The last few hours of the long Thanksgiving weekend were upon us. After an afternoon cleaning frenzy in which we scrubbed the oven (oh my), the bird cage and everything else in sight, the two of us sat down to a fantastic turkey soup. Sometimes our Sunday dinners are a big event with friends or children joining us. Sometimes they’re more like "supper" and this was one of those times. We had the iPad propped up on the table while listening to Pandora radio. We like reading the fascinating writeups on the bands. It reminds me of when I was a child and we all sat there reading the backs of our cereal boxes at breakfast. An Eagles song came on which made me think of the move to Los Angeles from New York and my first Thanksgiving away from home.
I arrived in Hollywood at the tender age of seventeen. It was early November 1975. My boyfriend, the drummer, had preceded me to LA and become acquainted with Susie Cowsill of the Cowsills band. The same band that had been the inspiration for the television show The Partridge Family. Having the last name Partridge opened me up for considerable teasing in the 70's. Ah well. More character building. Susie lived with her much older, manager boyfriend and they invited Ben's band and all the girlfriends to Thanksgiving at their house in San Fernando Valley. The smell of marijuana was slightly more pervasive than the aroma of turkey, but it was a very nice time amongst many, very high strangers.
By the following year we'd met some more local musicians and had Thanksgiving in a classic Hollywood bungalow with Bill and Kristine King. Bill played keyboards for the Pointer Sisters and Kris was their wardrobe mistress. They had an adorable son named Jesse. For me, this Thanksgiving was stranger than the stoned one the year before. I couldn't believe what happened. They left the television on during dinner! The guys watched football the whole time and barely paid any attention to the food Kris had spent hours cooking. I'm all for football on Thanksgiving, but during dinner? Blasphemy.
Eric likes to talk about our strangest Thanksgiving memories. I don't remember this, but I've been been told that when I was very young I only wanted to eat the olives and nothing else. Now I never eat olives. You would think that the LA dinners would have been be my strangest, but they weren't. Five years ago Eric and I ended up with no children and no plans. My girls had Thanksgiving with their Dad on Catalina Island and Caitlin was in school in Scotland. We decided to have an adventure and made plans to go to Mendocino. We'd have Thanksgiving dinner at the Mendocino Hotel. Never in my life had I had Thanksgiving dinner in a restaurant and it will not happen again. So disappointing.
I thought we'd be in the main dining room which is classy and romantic. They put us in the Garden Room. Fine for brunch, but this was not brunch. It had jangly acoustics and bright lighting. We were seated right by the entrance to the kitchen so it was far from relaxing. Even worse, (if anything CAN be worse than noisy, busy, overly lit non-ambience) was the dinner. They brought a plate of traditional Thanksgiving food and it was smothered with gravy. I don't eat gravy. Ever. I was near tears and Eric was trying to make the best of it for me, but there was nothing doing.
All I kept thinking about was how much nicer it would be at home. With my grandmother's napkins and our beautiful dishes, lovely goblets and candlelight. We had been afraid that it would be too sad with no children - just the two of us. In retrospect, I think we could have coped. It was being in the restaurant that made me sad. Though the rest of the trip was a pleasant getaway, that dinner, far and away, was my strangest Thanksgiving!
This year was blessed and uneventful. We shared meals with all four children at one point or another and were joined by several of the boyfriends. We had Thanksgiving Boxing Day on the 25th which was brilliant. We reset the table, shared leftovers and played games with our good friends from Napa. It's so much easier the next day when everything is already made.
We've had some unfortunate holiday luck in the past. My step-father's mother came from Michigan for Thanksgiving, ended up in the hospital and never got out. My father visited from New York some years back and came down with pneumonia. I put the turkey in the oven and headed to the hospital to see him. It was a strange experience because my mother (they'd been divorced for forty years) showed up as well as several siblings and nieces and nephews. An odd family reunion in the emergency room. My ex-husband's father died on Christmas morning. Hence, we've got a pretty low bar for the holidays at our house. If everyone survives and the food's decent, it's a huge success.
We conquered Thanksgiving 2011 with no untoward events. It's on to Christmas. I don't know if this is true, but it seems like the worse the economy gets, the earlier and more brightly people seem to decorate for Christmas. It used to bother me when the decorations went up right after Thanksgiving. Now it makes me happy. Out with those pumpkins, in with the silver and gold, red and green. Go big, people. Go big. And if you really want to be over the top, you can order all the items mentioned in the Twelve Days of Christmas for about a hundred grand. However, if you choose to order them online, the price has risen considerably. A Partridge is fairly inexpensive to purchase, but the cost to ship it? Astronomical!
Love my review in the aladdinjaz newsletter:
"Wendy Crowe, a most fun, clear and kicky writer in San Francisco, CA.
oh what fun to read her consciousness/mind/thought dreams. luv luv the way she writes. the one that started my fascination with her writing:
http://pearlsandlemons.blogspot.com/2009/10/reply-all.html
a lotta unpredictable streams and quirky kicky visions in the many little pieces thereafter,
but more important.... she's got some keen insight into this complex "world-Life-Movie" we run within...
among others take in "walking alone":
http://pearlsandlemons.blogspot.com/2011/11/walking-alone.html
Thanks, Tony.
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