Dear Lyla,
Thanksgiving Day is almost here and tonight your three “boy” cousins will arrive from Minnesota to spend the holiday weekend with you. I hope very much that this will be a memorable holiday for you, one that you look upon fondly and remember often. In honor of the three musketeers that will join us this November for feast and festivity, today’s story is about their mother. I must say that my sister and I have many holiday tales that we could share with you and your cousins and they usually involve mischief and mayhem; most often at Grandma Jo’s expense. But today your Aunt Patti is the offering on the altar of humility in this holiday musing and it all begins with a tantrum and a turkey. As you know your Grandma Jo is an excellent cook and, for her, holiday dinners were serious business. There would be a fine lace tablecloth, cloth napkins, crystal wine glasses and great-grandma’s silver to adorn our humble table. There was a ritual to these feasts; we would begin the day sneaking olives off the relish tray (one for each finger of course) and end by sneaking extra helpings of whipped cream for the homemade pumpkin pie. These meals were full of laughter, mirth and the occasional under the table goodie for the dog; if you were to describe the scene at our table it would closely resemble a scene drawn by Norman Rockwell. For us holidays were a time of relative peace and harmony; we ate, we played games and we teased each other good naturedly. It is likely due to the nostalgia that my sister felt for the holidays that the “great turkey debacle” came to be. I was in graduate school and was coming home for Thanksgiving and just assumed that Grandma Jo would be hosting as per usual; I learned in an animated phone call to my mom that plans had changed. Patti was bound and determined that she was going to cook the Thanksgiving meal and like it or not we were all ordered to come and have a good time. As soon as we stepped in the door I should have recognized the stench of impending doom. Patti was in a tizzy rushing to put the final touches on the noon meal. Grandma Jo, an excellent judge of cooking times and multi-tasker extraordinaire, recognized a disaster when she saw it. She graciously offered to help with the final prep work; determined that she could handle the task herself, Patti declined the offer. In a final flurry of activity, and a few glasses of wine later, it was announced that we were about to eat. As we sat down to eat we began with a simple table blessing (historically the youngest at the table says the blessing and my niece Kaila was not old enough to say it yet so the job fell to me) and then proceeded to survey the spread before us. We were treated to burnt rolls, lumpy gravy, partially mashed potatoes and a runny substance that I am led to believe was pureed yams. However, the turkey looked amazing! It was beautiful, brown and smelled amazing; we were in for a treat. Our hopes for an edible morsel from Patti’s table were quickly dashed when Bumpa cut into the turkey. In her quest to replicate the Rockwellian perfection from her childhood, she had neglected to clean the bird prior to cooking it. You can imagine the gory site once the turkey had been sliced open; all of the innards had liquefied making the turkey quite unpalatable. One glance at Patti told me she was ready to come unhinged should anyone make a derogatory comment about her culinary talents. Grandma Jo, ever the peacemaker, declared that we could simply eat around the innards since that part looked fabulous. Bumpa, on the other hand, was not about to let Patti off the hook. Bumpa laughed; he laughed long at hard until his face was purple and it was questionable whether oxygen was flowing to his brain. Little one there is something you need to know about Bumpa’s laughter, it was contagious! I started laughing, Grandma Jo starting laughing and, yes, Patti began to chuckle. It would have seemed to any outsider that we had lost our ever loving minds, and maybe we had. Maybe we were so focused on achieving a sense of idyllic perfection that we had lost perspective; Bumpa brought us back to reality. You see little one, Bumpa didn’t laugh to make Patti feel bad; quite the opposite. Bumpa was letting Patti know that it is ok to make mistakes; if you can laugh and learn at the same time, things will probably turn out just fine. This Thanksgiving I hope that there is plenty of laughter at our table, that we live in the moment and enjoy one another for who we are and not some version of what we think we should be.
Letters To Lyla 