So Many Turkeys, Memories, Images

New York

I'm looking out my window at a New York night sky filled with winter grey and dots of window light in the distance against the shadow of jagged outlines of brick. Vladimir Horowitz plays a concerto with his brilliant passion an detail on the classical FM station.

I've just come home from acting class on 44th Street where the tourists are languishing on all the streets, yearning for just one chorus of anything from Spamalot, Color Purple, Cyrano. And I'm thinking about Thanksgivings past when I was growing up in Iowa in the 1950s.

Thanksgiving was, in many ways, just what Norman Rockwell imaged above. It was all the generations coming together at my parents' house to have very specific foods that were only prepared on that one day every year. Aunt Jean would prepare suet pudding ( from scratch ) with hard sauce ( that meant liquor to us kids, so we wanted a lot of it ); Mother made creamed onions which required making a roux, something my mother really didn't have the patience for any other time. Anut Kate would make stunning pumpkin pies ( don't criticize the "stunning", you didn't eat her crust ).

Aunt Jean and her husband, twenty years her senior, his three piece suits and Ben Franklin glasses always a mystery to me, would always come. Aunt Kate, the "maiden" aunt would arrive after singing soprano in the choir at the First Presbyterian Church, her pies in a wicker basket still warm from the oven. All of my grandparents were dead by the time I was 5, so that part of the Rockwell image was off. That generation was missing for me.

But the mix of awe at The Bird, as Mother called the Thanksgiving turkey when Mother brought it out on the huge oval platter, and the giddiness surrounding the fete, was palpable in the dining room of that house on Norfolk Road.

Today, 40 years later, there's a ennui in me to find that coming together with the different generations now, to find a transcendence of sorts, in which individuals within our extended family, with different points of view, can suspend the differences for just that moment of connection as a family. And, of course, there's another fact: I'm now the elder, now the one who's probably scrutinized ( "Oh...Mother..." ) for my quirks, my nostalgia, my interest in gathering.

Most families don't look as perfect as Rockwell's magazine covers. Isn't that why his work was such a hit in the 50s and early 60s? They represented something to aspire to, to reach toward--the post-war peace and prosperity that, in many ways, the war was all about protecting.

But Thanksgiving itself transcends I think, the Rockwelian images. Even if your family is a family of one on Thursday, even if you are in a McDonald's on the Turnpike for dinner, I'm thinking there might be more thanks than loneliness. I'm thinking that there is, in each of us, a deep sense of the mix of sadness and wonder in this world--in our families--in our souls.

And for that I am thankful.

Rockwell had the FEELING just right. It's an O'Henry story without words. Even better, it invokes in each of us some memory of some time when we were connected to all of those who share our DNA, happy to be there, happy to belong.

M.C.