Yes, Even For the Dry Turkey Breast

A Thanksgiving Tradition of Remembering and Giving Thanks

(Note: I published an earlier version of this piece a year ago. Hard to believe the year has passed so fast.)

This morning I got up at 1, had a pee, went back to bed. I got up at 3, went down for granola, went back up, to bed. I got up at 7, had coffee, watched the news. Now I’m back up in bed, with the covers pulled over my head. It’s not looking likely to be one of my best days ever.

So it’s covers-over-the-head for me this morning. Having something of a "spell," as we used to say about my mother's sudden attacks of something – probably anxiety, or perhaps crashes following the diet drugs given to her by the good Doctor Pill, which we now pretty much know were Speed. Her spells came on unannounced and laid her low, sometimes for hours. She wasn't happy having them, of course, but she was REALLY unhappy when I, about age 9, said to Mrs. Faye Williams, one of her church-lady friends, who telephoned one afternoon: "Mother can't come to the phone right now. She's having one of her spells." How was I to know it was a term to be used only within the family?!

Ah, the unforgettable Mrs. Faye Williams, with her jet-black hair (out of a bottle) and one of those bosoms like a bric-a-brac shelf. A lady worthy of Congreve: “Here she comes, i’faith, full sail, with her fan spread and streamers out ...” Though Mrs. Faye Williams didn’t actually carry a fan. A lady large in person, personality and prejudice, who, one Sunday noontime, half-way through Sunday Dinner, slowly descended to our dining room floor as the “antique” chair on which she sat gave up its ghost to her substantial avoirdupois, with an anguished creak and a horrifying crack, and gradually melted beneath her.

She largely directed her prejudice against our arid West Texas town, to which her husband, Millard, had brought her forty years before, and which in no way equaled the remembered splendors of the Paris of her youth: “When I was a girl, growing up in Paris ...,” she often rhapsodized. It’s thanks to Mrs. Faye Williams, to hearing her go on about the wonders of that bon place, that I began to dream of Paris as a lad of 10 – a dream I’ve been having ever since. It was only later that I learned the Paris Mrs. Faye Williams rhapsodized over was the one a hundred miles northeast of Dallas – as the crow flies – (how do you say that in French?). Ah, the unforgettable Mrs. Faye Williams.

But I digress. Back to me, head beneath the covers. This morning, even Jane Austen’s Emma, one of my go-tos when I’m feeling the need to flee the here&now, didn’t snap me back to the fantasy that I’m an English gentleman of the 18^th Century the way it sometimes does. In fact, Miss Austen’s words that jumped out at me this time, as I read them once again, but apparently this time actually registering them for the first time, were: “evil,” “disadvantages,” “danger,” “misfortunes,” “melancholy.” And I’m only at page four! Why would I even think of sticking my head back above the covers?

As I write, Thanksgiving, the dishonored holiday, now making only a blip between Halloween and Christmas, still lies ahead. As you read, it may be in the past, but don’t despair: you still have dry turkey breast in your future next year, and the next. Unless our near octogenarian President-elect (was he really at the first Thanksgiving, as Reddit says?), pardons them all (we’re not just talking turkeys here) and maybe also himself.

Pardon me, but I almost miss the turkey years – even the dry breasts – before vegetarianism, or more frightening yet, veganism (whatever that may be), reared their fearsome wattles and shooed the birds back to the barnyard. Why, a dear friend tells me that modern squeamish sensibility has even altered the famous Yellville Turkey Drop, where live turkeys are no longer flung from low-flying airplanes, towards the clamorous human turkey catchers down below, as tradition had it. Now gobblers (already plucked and prepped for roasting, so I’m told) are simply handed over at ground level. What valor, what bragging-rights, can there be in that?

There was something almost comforting about the tradition of family recipes, year after year, decade after decade, (ok, let’s say it) century after century – now banished to the junkheap of gluten free: turkey stuffing (the stale bread cubes), pumpkin pie (the crust), candied yams. You’re right, the yams had no gluten, but the sheer sugar shock made us all sick anyway, so – also banished!

I’m not one of those so benighted as to claim that things were always better “back then.” Though truth be told, when it came to eating abandon, they almost always were. I remember when Thanksgiving over-eating  was a gluttonous (no thought of gluten then!) high spot of the over-eating year.  A time of giving thanks for another ample harvest, though for most of us this was mostly pretend, since harvests had gone out of our lives long before. Most of all, of being with family. OK, if we must, in order to get to complain about the dry turkey breast; perhaps uncle X will come out with another howler of homophobia again this year, so we can shake our fay heads at his ignorance, and give thanks that we live in sophisticated cities far away from him.

When I was a kid, we lived on Avenue P – yes, really – and the joke , among the pre-adolescent males, at least (though I strongly suspect some of the post-adolescent ones – i.e. male adults – told it too; the ladies, of course, wouldn’t), went: What’s the worst thing about living on Avenue Q? You have to walk a block to pee. It never ceased to amuse.

I think of that joke often now – in the middle of the night – grateful that the walk these days isn’t so far, since I have to take it so often. (I failed to mention above the reason I got up at 2 & 5 – but I think you can guess.) I mention this now, perhaps, because I miss some things about life on Avenue P, even so many decades later. Not all, for sure, but some. It was always there that we had Thanksgiving – unlike Christmas, which was always elsewhere, at someone else’s house, and so took me away from our house, our Christmas tree (aluminum, with a rotating disc to cast it in ever-changing colored light), our (my!) Christmas presents. Christmas always meant stress; Thanksgiving, homeliness. And I knew exactly where to pee!

Avenue P was also where unforgettable Mrs. Faye Williams and her chair had their cinematic fade-to-nothingness. I haven’t been there in those many decades I mention, but I looked recently on Google Streetview, and it looks much the same, including my five-year-old footprint in the cement edging that my father poured to define the gravel patio he built around his pride-and-joy fish pond, full of coy. To be clear, I couldn’t actually see the footprint, but it gave me such joy remembering it that I’ve decided it MUST still be there.

Over to the Rice University campus now (I DID come out from under the covers at last), for a pre-Thanksgiving Christmas Carol concert (yes, the dishonored holiday indeed). I look around at all the many who are 20 and 25 and 30 – in the first full flower of life – and I almost want to cry for them. And for me. They think they have forever – when the truth is (a truth I know now), even for them it will all be done so soon. They don’t know it, which is a mercy for them, since there’s nothing they can do, nothing any of us can do, to change it. I spend half my time in tears now, thinking about that, and about lost loves, and lost lives. And most of the other half remembering.

Older and wiser as I am, I go to bed these days knowing that SADS (Sudden Ancient Death Syndrome) may mean I won’t wake up in the morning – no matter how many times I wake up through the night.

But it’s not all sad and bad. Not even the tears, not even the remembering. To be clear, my mother’s turkey breast was never dry – though I may not be an impartial critic, since I was not then, as I still am not, a breast man: I’ve always been a drumstick guy myself. And her candied yams were never cloying, and her green Jello salad always delightful. That’s the way I remember it, anyway, and I’m sticking to it.

Oh, what I’d give for another Thanksgiving on Avenue P, whether vegetarian or vegan or gluten free – whatever. I’d do all I could to stanch those tears, for that day, at least. And the remembering? It would give everything such a rosy glow that even Mrs. Faye Williams would be radiant in the most flattering Parisian light – as she went down. AND as she rose again. (But the chair? Not much anyone could do for the chair, no matter how flattering the  light.)