Fall is dancing through the countryside here on its way to a prearranged meeting with the season that dare not speak its name, that hoary culprit popular only with ski-lodge proprietors, sleigh manufacturers and, of course, little kids with Christmas on their minds. Before making an exit, however, Autumn pulls from its amber closets its greatest jewel—Thanksgiving—to share with the world, and the world is grateful. For all the talk of “family values,” families are not as close as they once were. When we were kids, clans, neighborhoods, parishes stuck together. If grandpa was getting a little forgetful, well, we’d just have to remind him more. If Mrs. Dejected down the street was having a rough time of it, people showed up with sustenance. When a neighbor jumped on the trolley to Heaven, everybody went to the wake. When’s the last time you went to a Block Party?
Thanksgiving may be the Greatest Holiday because it draws people back to their origins, their roots, their families, if not in fact then in memory. This column’s greatest gift to its readers is probably inspiring memories, particularly those of a youth gone by but which seems just around the last corner. Most of us, given the choice, would return there in a heartbeat, forsaking all the alleged advances of the intervening decades, even if we did have to learn to use the clutch all over again. The Thanksgiving of childhood—we can see it clearly, we can feel it. I remember particularly one Thanksgiving when about ten of us were sitting around my grandmother’s living room and a chorus of “You Are My Sunshine” broke out. Sounds corny, right? My mother, an emotional woman under any circumstances. started holding hands with people, looking right in their eyes and singing the song to them. Much later, in her eighties with senility creeping in, she was riding with me through the forests of New Hampshire, not remembering much. Most of my chatter provoked nothing but silence. Then, out of a clear blue sky, she brightened up and said, “Let’s sing a song!” I knew instantly which song it would be. She reached her hand out, as she did to the roomful of people that Thanksgiving so long ago, and we began to sing: “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine, you make me happy when skies are grey….”
The Good Old Days
In the Good Old Days, the neighborhood seemed vast, almost endless, filled with laughing, hollering children available for noble pursuits. In the Good Old Days, little boys played Ringolevio, despite their mothers’ protestations, and little girls played On The Green Carpet, which scared the boys to death since it might involve kissing. In the Good Old Days, the girls discussed their interest in handsome members of the opposite sex; the boys would not be caught dead in such conversation. In the Good Old Days, the neighborhood was visited daily by the milkman and the ice-cream man (in season); the ice man cometh weekly, the scissors sharpener a couple times a year. The arrival of the rag man was unpredictable but cause for great celebration, it being the only time any of us ever got to see a horse. Basements were emptied of vast bales of tied newspapers, for which the rag man paid a pittance but for which nobody else paid anything at all. Most of us kids suspected the rag man had a Cadillac in the garage.
In the Good Old Days, you could go down to Leo Gervais’ corner store and pick out a glass bottle of freezing tonic (soda, to you) from his large, ice-filled drink box. Nehi’s Raspberry Soda was available, as was the iconic Orange Crush, the oddly brown Cream Soda and even Moxie, a perverse blend, bitter to a child’s taste. New initiates to the neighborhood were delivered to Leo, who had a demonic sense of humor and offered these kids a free bottle of the stuff if they could drink it down. In ten or more years, nobody ever did, most of them spitting it out in shock and dumping it in the street as Leo smiled and put it on their tabs.
In the Good Old Days, we built forts from the banks of snow piled up in the gutters by the giant plows which roamed the streets at night shaping order out of chaos. I could see them from my upstairs window as they surged inevitably forward, blocking driveways, piling the white fort material ever higher. In the Good Old Days, we shoveled. The driveways, the sidewalks, the paths to our doors, all the while looking over one shoulder to ascertain the stability of the icicles hanging precariously from the eaves of the house. Most of the adults we knew had horrible tales to tell of the unkind fates of shovelers they knew who were oblivious to the slings and arrows of outrageous icicles.
Not that we didn’t have a few other things to worry about. In the Good Old Days, we had catechisms at St. Patrick’s School. Which was fine for a while, what with all the glorious pictures of The Holy Family and all the saints, golden halos surrounding their sanctified noggins, flotillas of angels gleaming in the vast meadows of Heaven. Until we got to the other part. Oh oh. This didn’t look so good. Scary pictures of red devils wielding pitchforks, of all things, smirking through the flames, large flames, lapping at their haunches as they flitted about, uncaring, plotting how to capture souls. Our souls.
The catechisms showed us pictures of these souls, which were white and located somewhere, I thought, between your heart and your stomach, although I’m not exactly sure about this. You were okay if you kept your little soul a sparkling white, but that was not as simple as it looked. There were these things called sins, see, and when you somehow got one, you also got a little black smudge on your soul. Venial sins, the small ones, earned just a little smudge, but MORTAL sins, well, don’t ask. The mortal sin smudge was so big it took up almost all the white space. AND—if you were so careless as to actually DIE with a mortal sin on your soul….well, remember the place where the devils were frolicking? Welcome home, sucker.
Okay, so how do we get these sins, anyway? Well, it’s easy. Skip church on Sunday, punch another kid in the nose, cuss, cop a cherry off the fruit stand—all sins, bucko. And don’t even think about messing with a girl. Gerald McDonald, who was older than most of us, asked Sister Louise Clara if it was a sin to kiss a girl. “It all depends HOW you kiss her, Gerald,” said the nun. All of us were pretty sure Gerald was thinking about the sinful way. Now for the good news. If you went to confession and told Father Gavilan about all your sins, BINGO!—they were instantly wiped out. All you had to do was perform the penance Father Gavilan gave you—something like reciting five Our Fathers and five Hail Marys. Nobody minded that. The hard part was going into that dark little confessional, hearing the priest slap open the tiny door between you and him and then actually telling him the horrible things you’d done, things that probably nobody else had ever done in the history of the world, things that might shock the poor holy man. Sometimes, purely in an effort to spare Father Gavilan’s ears, you might leave a couple of things out. But that was a problem, too. You were not allowed to have Communion at Mass the next day if you still had sins on your soul and if you did, that was probably a sin, too. I developed a clever strategy to manage all this angst. I would shade the truth until I was about to die and then tell the attending padre everything, insuring redemption and a quick trip to heaven. I told my friend, Tom Rys about this plan and he said, “Yeah, well make sure you don’t get hit by a bus.” Tom always was a cynical sort.
A Soul Food Thanksgiving
When I was seventeen and looking to sample life outside New England, I applied for admission to about a dozen colleges scattered around the country. I was accepted by all of them, even the University of South Dakota, although a dean there kindly sent me a letter listing several reasons I would probably not be happy in freezing Vermillion. I eventually decided on Oklahoma State in the northeastern corner of the state, reachable after the world’s longest train ride and a subsequent bus trip from a dubious place called Ponca City. OSU is located in the small town of Stillwater. The best thing one might say about Stillwater is that it’s not the kind of place college students might be found running amok through a vast array of casinos and brothels, there being a deplorable shortage of each, and thus conducive to study and education. After one year of living in an asylum called East Bennett Hall (the nation’s largest college dormitory), I opted out and pledged a fraternity called Theta Kappa Phi.
Now, I am probably the antithesis of a likely fraternity candidate, what with their constant meetings, silly rituals and social requirements, but it was a step up from the carnival that was East Bennett Hall. The fraternity was small with about 35 members living in the house and a half-dozen others who showed up for dinner and/or the weekly meetings. Everybody was required to be at dinner, presided over by a matronly housemother who tinkled her little bell when it was time for Sally, the cook, to bring in the grub. Sally was a large, good-humored black woman who prepared the meals in huge vats crammed into a modest kitchen. The food was invariably first-rate and the cook was highly prized by the membership. Since Sally took her evening meal at the fraternity, when the pledges and members alternated in running off with the food to infuriate one another (important fraternity bonding activities), whichever party was carrying out the prank was required to take Sally along. I can remember the first time we pledges ever did this, sitting in the back seat of a speeding car along with Sally, separated by a gigantic urn of tea which sloshed all over us as we took the corners at breakneck speeds seeking to escape the hungry members. Even though she had sold her soul to an obvious band of lunatics, Sally had a boys-will-be-boys attitude about the whole thing and seemed to genuinely like us for some unfathomable reason.
When you decide to attend college some 1700 miles from your home, chances are you won’t be dropping in on the old neighborhood every weekend. Or hardly ever, for that matter. I rode back East with four friends the first Christmas break I was in Stillwater, a nonstop and never to be forgotten 24-hour rolling torture chamber, not likely to be repeated. When Sally found out that three of her boys—Joe Alexander from Albany, John Muscato from Schenectady and I—were hanging around Stillwater for Thanksgiving, she invited us to her house for dinner. “Now it might not be what you’re used to,” she warned us. We looked at each other, unperturbed. Sally, it’s dinner—how bad can it be?
This might be a good time to mention that Sally was only the second black person I had ever met. The first was Mickey Murphy, who lived down at the end of Boxford Street next to my best friend, Jackie Mercier. Mickey had been adopted by an Irish family and nobody thought anything of his skin color, he was just another kid. The Murphy back yard was full of long, hanging vines which Jackie Mercier called “Tarzan Swings,” and Mickey Murphy negotiated with speed and brilliance, earning him a unique respect with the other kids. “Mickey’s really good at this,” Jackie famously said one day. “Good thing, too. He can’t hit a baseball with a canoe paddle.”
On Thanksgiving Day, Joe, John and I followed Sally’s detailed instructions and finally located her modest home in a section of Stillwater reserved for blacks. None of us had ever been there before—or even knew the place existed. The neighborhood streets were uniformly of dirt, and narrow, barely allowing two oncoming cars to slide by one another. Large ditches filled with water lined the roads. Most of the small wooden houses were in some stage of disrepair but Sally’s was intact, cheery, with a host of children bobbing around the front yard. They circled around us, curious, as we drove up. Sally came to the rescue, smiling, and ushered us in. We met her parents, her grandparents, her husband, her children, her grandchildren, the works. Neighbors dropped by to view this strange white phenomenon.
When the dinner was finally ready, God was addressed. Abundant thanks was offered for the blessings of the day. Sally even thanked her heavenly Father for her three guests. Eventually, the food was delivered. There was turkey, of course, and there was….well….other stuff. Big lima beans. Black Eyed Peas. Collard Greens. Corn Bread Dressing. We had never seen most of it before. We ate it, though, and it was great. Sally watched, bemused.
“Next year, when you go home,” she said, “I know you’ll be missing Sally’s Thanksgiving dinner. But don’t you worry one bit! I wrote up the recipes for you. You can take them home with you and give them to your mothers. Courtesy of Sally, tell them.” Then she laughed and laughed.
The following year at Thanksgiving, I took the recipes from my notebook and gave them to my crusty grandmother, not one to be told what was needed for holiday dinners. “Here Nan,” I said. “I think you should be adding these to your inventory.”
She pushed her glasses up over her forehead, as she did when she read, and sat down, moving her lips as she went over the list. She took a long time considering this new proposal. The, she pulled her glasses down, stood up and looked at me. “What kind of place is this Oklahoma,” she wanted to know. “And who the hell have you been hanging around with.”
That’s all, folks….and Happy Thanksgiving.
