THANKSGIVING MEMORIES - part one

Misanthropic Boomer

Some Thanksgiving Memories

Thanksgiving. Now memories of this holiday are so precious I had to create their own safe file space in my mind; a protected space, so that no matter what the future holds for me, I will have my Thanksgiving memories safely tucked away. I will open the vault door and be awash with the people, places, smells, tastes and feelings that mean so very much to me after so many wonderful years…not to mention the competition with all my other life’s memories.
The first Thanksgiving I remember I was four years old. We lived in a one bedroom mother-in-law cottage…that’s what they called it…it was a shack, on 82nd Street and Normandie Avenue, in Los Angeles. I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but we were poor: spaghetti with chicken wings four nights a week and meatless stew the other three nights poor. I’m not complaining because I do remember being very happy and never knowing we were poor. Aunt Melba and Uncle Bert had us over for Thanksgiving.
I loved Mel and Bert. Mel was glamorous, and Uncle Bert was a rugged big rig, cross country truck driver. As I said, Mel and Bert had us over and furnished all of the groceries, but my mother did the cooking. My mother was always in the kitchen on Thanksgiving; another treasure from the vault. I would slip in an out of the kitchen like a wraith unseen and unheard by everyone except my mother, who would slip me a taste of whatever she was working on at that moment.
We stopped going to Mel and Bert’s in 1955. They got divorced. They came to our new home in Gardena for Thanksgiving, but they came and left at different times. To this day I miss them tremendously. My Uncle Bert was killed in 1963 while working on highway construction. He drove a heavy grader, and was grading a section when a truck loaded with construction personnel lost its brakes coming down the grade and would have gone over the edge and fallen two hundred feet, except that Bert slammed the grader into the truck, pushing it to the safe side of the road to a stop. At which time the weight of Uncle Bert’s tractor caused the part of the road on which he rested, to collapse, and he, after saving all those men, fell two hundred feet to his death. He was a hero. My father had to identify the body. It’s the only time I ever saw my father cry.
Beginning in 1956 Thanksgiving took on a whole new meaning for me. That was the year we began having Thanksgiving with the Neffs. We swapped Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners from 1956 through 1965. Those were wonderful, eventful Thanksgivings. Our family consisted of three people, my mother, father, and me. The Neffs had an enormous (by my standards anyway) family, and they lived in Pedley, California (out by Corona…Norco…Riverside. It was damn near another country. There was no freeway. It took about two and half to three hours to drive from Gardena so we always spent the night. So Thanksgiving became an adventure.
The direct Neff family consisted of five people…Mom and Dad (Jane and Mike) and three children (Tommy, Peggy Jane, and Danny). Tommy was a year my junior, and we were best buds, and naturally it was us against the other two. We got into a lot of trouble for picking on poor Peggy Jane. Danny got his share as well, but we needed him to get thing down from trees and rooftops. Danny climbed as though he had suction cups on his hands and feet; he could go anywhere.
And naturally since it was Thanksgiving there were football games. Tommy, Danny, and I always played football on Thanksgiving. Sometimes just the three of us; me against the brothers, and sometimes we would pick up other kids. It didn’t matter just as long as we were outside, with a football.
As I said, we swapped dinner locations, i.e. Thanksgiving in Pedley and Christmas in Gardena; switching back and forth every year. In addition to the two immediate families we were always joined by Tommy’s Grandmother and his Great Uncle. 
The food was always amazing and covered every inch of the dining table. We had turkey, of course, with the addition of a ham sometimes. There were always string beans with bacon, creamed cauliflower, mashed potatoes and gravy, candied yams, spinach, corn, both jellied and homemade cranberry sauce, two kinds of dressing, homemade biscuits, and both pumpkin and mincemeat pies for desert. Now that I think of it, we probably spent the night not because the drive was long, but because we couldn’t move.

end - part one

THANKSGIVING MEMORIES - part two

Misanthropic Boomer

Some Thanksgiving Memories – Part the Second It Is (I love writing like Yoda speaks)

I do apologize for not finishing my reminiscences in a timely manner, however, I was so full from dinner (you would think after sixty-nine Thanksgivings I would have learned to pace myself…the expression that fits is, “fat chance”) that I was unwilling to challenge the stairs to the basement. It is now 05:44 am, Friday morning and I’m ready to pick up from whence I paused.

Moving ahead to 1966 I had the second most bizarre Thanksgiving ever (the most bizarre came a few years later, and was a pip). I was dating the woman who ultimately became my first wife (that’s right, I didn’t get the whole marriage mishigas right the first time around…I look at those four years as practice for when I met my Mayo). It was the first year since 1956 we weren’t having dinner with the Neffs so it was important that I bring my affianced. No problem. Dinner was at 4:00.

Naturally, after the huge dinner I was stuffed (even more than the turkey), and that was when my lady leaned over and whispered in my ear, “We’ve got to get going, dinner is a 5:30. Dinner?

That’s right, she had, without telling me, committed to Thanksgiving dinner with her family. We made some lame excuse for having to leave, (I could tell by the twinkle in my mother’s eyes that she knew exactly what was happening and was laughing inside) thanked my mother and father and went on our way. That particular incident should have set off alarms about where I stood in the relationship…and it probably did, but I was completely blind to anything about her except how hot she was. 

Betty’s (my first wife) mother was an excellent cook, which spelled disaster for me because I ate as much at this second dinner as I had at the first. When dinner was over, her father and I went out back to smoke a cigar, complimented by a young single malt. I was so full that I was unable to smoke the cigar due to the pressure created each time I attempted to inhale.

The Thanksgivings years from 1967 to 1971 were, if nothing else awkward, since our parents did not seem to like one another. It was, each year, some variation of the two dinner scenario. I began to dread my beloved Thanksgiving…after all; it was trying to kill me. I began having nightmares of a Thanksgiving explosion caused by overeating at two separate dinners….similar to the scene in “Big Trouble in Little China,” for those of you who are familiar with the film, where one of the Storms (Lo Pan’s bodyguards) explodes.

Thank God for divorce; 1972 was peaceful and pleasant, sort of. I had just begun going out with my Mayo and she invited me to dinner with her family for the Holiday. I had a chat with my folks, gave them a hundred dollars and sent them off to dinner at the Velvet Turtle in Redondo Beach. It was, apparently, a very lovely and somewhat romantic Thanksgiving for them. I, on the other hand, was not quite so lucky.

My Mayo is one of the sweetest, kindest, most thoughtful people I have ever known…the rest of her family not quite so much. I will refrain from going into detail and besmirching the entire family; however, I cannot in good conscience let the dinner go. The turkey…shoe-leather. This was complimented (?) by boxed mashed potatoes, canned sweet potatoes, frozen peas, frozen corn; desert was, naturally frozen pumpkin pie topped with whipped cream out of a can. It was the T.V. dinner of Thanksgivings.

Now, as promised earlier, for my most bizarre, yet special Thanksgiving…I call it “The 1973 Thanksgiving Hot Dog Feast,” also known as “The Friday Thanksgiving.”

Mayo and I were by now a couple and lived together in Redondo Beach. I had a very dear, yet somewhat strange friend, one Frank Sullivan with whom I had worked in the past. He was a programmer, with a Masters in psychology who had quit his job at Northrop and moved to a small town in the Sierras with his wife Nancy, who was teaching Special Education at the grammar school in Coleville, California, along the East Walker River. Frank worked part time for the U.S. Forest Service, and grew hot house marijuana; and occasionally did consulting work in San Francisco.

They invited us up for Thanksgiving. What could be cooler? Thanksgiving in the high country, and if we were lucky there would be some snow. Apparently 1973 was one of the most brutal winters the Sierras had experienced since the Donner party had their special winter banquet.

Frank and his wife Nancy were supplying the accompaniments, so we brought the turkey. I picked up a fresh one (I waited while they killed the bird and dressed him) at Del Wee Poultry, in Torrance, on Artesia just west of Van Ness; where my family had gotten their turkeys since Ron Powell’s dad took us there in 1955. That was Wednesday morning. We could not leave until the afternoon because Mayo had classes at El Camino she could not miss.

We finally got my van loaded and ready to go, and left at about 2:00pm, Wednesday, Thanksgiving eve. It is about an eight hour drive from Redondo Beach to Coleville, where Frank and Nancy rented a beautiful, old two story, semi-Victorian style home.

Driving was slow due to both the somewhat notorious pre-Thanksgiving day traffic, and unbeknownst to us, a snowstorm that was hitting the Sierras. The result of these two events was that we found ourselves little more than halfway there by 9:00pm, and that I had to stop and put chains on my tires because we were in a full on snowstorm (my very first).

Driving was slow and scary, but doable. My heater was broken so my Mayo was sitting beside me zipped into her sleeping bag. About six, or so miles north of Big Pine we ran out of gas. My gas gauge was broken, however, I always knew when to stop for gas because I knew how many miles to go on a tank of gas before I needed to fill up…always, that is, until I forgot to take into account that we were in the mountains in a snowstorm where the air is thinner and the driving is slower because of the stop and go required by the severely inclement weather. The upshot was, I let us run out of gas in what turned out to be one of the worst blizzards in over a hundred years.

I was pretty sure we could not just stay there and freeze to death, so I bundled my Mayo up as best I could, left her with a Coleman gas lantern, locked her in the van and set out for Big Pine and gas. I hadn’t walked a quarter of a mile when I was startled by the honking of a car horn. I jumped and turned to look, and there just pulling to a stop was a brand new Cadillac convertible…with the top down and the radio blaring. Sitting behind the wheel was an enormous woman, wearing a mink coat; she was grinning a Cheshire Cat grin and said, “That your van back there? Break down, or just,” she threw back her head and laughed, “run out of gas?”

“Ran out of gas,” I responded sheepishly.

“Well, get in,” she said. “Big Pine’s just a few miles south and they’ve got an all night Texaco station.” I jumped into the car feeling both extremely lucky and grateful. She held out her hand, “Name’s Martha, and you?”

“Vance,” I replied.

As she pulled slowly back onto Highway 395 I looked over at Martha and said, “Aren’t you cold with the top down?”

“Oh hell no,” she replied. “I’ve got the heater blasting and I’m wearing my mink, and I’m really hot because I just left the sulfur hot-springs, I’m roasting see.” And having said that, Big Martha pulled her mink coat open and under that fur she was as naked as the day she was born. She laughed, picked up a bottle sitting on the seat beside her, and took a pull. She offered it to me, however, I declined, feeling that was the prudent thing to do.

It took about thirty minutes to cover the six miles back to Independence and Martha jabbered and drank the entire way. When we pulled into the Texaco station I was relieved, that is until I saw the four guys in the office pointing in our direction and laughing. Martha pulled up and let me out. I went to the office and explained my situation. The owner was very nice, even gave me a larger gas can than the one I was carrying. As he filled the can (remember this was 1973 when gas station attendants actually worked) he said, “You can just pay me when you come back to fill up” (people were still trusting in 1973 as well).

When the can was full I asked for a lift back to the van. “Oh we can’t leave the station, but I’m sure Martha would love to take you.” He chuckled. “Hey Martha,” he called out, “will you take this young man back to his vehicle, none of us can get away?” By now the other three were in the open doorway laughing outright.

“Sure thing. Hop in sweet thing.” I did and Martha took me back to the van. Nothing eventful happened (thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster) and Martha was really a kind, sweet woman who probably saved our lives.

We drove back to the Texaco station, where they were still laughing. We filled up and were on our way. It took us until 4:00am (six more hours than anticipated) to reach Frank and Nancy’s place (that’s the very same Nancy that was the best man at our wedding eight months later).

When I unloaded the van I took the turkey in first, when I returned with another load Nancy said, “I thought you said you were going to get a fresh turkey; this one’s frozen.” The bird had been sitting beside me on the floor over a leak to the outside and after sitting for more than eight hours in freezing temperatures…it froze.

We left the bird out to thaw; however, it was not to be. We had hot dogs and beans for Thanksgiving, and turkey with all the trimmings on Friday. And that is how “The Friday Thanksgiving,” came to be.

Mayo and I moved back to Los Angeles (Hermosa Beach) at the beginning of 1975 and began having our traditional family Thanksgivings with my folks at their house.

In 1977 my mother was too ill to go through the rigors of Thanksgiving dinner preparation so we decided to have Thanksgiving at our place in Hermosa. This is when the tradition of having our orphan friends over really began (friends with nowhere to go for Thanksgiving). That year we had my mother and father, and our friends George and Renee Kauffman and their daughter Lizzie. It was a wonderful day, and my Mother seemed better than she had in months.

After dinner my father went to the living room to watch football (take a nap), Lizzie went out back to play with the dog and the rabbit, and my Mayo, my Mother, George and Renee, and I sat at the kitchen table having coffee and chatting. George pulled out a joint (marijuana for the uninitiated) and lit up, passing it around. When it came around to my Mother, she laughed and declined. Then I noticed a funny thing, whenever someone exhaled the smoke they did so in my Mother‘s
direction…it wasn’t planned, it just happened. She got a contact high. By the time we were done she knew she was high and asked if she could have one to take home, because it made he feel better than she had since her diabetes had gotten worse. I supplied her for the following six months until her death in 1978. She swore it helped more than anything the doctors gave her.

In 1978 we bought our first home, and Thanksgiving that year and every year after (and soon Christmas and Easter as well) became the “Day of the Orphans.” We invited more and more friends who were alone for the holidays to our festive dinners. 

The tradition has been modified over the years due to circumstances beyond our control; for example being separated by three thousand miles for two years from 1994 to 1996 because of work. But through it all we three have always managed to be there for one another and to see to it that as many of our friends and acquaintances as possible had as wonderful a Thanksgiving as we did.

As wonderful as the entire Holiday time of year is, it is for me Thanksgiving that brings out in us our true humanity: that is, every man, woman, and child on the Earth has the right to have reasons to be thankful. Therefore, it is Thanksgiving more than any other day that makes me hope for peace on Earth, and good will toward all; so that we may all have the joy in our hearts that makes us caring and sharing citizens of our Big Blue Marble as it makes its way through the Multiverse.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING Type here