Good morning, all! I stayed up too late looking over one of Roy Webb's orchestrations for the Rodgers & Hart curio CHEE-CHEE, so when the alarm went off at 7:00, I had to sleep in for another hour. I have absolutely no plans for today; I called a couple of local nice restaurants in the neighborhod, and they are completely booked for today, so if I want a turkey dinner, I can always try the local diner, and I might. I'm also thinking about seeing a movie, but I may end up here watching DVDs and whatever else takes my fancy. I hope everyone, all the DRs and their families and loved ones, have a magnificent day.
Thanksgivings in my family between 1953 and the early 1970s usually happened at my Aunt Jean's home in Hamilton, Ohio. Jean was the second eldest of my mother's siblings, who literally screwed and clawed herself out of her parents' very lower middle class white trash poverty into upper middle class income; the person who most reminds me of my Aunt Jean's pretensions is Hyacinth Bucket, played by Patricia Routledge. My Aunt never suffered Hyacinth's humiliations but she definitely pitied her poor sisters and looked down on her brothers-in-law who worked blue collar jobs in construction and farming, like my dad and my Uncle Harold, both of whom were perhaps better examples of humanity to me than she.
So, Thanksgiving was usually a lot of fun: most, if not all, of my cousins would show up - depending on whether my Aunt Lois and Uncle Harold could come down from the Columbus farm, and there were usually families of five, if not all six, of my mother's siblings as well as my grandmother until her 1962 death. The food was generally wonderful since my grandparents' genepool was really high for cooking skills: Jean was a really good cook, and all of my aunts brought plenty of pies, cakes, and side dishes. My mother's pecan pies could be wonderful, depending on her mental state the day before Thanksgiving, so one never knew if the pies she brought were edible.
So, the meal was wonderful, but for me it was often a bore: my cousins the age of my brother Tom and me were all girls and after a while, unless we played a board game like monopoly, there were only so many games to be played. If we played hide and seek, we got hell for being noisy and running through the Thanksgiving (yawn) football game; tv was out since most of my uncles were watching football, except for my dad and Uncle Lyle who talked Middletown construction. The most interesting part of the day was if sibling wounds were picked at and shocking things about the childhood of my relatives came out. My Aunt Jean's whoring about never came up (neither did her elopement with the man her sister Dorothy thought she would marry), although I learned about that whenever my mother's jealousy of Jean's income came up at home. Mostly, the dinner discussion covered petty things, like Dorothy's Christmas doll that Ruth broke, Ruth working as a photographer's assistant, stolen boyfriend accusations,as well as gossip about all of the ghosts and apparitions in the house on Tenth Avenue which still appears as a place of terror in my nightmares, my grandmother's lecherous brother who constantly tried to molest his neices and my grandmother's refusal to believe her daughters. It was all funny then. Now I find much of it shocking and sad.
Now that my parents and five of her siblings and their spouses are all dead, I find that I really miss them. I appreciate their kindnesses and their eccentricities much more today than I did when they were alive. My father's mother's house in Kentucky was a place to visit, but my mother's family brought me up. My mother's mother loved me, my father's mother openly preferred her older son Dewey's boys. On my loonier days when I wish the check would arrive, or I fight wth a friend, see another romance crumble, or I lose a job, I rage at the universe for my misfortune and curse my existence, but I think overall I've had a pretty good run and I've pretty much worked at jobs I wanted, certainly a better run of work than my brother Tom who never liked the employment he inherited from our dad. I also know that all of my mother's siblings had much more than I ever realized in helping me become the person I am, for better or worse, and that's another story.
