turkey

I love my relatives and friends, and I am grateful to have them, but I prefer not visiting them on Thanksgiving. I don’t need to get into that old ass argument about what the holiday really means, because really who gives a fuck. Everybody wants food, and everybody wants a holiday. Period. So it’s not going away, despite periodic bleatings of ‘protest’ – something about the Native Americans giving the gift of corn to the white man, who pays him back disproportionately in mass murder.

Thanksgiving exhausts me. You wind up traveling fifty-hundred hours to grandma’s house, over the river and through the woods. You get there and it’s hot as hell from all the burners going, and this makes me sluggish, as the winter boots, socks and sweater that I wore to keep me warm on the way are totally superfluous at this point.

The worst part of it is the food. You can’t tell by looking at me, but I don’t really like food. I’m still waiting for those food pills of the future from the Jetsons to be invented. Food has too many demands. I hate having to stop what I’m doing to eat it, and I don’t like making a big deal out of shopping, planning meals, cooking, washing dishes — I am a good baker though, and that’s because I like cake. It’s probably politically incorrect for me to say this but I don’t give a shit – generally, I’m afraid of food.

A hot house filled with the olfactory overload of food — jammed to the gills with all this stuff we don’t need to be eating, gives me complex feelings. Really on Thanksgiving, under the guise of celebrating gratitude, we’re really celebrating gluttony. Thanksgiving is a ‘heavy’ holiday — the demands of travel, the heat of the burners and oven filling the house, the exhaustion from watching the host bust their ass sweating and carrying all those trays, the claustrophobia you get from the excess of food filling every crack and crevice, having to help the host clear the table and wash dishes — having to rush back home again because the next day I usually have to go to work; and finally, going to bed with a bloated gut.

In conclusion, I hope that this post doesn’t cause my loved ones to disinvite me to Thanksgiving dinner.

On Thanksgiving I saw my grandma at the Hebrew Home for the Aged at Riverdale. It was lunchtime. She sat with her assigned table mates, Bobby and Matt. Bobby calls everybody honey. He uses the word like people use salt: “Hey there honey! Haven’t seen you in a while honey! Happy Thanksgiving there honey,” he says.

Matt’s a small man who speaks softly. He was asleep in his chair wearing his white disposable bib when I came. When I sat down, he woke up.

“Ohhh! Good to see you! You look great!” He said.

“Yeah, you look great there honey,” says Bobby.

Bobby told us that the cook there is Italian. “Yeah, they make the spaghetti here downstairs honey. They make it there. The cook’s Italian. They make it good there honey.”

Today the attendants served the seniors turkey dinner. But Bobby always talks about spaghetti.

I’ve chatted with Bobby and Matt before. I found out that Bobby used to be an undertaker’s assistant. He worked for his uncle and says he never got paid. “No he didn’t pay me honey, no.”

Behind us at another table was the woman who takes her shoes off and puts her feet up on the table. Today she had taken her shirt off, so she sat there topless, no bra. Her feet were on the table as usual.

“Hey honey put some clothes on there honey!” Bobby said.

“Oh that woman’s crazy,” grandma said, making a shooing motion.

“Leave her alone,” said Matt, looking back again. Then Matt told me, “I wonder if I went over there and told her to stand on the table if she’d do a dance for me.”

“Ahahahaha! You mean like a stripper?” I said. Matt cracks me up with these bits. Matt laughed too. The old woman, she didn’t look bad.