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| Misanthropic Boomer |
Some Thanksgiving 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
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