Giving Thanks for a Holiday Full of Memories

I anticipate my Thanksgiving to be delicious and full of thanksgiving at my friend Jean Erck’s house, in a room thick with memories of other Thanksgivings.

There was the time Mama lost the turkey roaster and had her car stolen the day before Thanksgiving. When the police found the car in San Bernardino, Daddy and I drove out to pick up the car and in the back seat was a brand-new turkey roaster left behind by the car thieves when they abandoned Mama’s car.

I was 16. It is the roaster I still use. The streaks of green wall paint have almost worn off in the last 40 years. They are on the roaster because I decided to paint the living room at our house in Silver Lake. I wanted to paint the room and for our son, Tim, to be born while Doug was still home on a brief leave from the U.S. Army before his infantry company went overseas. I mixed the paint in the roaster and it has looked for years like sweet green icing was running down its side. Timothy was, indeed, born on Doug’s last day of leave and the living room looked great, too.

One Thanksgiving, a customer of Doug’s from Virginia sent us a genuine baked ham, which I kept under the bed for days because the wrapping said to keep it in a cool, dry place and that seemed best. I soaked it, simmered it, baked it, sauced it with brown sugar and port wine and after about three days of wrestling with that Virginia gentleman hawg, it tasted like a large salt lick for cows.

The people down the hill had a terrible time that year, too. The lady of the house forgot to turn on the oven so her turkey was raw when dinner time arrived. So I couldn’t even go next door to borrow a few slices of turkey to make up for the ham.

Our ham was inedible. The rest of the dinner was ready--sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, green beans, Marsala wine gelatin salad with grapefruit sections, sliced red apples and walnut halves--but there didn’t seem to be much sense to sitting down to that array, so my husband, Doug, made another batch of Ramos fizzes.

Finally, one guest said wistfully, “Is it all right if I fix a mashed potato sandwich?”

Another Thanksgiving we spent hanging on an anchor in Little Fisherman’s Cove at the Isthmus of Two Harbors on Catalina Island. We had taken our boat, a cruiser (named the Money Tree because Doug said that was what was wanted to be a boat owner) and gone for a twilight cruise. When we got to the end of the Newport Channel, the Pacific Ocean lay satiny and moonstruck and seductive in front of us and we decided it would be fun to go over to Catalina for a late dinner with our guests.

Mid-channel, a chubasco blew up out of Baja with the roar of a bear. The harbor master at Avalon told us to get our boat out of the harbor and make a run for the west end. So we finally made Little Fisherman’s, near where the University of Southern California Center for Marine Biology is now established, after two hours of quartering waves that broke over the bow of the 36-foot boat. In order to keep from broaching, we spent half of our time making diagonal runs at the waves, which made for a long and terrifying trip.

Finally anchored in still water, we crawled into wet bunks and slept like rocks. The next morning we awoke, deeply thankful for seeing another Thanksgiving morning. For dinner, we had a half bottle of gin and a box of Oreo cookies to divide among the four of us.

Another day set aside to be grateful for the bounty we were vouchsafed, Tim came home from college with six friends, each carrying a duffel bag of laundry and I spent the weekend between the kitchen and the laundry.

There isn’t a Thanksgiving I would change, even the first one after Mama died when I was 18 and I cooked a 25-pound turkey sent to Daddy by a client. My dear Auntie Ruth told me how to do it in the course of several long-distance calls to her house in Portland, Ore.

The guests were all male. There were Daddy and Galt Bell, who was the producer and director of “The Drunkard,” a long-running melodrama in which I acted nightly while I was a student by day at Mt. St. Mary’s College; and Maj. Hanford and Dr. Tinney and one of the Cassidy boys whose ship was in port and whom we had not met before. They all said the dinner was great but I hated that big brute of a turkey because I had removed the pinfeathers with eyebrow tweezers after I got home from the theater. Sitting alone in a cold kitchen at 2 a.m. does not make you love the turkey, which is demanding your patience and lack of skill.

I hope your Thanksgiving is perfect, maybe in a ski lodge with powdered-sugar snow falling outside and the stone fireplace crackling. Perhaps at a hacienda in the desert or maybe over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s house.

Wherever, I hope it stands out as the best ever. Thanksgivings are like Christmas trees. Every year, we stand back and say, “Well, that’s the best one we’ve ever done.” And every time it is.