My family's tragic association with Thanksgiving began in 1978. At that Thanksgiving meal, my great-grandfather left the table and disappeared. No one knows if it was the canned cranberry sauce, the turkey, the piles and piles of pie or the fact that he was losing terribly at poker, but he died in the bathroom. His body had fallen against the door, and the 65 years of smoking, drinking and kielbasa had made his body a concrete barrier. So, as the story goes, armed with an umbrella and a socket wrench, Aunt Toots had to scale a drain pipe and climb in from the outside. There were some efforts to revive him, but alas, it was too late.
My great-grandmother followed suit in the bitter cold of November 1987. She had threatened for years that she would die around the holidays and we would all be sorry. She did, and we weren't. Five years ago, it seemed like my grandmother was next. While managing a 15-pound turkey the size of a small child, she slipped and fell after stepping on a pile of gravy on the floor. Thankfully, she just suffered a concussion.
Food-wise, there hasn't been much more luck. Last year there was a sulfuric-smelling, rotted turkey and we were left to the whims of grocery store butchers who laughed, wanted to know how badly we wanted a turkey and how much cash we had. There was a disasterous experiment that fused together sausage and stuffing, a green-bean casserole that closely resembled vomit and the cheesecake incident of 1998.
Sick of the standard pie, she spent hours making a cheesecake in an effort to ""create new traditions."" Underestimating the amount of time it would take a cheesecake to cool, she set it outside. That was mistake number one. Fifteen minutes later, a high-pitched scream echoed throughout the house. She had happened on a fat old squirrel burrowing through the cake, shooed it off only to discover that it was now lopsided and had little footprints running across the top. Most people would have given up, but not Maryellen Miskimen. No, she came up with the ingenious idea to cover the top with minature chocolate chips. Too bad, we discovered later, that the chocolate chips closely resembled something else the squirrel left behind.
It's been the same gathering of people for as long as I can remember.
There's a nine-fingered aunt—her index finger was lost to a county zoo chimpanzee and is now, 16 years later, still on ice in her freezer, next to the vanilla ice cream—my grandmother's cousin Louise, who lost a nose to cancer, in the corner; my brother who just revealed that he does not like poker, football, Merkt's cheese spread or anything else near and dear to the family and has been shunned; a hard-of-hearing grandfather whose solution is to just talk louder; and a grandmother who mixes up all four of her grandchildren after two glasses of Sutter Home wine.
My cousin did attempt to bring her boyfriend one year. He was consequently quizzed on his family, which resulted in a showdown of epic porportion of who had the most interesting black sheep. His presentation? An aunt who was placed in the witness protection program after testifying against Domincian Republic drug runners. Our counter? My great-uncle, a schizophrenic who was acquitted on the insanity plea in a 1970s murder case after one of his personalities killed his wife with a baseball bat. The boyfriend never came back.
I'm looking forward to Thanksgiving this year.
