Thursday. November 22, 2001

lots of food had a soporific effect

"The wastepaper basket is the writer's best friend."

Isaac B. Singer

I am really tired when I wake up.

But there are things to be done. I get up and shower and dress and start to rearrange furniture and dry the dishes from the cooking the night before. The phone rings. It's the last relatives to arrive in town and they are pulling into Austin. I push up the time for the big meal by a couple of hours. No way we are feeding the multitudes a meal before the big one.

So I'm scurrying around, sticking my smoked turkey into the oven to get hot and smell the place up like a holiday; dragging out serving pieces, putting on tablecloths and setting tables. Everyone shows up with their contributions and somehow we bake, reheat, prepare, arrange and voilà we have the meal. We have pickles, olives, stuffed celery, deviled eggs, grapes and green onions. We have waldorf salad and ambrosia (coconut, madarin orange, you know the one). We have smoked turkey. We have gravy and dressing. We have green beans (with shitaki mushrooms, leeks, shallots and garlic). We have lemon potatoes and dairy-less mashed potatoes. We have spaghetti squash casserole, sweet potato casserole, creamed onions, homemade rolls. We have pies and cookies.

We have the usual sink backup (cleared, thank you for asking). I wash dishes and other people remove the stuff from the warmers and put in the frig. I get people to dry dishes and I direct putting away. Whew. Finally, my knee hurts and my back. Everyone is taking turns napping. The girls (senior in high school, senior in college, where did the time go?) study and nap. The boys (fourteen? geez) get bored and then get unbored over the jigsaw puzzle. One wants to play Monopoly but only with the cousin who beat him last time. She's reading Emma for school from a copy we found on the Ball-Preece lending library shelves. They have lots of adult supervision on the puzzle.

The time wears on and people get hungry again. They have pie and coffee and nachos made from smoked turkey. They have drinks and sodas. My sis wants to look at toy collecting books I have and I hunt some up and she interests others in them. People snap pictures. My cousin's wife shows a book of photos she made for his fiftieth birthday. (Now, that is really weird. Little Bob fifty?)

Over a couple of glasses of wine and with the help of the massage chair, I recover.

We have a tradition. On Thanksgiving when everyone reaches the right point, we go see the latest and greatest kid movie. This started with Toy Story. Made sense then. We had a couple of seven-year-olds and a lot of people willing to supervise them at the movie. Since the youngest is now fourteen, we decide to go to the 9PM show.

"There won't be any kids," I assert.

"There is that," says one of the not so young boys.

So, we do it. Ten of us are game for it. I haven't read Harry Potter, I confess. But the time went by fast although I could wish we'd sat back a bit as the special effects were dizzying.

Home late, I pick up a few more things and doze off in front of some old Mash and Northern Exposure episodes.

Everyone is thanking me for hosting. Easy enough to do when everyone pitches in. Once a year anyway. It's good to see these people. To reconnect with family. To think about where we came from and what we have become.

It is nice to have family. That's enough to be thankful for.

JUST TYPING
Family.
Drifts from room to room.
Playing, eating, talking, sleeping.
Once we were young.
Now the youngest is mature.
The old move slowly.
And the middle generation.
Mine.
Is creaky, too.