Thursday, November 28th

Lois, Patience, and Monika worked on preparing Thanksgiving dinner (with all the trimmings!) while Jake and I continued clearing Merlin’s old workroom. Tony and Dawn arrived before noon, so Jake and I knocked off to change into party clothes. Then the family arrived thick and fast while the last-minute preparations for the meal were completed. Lois was calm until the last hour or so before the meal, when she had to cope with the final flurry of preparations.

We had a wonderful meal of turkey and dressing and potatoes and salads and vegetables, but we totally forgot to put out the cranberry sauce! It was amazing that none of us remembered to get it from the refrigerator, but we were all busy eating and talking. All the guests had brought salads and deserts and that gave us a wonderful variety of foods to choose from. Bill’s Chinese salad was so appreciated by folks that Patience and Monika had him describe it the next day and wrote down the recipe to try at home.

After the main course of dinner we did the tradition “dance for your dessert” ritual in which Lois guided us through English Contradances. Lois explained each dance in detail since we always have some new folk, and she was quite hoarse by the end of the four dances. Dawn was a rookie this time, but she joined in enthusiastically and caught on quickly. Tony and David continued their tradition of trying to trip each other during the dances, and we all tried to collide with other couples if they didn’t sashay out of the way quickly enough in one dance. This might not quite be dancing as the upper class Colonials did it during Revolutionary War, I imagine, but it is a heck of a lot of fun! Ultimately everyone who was able joined in, even Phyllis with her artificial knee danced a few rounds. We had up to 20 people dancing at a time—all the adults. Only Wade and James, David and Gigi’s boys, were not dancing at first and by the end even 3-year old James danced by hanging on to his father for a couple of the dances (we start them young!). With that many people we used almost every square inch of the big basement room, and I was glad Lois and Monika had cleared it.

Many of the nieces and nephews plus my son Martin had brought desserts, so we had a plethora of high-sugar, high-fat, high-calorie, but also high-taste desserts to choose from including brownies, cheesecake, pumpkin pie, cookies, and meringues. I held myself down to a little of Martin’s homemade bundt cake with the blackberry frosting, combined with some cheesecake with blackberry topping that Dawn had made. Then we all chatted for the rest of the evening. I passed around pictures of our new truck, which greatly surprised all the relatives. When Patience told Beth about it over the phone, Beth replied, “You’re shittin’ me!”, which kind of reflects the general astonishment. I also talked about our plans to go camping with the truck for the next few years.

I asked David about his dreams or plans for the future, and he surprised me by saying he didn’t really have dreams, just goals that he intended to accomplish over a 1-year or 5-year time period. Winning the Chicago to Mackinaw Island race next year was an example of the former, and sailing the Trans-Pacific race from California to Hawaii was an example of the latter. To me, the idea of racing a sailboat all alone in stormy seas is quite daunting. He said he set the goals for business as well as his personal life, and usually completed the five-year goals in about three years. The only goal he had abandoned was riding a bicycle across the entire United States—he said the more he practiced the longer distances the more boring it became, which surely was a sign to chuck the goal. The interesting thing was that he wrote these goals down and I was so intrigued that I asked him for a copy of any of these old goal statements he might have lying around. He might be one of the few people in the world that can actually succeed in making a New Year’s resolution come true!

I chatted with Melissa for a while and she seemed to be happy and enjoying her junior year in high school. She regaled me with the stories of her two pet mice, the cat, and the two Rottweilers. She said she used to have three mice, but the male died, which might be a blessing considering that the other two mice were both females. The cat seemed to get along fine with the mice as long as they didn’t run away or, in a word, act like mice. She could take them patting her whiskers and so on, but when they ran away she seemed to want to crouch and pounce as if she suddenly remembered they were “prey” and she was “predator”. This ambivalence propagated up the food chain in that the younger Rottweiler would chase the cat while Sasha, the older dog who had been raised from young with the cat, would fend off the young dog’s charges and protect her. Melissa described all this so vividly that I suddenly had a mental image of a dog chasing a cat chasing a mouse while another dog was barking and trying to interfere. Wouldn’t that be a sight?

Melissa had joined the chess club in school and brought along a roll-up chessboard and pieces from her school, which she soon put to good use. She set up the board and challenged all comers in chess while Tony, Jerry, and others kibitzed. She played her dad, Michael, Tony, Jake and myself, winning several games. I had not played in many years and felt like I was fighting for my life but in the end was lucky enough to eke out a victory—she was quite good.

Michael told me he was interested in studying engineering in college and had started visiting different campuses. He had liked the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus, but was going to look at several others in the Illinois area. We invited him to look at schools in the Washington D.C. area while visiting us and seeing the sights, so we will see if that works out. He later took some pictures while trying out my digital camera as his mom was thinking about buying one for the next family camera. They enjoyed the “instant replay” aspect of the digital camera, which allows you to immediately delete the really bad pictures and keep only the good ones, but I also mentioned the better ability to send and share pictures with the family via email and disks.

The evening passed in a flash. Emily and Margaret played a violin duet, followed by duets with Patience on the violin and Lois on the oboe. I showed some of our picture albums from the last year to Phyllis and Wendy, who seemed to enjoy them (even the photo-poems!). Joe checked on football scores and reported them back to the rest of us. Unfortunately, the Redskins lost, but other than that a good time was had by all. Speaking of the Redskins, Martin told us the story of what had happened to the drinking glasses we had donated to the coop. Most of those were old Redskins glasses that we had picked up at garage sales over the years (buy them new? Don’t be silly!). Well it seems the coop members became quite agitated over the real or imagined slur to Native Americans, but still wanted to use the glasses. So they carefully steamed off all the team decals and are now using the neutered but politically correct glassware. That sparked off a memory of the feminists protesting Ford Motor Company naming a sports car the “Probe” and trying to get them to change the name. And even further back I remembered that master of symbolic gestures, Jimmy Carter, and his refusal to light the national Christmas tree for two years because Iran was holding U.S. hostages. Ah yes, the cumulative effect of those trivial symbolic acts was to make American Liberalism the political force it now is in current U.S. politics, which is to say, negligible. Martin left later that evening to return home and prepare for the final defense of his thesis which was scheduled for the following Monday. So we wished him well and watched him drive off. Shortly thereafter, we also said good-bye to the other families as they each chose a parting gift of Bob and Monika’s Homemade Jam and left to return home.

Copyright 2002 by Robert W. Holt