Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving when food, football and friends all come together for a frantic celebration of another year and to began the serious business of

                                            !!CHRISTMAS SHOPPING!!

Where did all this go so wrong?

Somewhere in my childhood I recall family from every part of the country gathering at Aunt Florence’s house in Chillicothe, Missouri. We stayed at the various cousins that lived in Chillicothe and with a few in nearby hamlets, names long ago forgotten.

Must have been 20 or 30 kids my age. We would arrive by car, train and bus a week in advance. This was the family homestead. No knocking on doors, just walk in. Who is sleeping where? It was a time of remembering. Remembering Uncle Harold who passed on the year before. Uncle Zach who moved from North Carolina to California to be the superintendent of the Santa Ana school district. That was back when there were still orange groves in Los Angeles, not gangs.

Thanksgiving day had us all at the only building in town big enough to hold the 200 or so of the Pierson & Wall sides of the family; the basement of the Methodist church. The moms, grand moms and the only great grandmom left had been cooking and baking for three days. Turkeys, duck, geese, hams and untold numbers of pies. The meats all shot or killed from the herds the families had raised. The pies fresh baked from fruits canned earlier that year. Nothing with chemicals there. This was fresh stuff. The vegetables fresh from the root cellar (most don't even know what those are, pity). They had also been put up the previous summer.
Some years there would be snow and then we kids would all gather in Aunt Florences ktchen around the pot bellied stove that heated the downstairs and warm ourselves after getting red/blue fingers from sled racing with our mittens off. Grabbing a cookie as we bolted out the door, dodging the swipes of our mom's.

Didn't have a dad there, but the uncles were all out back looking at cousins Ezra's winter litter of hogs while they speculated about corn or wheat prices and how they were going to quit farming some day.

Thanksgiving! That's the way I remember it. Gone now, but the memory is rich in my mind. Gone when I grew up and saw the other side of the tracks. Gone when I found out what KKK really meant. Gone when the Cold War began. Gone when the English arrived to teach us about yellow submarines and Lucy. Gone when I lay stoned in the grass seven miles from Woodstock. Gone when I went into the Navy and cruised the Tai Wan straights gunning down junks smuggling arms into Tai Wan. Gone when I left Lake Michigan in the 50's with a white t-shirt tied to my antenna so I would not get caught up in the race riots. Gone when we built the Interstates and children began to leave home for more opportunity. Gone when we had began to look only inward and "self-help" became a mantra.

Gone, gone, gone, gone. Now only in the memories of the oldsters and in the books that no one reads anymore.

This Thanksgiving there were six of us; my wife, my daughter, her fiance, Megan and my three month old granddaughter. And that is enough. I am perhaps more thankful now than in my ignorance of youth.