A note of ambivalent thanks

A note of ambivalent thanks
by David Benjamin

“Lord every year we gather here/ To eat around this table/ Give us the strength to stomach as much/ As fast as we are able…”
— Loudon Wainwright III

MADISON, Wis. — Thank God that’s over.

At some point on every third Thursday in November, it dawns on me that I really don’t like Thanksgiving. Partly, it’s the weather. Hereabouts, Thanksgiving tends to be gray, chilly, often damp and sometimes treacherously snowy — the sort of day you want to stay off the highway, hole up antisocially at home and watch Detroit and Dallas play candy-ass indoor football. The weather here (outdoors) is pretty much the same weather the Pilgrims had, except that the Mayflower exiles had the added pleasure of a clammy, bone-chilling 20-mph northeast wind off Plymouth Bay.

The Pilgrims deserve a measure of homage, of course, for patching together a harvest feast after what had to have been one of history’s sparsest harvests. Underdressed for the climate in a scary-ass woods and surrounded by strange natives who might turn hostile any minute, the Pilgrims were making the best of a dubious existence. That first Thanksgiving was probably less a celebration than it was an effort to humor the neighborhood Wampanoags — at least ’til the Puritans could build up enough population and weaponry to launch the White Man’s 200-year campaign of scorched-earth genocide against the actual first Americans.

When I slip my feet into the moccasins of those luckless Wampanoags, thankfulness is not the first emotion that comes to mind.

And then there’s the traditional turkey, which has never been my favorite protein — bland, white, dry and soporific. If turkey dinner were a person, it would be William Howard Taft, his skin crispy and golden, served piping-hot with an apple in his mouth on a bed of yams and cranberry sauce, but still somehow completely unmemorable. Of course, I understand the turkey imperative. It’s what the Pilgrims had. But they had no choice. They were foraging in the woods for any flesh-bearing critter they could run down and hit with a stick. If the Pilgrim hunters’ luck on the third Wednesday of November had been slightly different, America’s traditional Thanksgiving dish might have turned out to be barbecued squirrel.

But, look. Even if turkey was the blue-plate special at Plymouth Rock, why exactly do we keep ordering it? I mean, maybe there’s a reason most families roast only one turkey a year. We’ve built our biggest food holiday of the year on a menu written by an outcast band of religious ascetics who were hungry enough to regard tree bark as a gourmet delicacy. Except for roast turkey, what have the Pilgrims contributed to America’s vast and sumptuous culinary legacy? How many Pilgrim restaurants are there in your neighborhood?

My misgivings about Thanksgiving, of course, go beyond the main dish. There’s also the matter of family gatherings, which I decided — early in life — are best avoided except under duress. I founded this bias on the long-proven axiom that you can choose your friends but you can’t choose your relatives. I had not chosen these people! Far too often, these unwelcome holidays among my mother’s immense extended family required a journey into “the country.” We all crammed into cars in unaccustomed clothing and, over the river and through the woods, ended up in one of the clan’s drafty and — on Thanksgiving — overcrowded farmhouses. I didn’t like the country. Farmhouses held no rustic charm. I was a city kid. The metropolitan population of Tomah was almost 5,000. It had paved streets, dime stores, comic books, candy counters, a bar on almost every corner, two supper clubs, a pool hall, a public library, two hospitals and a high school. Civilization! I could walk all the way from the creamery to the ranger station without once having to worry about stepping in cowshit.

If perchance we didn’t have to do Thanksgiving in the country, we had to go up to T.J.’s. T.J. was my mean grandfather. On Thanksgiving, after we had all filled our paper plates with turkey, spuds and stuffing, and scattered to eat off our laps, T.J. would patrol his big old house like the Avenging Puritan, pouncing and snarling if he saw anybody having fun. He would launch straight into a splay-haired rage if one of the kids — there were dozens of us, unwashed, barbaric and infested with communicable diseases — slopped our gravy or tried to turn on the record player.

Lately — and for this I’m thankful — the family aspect of Thanksgiving has improved. Although I’ve lost my big sister Peg and my kid brother Bill, I’ve inherited from my late dad, Big Bill, a pleasant houseful of stepbrothers, stepsisters and other shirt-tail relations whose names I remember only erratically. I still tend to call Heather Stacy and Stacy Jennie. However, even though they live in “the country,” and despite their alarming tendency toward antediluvian politics, I’ve warmed to this hodgepodge of non-blood relatives. Have I mellowed?

The better guess is that they’ve mellowed toward me, who am not the easiest of guests. After all, I dislike Thanksgiving and they can probably tell. But nobody (except a niece named Sonnet) scolds my curmudgeonage. My stepfamily is a blessedly informal and largely lovable bunch — humorously inclined and infinitely tolerant of my profane prose, my Asian spouse and the Obama button on my hat.

These folks, my second (or third, or fourth) family, tend to mimic much of what the Pilgrims did a few centuries ago, staging a makeshift holiday in the middle of the week, squandering their sparse store of provender on feast and festival, mustering up too much gratitude for a handful of mixed blessings, remembering the dead and making the best of a dubious existence in a scary-ass world.

Thank God for that.