franksolich's primitive Thanksgiving

[franksolich]

This tale, which is based upon various people and experiences in real life, is dedicated to the primitives in the cooking and baking forum on Skins‘s island, with the hopes that they enjoy it.

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franksolich’s primitive Thanksgiving.  “What are you going to do?” the neighbor’s wife asked me; “this’ll be the first time in fourteen years you haven’t spent Thanksgiving dinner with us.”

“I dunno,” I said; “but I think I’ll just sit back and let whatever’s to happen, happen.”

The neighbor and his family--which includes two 13-year-old twin daughters, an 11-year-old son, a 4-year-old boy, and a 2-year old girl--are going to be spending Thanksgiving with her brother and his family down in Kansas City.

Their decision was more heart-wrenching than it needed to be; they were really and truly concerned for franksolich…..and in fact they’d invited me to come along.

I’d demurred, however; all I do is eat and run anyway.

And ever since Auntie died a few years ago, Thanksgiving dinners there haven’t been the same.

Auntie had been the youngest aunt of the neighbor’s wife, and a one-time hippiechick.  By the time I knew her, she was nearing sixty, grossly obese, punctured from ear-lobes to navel with body-piercings and their accompanying hardware, and tattooed all over.  She had jugs that sagged halfway down her torso, and was always heavily medicated.

Auntie lived in a half-way house down in Kansas City.

She’d always arrived, accompanied with a responsible social worker, to Sioux City, Iowa on the bus from Kansas City.  The social worker had family in northwestern Iowa, and was always happy for the chance for a free ride there for the holiday.

Auntie always arrived into Sioux City in the middle of the night, when few if any people were around to behold her, and then after a day of being secreted with the neighbor’s family, was driven back to the bus depot during the middle of the night, when few if any people were around to see her in all her sordid glory.

Auntie never cared much for me; being a nice guy, I always kept a good distance between us, but it always seemed the mere sight of franksolich pushed one of her “hot buttons,” triggering a violent emotional discombobulation, and she sometimes had to be forcibly subdued and sent to bed.

I never did know what was up with that; franksolich isn’t anybody to be scared of.

But after she died three years ago, Thanksgiving dinners with the neighbor’s family weren’t ever the same.

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“Well, I’m going to be worrying about you all the time we’re gone,” the neighbor’s wife said.

“Do you know what you’re going to have, or should I fix part of a turkey for you, beforehand?”

Not to worry, I said; “the other day at the grocery store in the big city, I spied what were advertised as ‘baking potatoes,’ white potatoes that’d already been scrubbed, at forty-nine cents each, and bought three of them.

“For Thanksgiving, I’ll have one heaped with sour cream, a second coated with blue cheese salad dressing, and the third the normal way, with real butter and salt-and-pepper.”

“But you’ve been invited to other places,” she pointed out.  [The business partner], [the femme], [the retired banker’s wife], [the widow of the guy who used to scoop grain at the local elevator five and a half days a week], [the neighbor’s older brother’s family], [the retired property caretaker and his family], [the current property caretaker and his wife], &c., &c., &c.

“I’d feel better if you spent Thanksgiving with someone,” she insisted.

“But really, no,” I replied; “this time, I want to be alone, to see what happens.”

to be continued

[franksolich]

“I tell you what,” I said to the property caretaker in the morning; “if I get bored any time Thanksgiving Day, I promise I’ll go over to your brother’s house.”

The caretaker had repeated his invitation for me to go spend the holiday with him; he and his wife are commemorating it with his brother, sister-in-law, and family.

“I don’t understand why so many people seem so concerned that I want to spend the day here at home.

“It’s not that I’m being anti-social and seeking solitude,” I pointed out; “I just want to hang around here to see what happens.  Maybe nothing’ll happen, maybe something’ll happen.

“You know I do things like that, once in a while.

“Just sit back, relax, get mellow, and see what naturally happens.

“I was the next-to-the-last in a large family; it’s my nature to be passive.

“Not to mention that being so low on the totem pole, I was aware from the start that I wouldn’t ever have any say in what’d happened, so I learned to just take things as they come.

“And remember--whether something happens or not, I’ll be over at your place in the evening, to collect your leftovers.

“I really like the six five weeks between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day when, because everybody else is ‘tired’ of turkey and its accompaniments, I get their leftovers.

“And then on Friday, I’ll be at the bar in town for supper with you and your wife, and on Saturday, a bunch of us are having supper at your place.

“It’ll be a good Thanksgiving.

“It’ll be good because it’s not just one day; it’s stretched out.

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“In fact, it brings to mind the holidays of my childhood, when necessity compelled the family to observe holidays in random bits-and-pieces over several days, not just one day.”

I have no idea what holidays were like for my family before my time, but by the time my younger brother and I came into being, it was rare, if ever, that a serious holiday was actually observed on its calendar date.

Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s Day.

In fact, nearly all the time, it was observed the weekend following the holiday itself.

My father was a hospital administrator, in addition to being a registered nurse and anesthetist.  My mother was a registered nurse.

Because my father was the highest-paid person on the payroll, he felt that he had an obligation to work harder than everybody else, and to put up with more trouble and inconvenience than lesser-paid people.

In my time, he was administrator of a 40-45-bed hospital in a small town alongside the placid Platte River of Nebraska, a reasonably new Y-shaped single-floored building that meandered over a city block.

And then he was administrator of another 40-45-bed hospital in a town in the heart of the Sandhills of Nebraska, an older brick building four stories high that was long and narrow, running the length of a city block.

On the holidays, if a physician determined a patient would be okay being away from the hospital for several hours, spending the day with his family, the patient was temporarily released.

The normal average “census” was usually circa 25 patients a day, but because of all these temporary “leaves,” on a holiday itself there were usually only 6-8 patients still abed.

Now, nobody wants to work on a holiday; they’d just as soon spent it with their families.

So on the holiday itself, all the rest of the help--the laundry women, the people in the kitchen, the maintenance men, the nurses--were given the day off, and my parents ran the hospital all by themselves.

(Physicians of course were not employees of the hospital, coming and going as they wished, or were requested.)

Which they could do, of course, given their qualifications, and the extraordinarily-low patient count.  They not only nursed, but also cooked the meals, did the laundry as needed, cleaned the halls and rooms as needed, fixed the furnace as needed, shoveled the snow as needed, emptied the trash as needed.

The parents were all-purpose people.

And both places were small towns, circa 3,000 people, meaning that if help were needed, well, help was within walking distance or just a couple of minutes via automobile.

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“This meant that on many holidays themselves, they were just ordinary days back at home.

“Yeah, sure, like on Christmas Day, one of the older brothers or sisters had to take my younger brother and me to church--everybody else having attended Midnight Mass--and there was stuff from Santa Claus under the Christmas tree, but things such as the big dinner and opening presents had to be done at some later date.

slightly obscured so as to not offend sensibilities

“It used to freak my playmates out, that we wouldn’t open presents until two or three days past December 25.

“Of course, these were the sorts of people who were too impatient to wait until Christmas Day to open theirs, opening them on Christmas Eve instead, which to me seemed a sacrilege.

“Early on, I absorbed the notion--and an eminently reasonable one, I think--that people who open presents on Christmas Eve rather than Christmas Day have poor impulse control, no self-restraint, no appreciation for delayed gratification, and so consequently get into all sorts of trouble later on in life.

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“As things evolved, but still when I was a kid, there was a further reason--the older brothers and sisters going away to college, embarking upon careers, getting married and starting families.

“And so most of the time, if one wanted the whole family together for a holiday, it was necessary to commemorate that holiday on some day other than the ‘official’ one.

“I’ve never had a problem celebrating holidays catch-as-catch-can.”

to be continued

[franksolich]

“Hey boss, I was sorry to hear--”

Yeah, yeah, I said, but it was hardly unexpected.

The former property caretaker came in the afternoon, to collect and bundle firewood he sells at convenience stores throughout northeastern Nebraska; this was the first time he’s been here since early summer, although I see his wife, who does my laundry, all the time.

He’s a thin, wizened slight little guy, bald and with a bug-eye; 69 years old.

He’d been property caretaker up until about three years ago, when he was injured in an automobile accident, and had to undergo considerable physical therapy.  He drinks a lot, but at the time of the accident, he was cold sober; it was the other guy’s fault.

And of course he’s sarcastic when he refers to me this way, as “boss,” because he knows more than anybody else, how franksolich is actually the “bossed,” not the boss.

Despite his breezy, casual informality, he was actually angry with me, upset that I hadn’t gone to a certain funeral early last month.

“You, of all people, who makes a big deal about ‘honor’ and ‘respect,’ and you just sent the dullest sympathy card you could buy.  You didn’t even sign it; you printed your name.

“And he was the last one left.

“What in the world ever possessed you?  It’s not like you.”

I sighed.  I was going to have to explain.  Again.

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“Well now, I‘d never talked about him,” I pointed out, “and if you yourself hadn’t ever seen some old family photographs, you wouldn’t even know he’d existed.

“How I treated him--and his meddlesome wife--didn’t make any difference anyway.  The last coherent conversation I had with him was just before I left for the socialist paradises of the workers and peasants, and that was twenty years ago. 

“By the time I returned, he was already pretty much self-lobotomized by mood- and body-altering pharmaceuticals.

“I never ‘rejected’ him until he was past understanding, past caring.

“During his last few months, he was in another world, always ‘talking’ to the dead--our parents, our brothers and sisters. 

“For myself, the only other one still alive, he blasphemed curses and maledictions.  Because I was sorely aware of his mental state, I didn’t take it personally, but it was a trial ‘listening’ to it anyway.

“We’d never been close; he was already in college by the time I started kindergarten, and married when I was still a kid.  I’d never done him any harm.”

After which I gave the former property caretaker the whole story; he was aware of bits-and-pieces, fragments, of it, but now he was illuminated as to the whole thing.

“It goes without saying they’d been hippies when I was a kid,” I said, as I concluded.  “That explains it all.”

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He’d been in hospice for eight months, and incredibly, being deprived of all “life-saving” pharmaceuticals with the exception of insulin, he’d slowly gotten better, more responsive, more alert.

But the drug-caused damage had been too great, and in early October he’d abruptly slipped away.

“It was uncomfortable for me, on the inside, looking at him,” I said; “gaunt, white-haired and all shriveled up, in his late 60s he was the oldest [my family name] I’d ever seen in my life, all the others having died in middle age or earlier.

“And they’d died all bloated up like waterbed mattresses, heavy and dropsical because of all the pharmaceuticals they’d used.

“Like our maternal grandmother the last eight months of her life, he just withered to nothing, even his skeletal structure shrinking.

“It was jolting, disturbing.”

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Well, I finally said as we loaded the bundled firewood into the bed of the pick-up truck, “God heals all.  ‘Every valley shall be exalted, every mountain and hill laid low; the crooked made straight, and the rough places plain…..’

Given the former property caretaker’s decrepitude, I of course did most of the work, and all of the heavy lifting, but so as to not hurt his feelings, made it seem as if he was doing most of it himself.

to be continued