Slow Down, Turkey

Nick and I were already upset about Thanksgiving being cancelled, and then my sister, Bridget and her family decided things were too crazy to drive down from the Bay Area. As the week progressed, so did my grumpiness. A new round of shutdowns in California have made me so irritated that I’m beginning to feel unstable. I have not accepted it with grace and dignity. At all. But as Thanksgiving Day dawned, I discovered that I had been given the gift of some breathing room, some space in my day to notice love and to feel gratitude. 

I love, love, love watching the Macy’s Day Parade, and this year, I had a leisurely morning to curl up on the sofa with my coffee and watch the whole thing, uninterrupted. Normally I would be frantic with my hostess duties, preparing for forty guests to descend. But this year, we were a cozy party of six — Nick, Chloe, Omar, myself and our good friends, Gene and Mark. Gene wasn’t due to check the turkey until 1:00 and Nick was on spinach casserole duty in the kitchen. I forwarded through the boring singing acts, pausing only for Broadway show numbers, interesting floats or any dancing, working my way to the Rockettes. They never fail to remind me of the years Nick and I spent in New York, the years I longed to be a professional dancer. Chloe arrived as the parade was ending and while she and Omar were assembling the Oreo Pudding, my friend, Amy called and we got to talking about our past Turkey Roasting Fails. Hers included a disaster with an oven bag and mine happened in New York, the first year I was married.

It was 1986. Nick and I were your classic starving artists living in New York City. We made a combined yearly income of $20,000 that year, considered in NY to be below poverty level. We lived in a fourth-floor walk-up studio apartment in a pre-war building in Hell’s Kitchen. Our bathtub sat in the kitchen next to our one sink and our toilet was in a water closet off the living area. Chunks of wet and crumbling plaster hung from the ceiling above the toilet due to leaking pipes all the way up and down the building, leaking so severe that the people who lived below us claimed they had to hold an umbrella when they used theirs. Nick and I spent our days auditioning, taking acting classes, dance classes, rehearsing, sleeping in 2-hour stints between these activities, trying to recover from working the graveyard shift as freelance legal proofreaders in law offices all over the city. When Thanksgiving 1986 rolled around, we didn’t have enough money for flights to his parents’ home in North Carolina or mine in Kentucky. We decided to make our first Thanksgiving together an adventure and cook the whole dinner ourselves. Up to that day, my cooking experience had included, as Nick was fond of telling people, “picking out cans of soup.”

“Have you ever made a turkey?” I asked him.

“No, have you?”

“No, but how hard can it be?” I said. 

We must have called Nick’s mom for some help. I must have sat at our little kitchen table and taken notes on the ingredients for her standard Southern recipes and the directions on how to execute them. Nick’s childhood Thanksgiving dishes were pretty much like mine. Our backgrounds were so similar. It had not been many years before, not long after I moved to New York, when Nick and I met in a play, that I immediately found a sense of home there in New York City. New York was about as far as a person could get from Owensboro, Kentucky and Cullowhee NC and we were both aspiring artists far from home, fighting for the right to compete in that very competitive and fast-paced city. It was such a big reach and we were so out of our element there. So finding someone so familiar and comfortable made me feel less alone in that alien world. 

“Mashed potatoes? Sweet potato casserole?” Nick asked.

“Check. Your mom told me how to make the sweet potatoes.”

“Spinach Casserole?”

“Check. That can replace Green Bean Casserole. And we gotta have Kentucky Derby Pie.”

“Does it have bourbon in it? Sign me up. Oreo Pudding?”

We pulled every bit of cash we had out of the bank and made a trip to the bodega down the street, lugging bags from 46th and 8th to 49th and 9th, then stepping over the people smoking crack on our front stoop and trudging up four long flights of stairs. We somehow pulled together all the side dishes and the two desserts. We unwrapped our 7-pound turkey, rubbed butter and salt and pepper all over it, stuck it in our tiny oven, then grabbed our warmest coats and headed down to Broadway to catch a little bit of the Macy’s Day Parade.

This was one of those surreal moments in New York when a piece of childhood comes to life right before your eyes like magic. We stood in the crowds and watched Spiderman float by, then Big Bird, then Shamu. Because of the biting November wind, we were forced to retreat to a bank ATM lobby for the remainder of the parade, but we had a goal —  to see Underdog.

Mission accomplished, we ran back to check on our wee turkey. It was nicely browned on the outside, looked the way it did in magazines, so we posed in front of our spread and took pictures of the table to commemorate the moment. When Nick started carving our little brown bird, then pulled its wings and legs off, we noticed a patch of white plastic. We were perplexed.

“Wait a minute, what’s that?” I asked. “There’s something inside here.”

Of course, we had not known about the plastic package of organs and necks stuffed in our guy. We tossed him in the trash and had a meal of side dishes washed down with cheap wine.

A couple of years later, after finding out we were expecting a baby, we moved back to Nick’s hometown. I was telling Nick’s Mom stories about how difficult our life was in New York, about never having enough money, having to buy one roll of toilet paper at a time and eating popcorn for dinner and she said, “You know, someday you’ll look back on these years of struggling as the best years of your lives.”

She was wrong. I mean, I wouldn’t trade those years in New York or Thanksgiving 1986 for anything, and 30 years have smoothed the jagged edges of that difficult time. I do look back on that period with fondness and lightness. But as I mourn the loss of Thanksgivings past, what I see is life getting better and better each year. 2020 was the first year that I had time to just sit and talk with Chloe. Once I got used to her wearing her mask the whole day, we had a great time. We played Bananagrams, I showed her how to make the Derby Pie and listened to her ideas about a Ben Folds musical. Chloe had time to teach Omar how to make the Oreo Pudding and he pitched her an idea for a sitcom. Gene and I chatted while he carved the turkey and Nick and Mark sat in the rockers on the front porch. Later, the five of us adults sat around the fire pit drinking wine and listening to music until the cold ran us inside. 

It’s not that I’m glad we were forced to cancel our yearly Thanksgiving Bash. I missed my sister and I missed the fun, but if I choose to look at the bright side of this year’s Covid restrictions, I can see that it gave me the space and the time to slow down. This year, I had time to remember the love of the past and to notice the love in the present. In the end, gratitude overpowered my irritation.