Home Alone

 With apologies to Mister Culkin, I was struck by the big ask the Centers For Disease Control and most government officials made at the onset of the holiday season: Stay Home. No over the river. No through the woods. No grandma's house. Not this year. Yet another hallmark that will leave a mark. "Remember that year when we stayed at home and ate Swanson's TV Dinners for Thanksgiving?"

I have written here before about the festival of fear and loathing my college roommate and I endured the November after our collective best friend died. We politely declined my parents' invitation to accompany them to our cousins' farm for the annual feast and frolic in the beet fields. We were far too wrapped up in our grief to imagine fun of any kind, let alone interacting with extended family. So instead, my mother made us the home version of the game, all wrapped in foil and sealed in Tupperware with specific instructions about how to heat and serve the contents. Looking back, I can take some joy from the gesture, but at the time, my buddy and I were too preoccupied with darkness to let that little light in. 

Then there was the Thanksgiving my family awaited news about my father's imminent passing. My dad, whose sense of time and timing was always a point of discussion, had the horrible bad taste to crash land into a burn ward in the days just before Thanksgiving. Once again, my older brother, his wife and my mother marshaled their forces and put out the traditional meal in hopes that some semblance of normal might permeate the scene. I do not remember tasting any of it. I can recall how it looked. It looked like it always had. Except something was missing. Ironic, since my parents had been divorced for several years at that point and my father's presence was lacking after that. But this was more final than any divorce decree. 

When I moved to California, I tried to recreate many of the dishes and doings that I remembered from my youth. Right down to Uncle Marvin's sweet gherkins. Those first few years felt a little hollow, and I longed for the annual trek to the beet farm and all the cousins and all the potentially dangerous activities involving farm equipment. And all the food. Suddenly finding myself in charge of cooking that poultry monstrosity was a challenge I felt that I could master.

And now, on the eve of our tiniest Thanksgiving in the years since my son was born, I took heart in his insistence that I make a turkey "like you always do." My mother will most likely be dining alone. My brothers will be having their own self-contained Thanksbubble. There will be phone calls. There have always been phone calls. These will be a little different. We will talk about those things for which we are thankful. And then we'll spend some time complaining about the isolation. Kind of the antithesis of the whole celebratory feast model. But, as my mother points out, we've had plenty of Thanksgivings, and we can look forward to a time when this is the one we tell stories about.