Thanksgiving

You know it’s almost Thanksgiving when I open my desk drawer and blow the dust off my recipe file. My kids are grown, it’s just Michael and me, and who needs to cook for two. But this year, like every year, the whole extended family will congregate in my home, a gaggle of sons and daughters, nieces and nephews and grandchildren. Like many families, our religious convictions are divided. Some go to mass. Others pray at shul. But Thanksgiving is our glue, the common link that binds us together.

The recipes are fanned out on my kitchen table. Like tarot cards, I touch them with my fingertips. The pumpkin bread recipe that’s been with me for forty years is on a sheet of notebook paper. We were in Ann Arbor then and newly married. My husband was in law school, and I was just finishing college.

I knew how to write an essay and even calculate a statistics problem but couldn’t cook toast. Michael, in a glut of confidence, invited twenty people to our tiny apartment for Thanksgiving. “I’ll cook the bird,” he said. “Everyone will help.”

The day of I was in a panic but Michael didn’t break a sweat. He had enlisted all our neighbors and every oven on the third floor. In minutes, our living room/dining room/kitchen/ bedroom was brimming with people. To my horror, two law professors and their wives showed up. Grown-ups!! But their hands were swaddled in kitchen towels bearing gifts. One after another a parade of new friends walked through our door. Each presented an offering. I bought a folder and started my recipe file the next day.

There’s the carrot cake recipe that’s three longhand pages written by my Aunt Lilly. She was older then, the penciled letters shaky. Even though she was a first generation American, she still cooked in Yiddish. Take a bissel sugar, a pinch of salt, a glass of flour, she begins. And like the ending of a good story, the last sentence wraps things up. God willing ,you should live a happy and healthy life with not a crumb left over.

Grandma Mildred was one hundred percent assimilated. She drove a red Volkswagen Beetle, played golf three days a week, and was the only person my father-in-law was afraid of. “Get a haircut!” she’d bark. “Put on a tie!” She loved Jell-O molds. Her recipes are short and to the point. For the holiday, chunks of pineapple and cranberries floated in a barge of strawberry gelatin. She didn’t mix and measure. She just opened cans and dumped.

A sweet potato casserole was my children’s favorite, both to cook and to eat. The recipe is on an index card in my friend Billie’s beautiful cursive loops. It’s the handwriting of an English teacher who loved to teach almost as much as she loved to bake. Whenever there was a crisis in my life, Billie was there. She was the sort of person who shared her table with strangers, who opened her home to anyone who needed a meal or a shoulder to cry on. She died of cancer nine years ago.

“Could we help?” my children would ask. Pancake syrup, marshmallows, tubs of butter. Little sticky hands would smear the cabinets, the counters, their hair. We’d laugh and finger paint each other’s aprons. That was part of Thanksgiving, too.

Our family grows exponentially. While there have been many losses, our home this November will be filled with babies, teeming with the next generation. I’ll pass my file on in due time. The papers in it are weathered and ragged around the edges just like me. Sure I can enter the recipes into my computer. Just press a button and they’ll be either saved or shared. It’s so clean. It’s so neat. It’s so easy. But there’s something about my recipes that would get lost in the translation. After all, the ones with the smudges have always been the best.