those are your choices, I tell people now. I work out just to be out of shape, just to slow the gradual erosion of physical abilities.
I have read Thanksgiving columns over the years, most of which tell you that what’s special about the holiday is that it’s non-denominational, it’s non-religious, it’s not nationalistic (not the 4th of July or Lincoln’s birthday), it’s a day for all Americans to be thankful and count their blessings (with the exception of Native Americans of course, who find very little to be thankful for on this particular day). And that’s cool. Gratitude is a good thing, not a bad thing. It’s easy to focus on the negative (especially for me). We live in trying times, to say the least. But it’s pretty much always been this way. Mankind has always lived in a state of calamity or catastrophe. Peaceful times are the exception, not the rule. That’s true for individuals, too, not just nation-states.
I’ve dealt with a lot of bad shit over the years, been hurt by the very people I trusted most, been done dirty by employers I worked my ass off for, been wronged more times by more motherfuckers than I can possibly count (the math just doesn’t exist). But the opposite is true is well. I’ve had people who owed me nothing… cook me a meal, buy me a dinner, give me encouraging (and sometimes profound) advice and support, even make me laugh at times when all I really wanted to do was lay down and die.
I don’t understand the meaning of life. I don’t know why we’re here or why I’m here. I’ve had people try to tell me that we’re here for spiritual growth, to learn lessons, etc. What lesson? Life sucks? What am I supposed to take from that? Cut myself off from the world and live in a cave meditating? Become a ghost in human form? What the fuck? What lessons? I’ve had enough fucking lessons to last ten lifetimes. A few lessons are fine, I don’t need the Costco buy-in-bulk case of Shitty Lessons, thank you, I’m good.
Again: I don’t understand the meaning of life. I don’t know why we’re here or why I’m here. But since we’re here, and I’m here, the only thing we can do is keep on going, keep on keeping on. That’s not profound or anything but it’s honest as I can tell it.
No one ever had to be nice to me, there was no incentive or payoff to doing right by me. But some people chose to be good to me. Some people choose to do right by others, they strive to make the world a better place without any chance of notice or reward. There doesn’t have to be any good in the world at all. And yet there is.
Happy Thanksgiving!
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