New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
Still giving thanks on a very different Thanksgiving
When I was a kid in a past century, everybody in my family piled into my parents’ station wagon on Thanksgiving morning and headed out to Granny’s house for a big holiday feast.
This wasn’t literally “over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s house we go.” She lived about five miles away and not in the woods, so it was an easy ride from Mount Kisco, N.Y., to Bedford Village.
When my wife was a kid, she and her sister and their parents drove from Old Lyme down to Philadelphia to join the grandparents and Uncle George and Aunt Mabel around a big table every Thanksgiving Day.
My granny lived alone in a big, colonial house near the village green. She had an excellent cook, Marie, who kept bringing in to us more turkey, more stuffing, more gravy, more corn, more mashed potatoes, more biscuits, then the pumpkin and apple pie. Sweet!
Who lives in that house now? I haven’t a clue. Granny died in 1976, followed in the decades afterward by my parents. My wife’s grandparents and parents also have left us, along with Uncle George and Aunt Mabel.
On many Thanksgiving weekends my brother organized a “Turkey Bowl” touch football game, which gave us a chance to reunite with our old friends. That’s gone, too, and we don’t see those friends much anymore.
But then my brother and I got married and produced kids of our own with whom to celebrate the holidays. He’s been lucky that two of his kids, now with kids of their own, have settled near him and his wife in suburban Washington, D.C.
Not so for our kids! They lit out together for L.A. Even without COVID’s restrictions it has been difficult to be with them on Thanksgiving. And this year, forget about it.
For about five years our good friends Barbara O’Brien and
Chris Udry invited us and other friends to share Thanksgiving lunch around their table in our East Rock neighborhood of New Haven. It was great fun. But several years ago they moved to Chicago. As Carole King asked in her song “So Far Away”: “Doesn’t anybody stay in one place anymore?”
For nigh unto 25 years I have gotten up on Thanksgiving morning and driven out to Madison for the “Turkey Trot,” a festive road race that attracts the entire community and folks such as me from nearby places. My next-door neighbor Bill and I drove out there together. This year, of course, the race has gone “virtual.”
My wife and kids learned long ago that no matter how we all celebrate Thanksgiving or where we are, at some point that day I will put on Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree.” This is
Guthrie’s epic tale of getting busted for littering by “Officer Obie” in Stockbridge, Mass., on Thanksgiving
Day when Arlo and his buds tried to help their host Alice by getting rid of her garbage. I also played it for Bill on our way out to that race in Madison.
Well now, here we all are in this infernal pandemic, with Thanksgiving upon us. The doctors at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have sternly warned us not to travel, not to spend Thanksgiving with people outside our household “pods.” New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker is pleading with us to follow that advice.
“Natalie and I have decided to spend Thanksgiving with our girls,” Elicker said in an email. “But we’ll be Zooming in other family members. It’s a hard conversation to have with loved ones, many of whom are feeling isolated, but we all want many more Thanksgivings together. This one is just not worth the risk.”
He’s right. And so what now for Thanksgiving 2020?
I will begin the morning with a run, but it will be a solitary one, through the quiet streets of East Rock. Later in the day my wife and I, “home alone” but together, and in the company of our dog and two cats, will Zoom with our daughters and our son-in-law, 3,000 miles away.
At mid-morning my wife and I will do something we had always talked about doing but had never accomplished: we will deliver meals for the Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen. This is being done in cooperation with the Interfaith Volunteer Care Givers of Greater New Haven and Yale Hospitality, who will make the food.
We have been given our delivery route, 10 homes on Quinnipiac Avenue, Eastern Street, Fairmont Avenue and Welcome
Street. We will meet Carmen, Christine, Carol, Gladys, Audrey, Carl and all the others. We are looking forward to it.
“Thanks so much for stepping up this crazy year,” the organizers told us while sending our list of recipients. “Next year things will be so much better.”
Oh yes, they will!
Meanwhile, we’ll be giving thanks for our good health, our home, having each other and that dog and those cats, our daughters, our son-in-law, our extended family in faraway states, our friends and neighbors, our neighborhood, our city, our state and our wise electorate.
We’re still here. We persevere. And as a symbol of that perseverance, this year we’ll drink a toast to Arlo Guthrie, who is still with us, as I cue up “Alice’s Restaurant.” “You can get anything you want…”