In 1974, when I was 11 years old, I took part in a Thanksgiving play at school. Gaga, my grandmother, ran out to the local fabric store on Austin Street in Forest Hills, and came home with enough polyester yardage to make me an outfit that she was certain would replicate what Priscilla Alden wore on the day she stepped off The Mayflower. Borrowing a neighbor’s sewing machine, Gaga turned into Gramma Walton, and sewed me a long gray dirndl skirt, a matching gray blouse, and a white smock that looked a little like a Zen rakusu. There was also a gray bonnet, which I distinctly remember trying on with Seasons in the Sun playing in the background.
You look like a real Pilgrim, my grandmother said proudly, and I did, until my mother insisted that I wear the gold chai that she and my father had given me for my birthday a few months earlier.
When I stepped out onstage into the vast, black, cavern of silence that was my grade school auditorium and the audio visual guy threw the massive switch on the giant spotlight, my mind went blank; to this day, all I can remember is “My name is Priscilla Alden. In 1620 I landed on Plymouth Rock…..” That was it for me before I began to develop a weird sort of bonging in my ears. I had memorized a three-hundred word speech about the long, awful journey from England, and the happy and helpful Indians (sorry; this was before the days when we said Native American) and how they gleefully taught the men and women of the Mayflower how to plant corn, until everyone came down with the flu and died. But the spotlight that hit me might has well have been a two-by-four: I stood there, in shock, my eyes wide open, my bonnet slightly askew.
Loser, one of my school friends whispered, laughing from the wings; I burst into tears and had to be ushered from the stage.
I’ve had a tense relationship with Thanksgiving, its tradition, and its meaning, ever since.
For a long time, the holiday was marked by the presence of Danny Kaye and Joseph Walsh singing Wonderful, Wonderful Copenhagen in Hans Christian Andersen, which I used to watch every Thanksgiving morning while Gaga was in the kitchen, putting the marshmallows on the sweet potato and Corn Flake pie. I’d sit in front of the television with my arm around my Airedale, Chips, and we’d sway back and forth together like a pair of idiots, singing along about the salty old queen of the sea. This went on for years, until things started to go south in my parents’ marriage, and I spent the morning hiding out in my best friend’s apartment around the corner, while our Thanksgiving meal was prepared in silence and ultimately eaten with the sort of enmity that’s usually reserved for warring nations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24SPhbpeAzEAfter they divorced, I spent roughly fifteen years celebrating Thanksgiving with my father’s sister and cousins, and their children; there was music, and great food, and — because we smushed Hanukah into the celebration — toys and games for the kids. Eventually, the children grew up, as children do, and started their own families; they scattered to different parts of the country where they began to make their own traditions.
This year, like last, Susan and I are having sixteen people to our table: my mom will be with us, along with some single friends and their very young children, and our neighbors and their teenage children (and some teenage friends of the teenage children). There will be nearly as many vegetarians as meat eaters, and so while there will be two heritage turkeys — one done on Susan’s dad’s old 1959 Weber Kettle grill, one done in the oven — there will be far more vegetables on the table as there will be poultry. I suspect — I hope, anyway — that there will be much laughing, and joy, and happy eating sounds before many of us pass out in a tryptophan haze.
But still, I struggle. I struggle with the meaning of Thanksgiving—a holiday that can be so overwhelming that it leaves me frozen and a little panicky and unable to form words, like I was that day on the stage at PS 174, when I was dressed as Priscilla Alden with a chai.
This year, though, as I was applying the salt brine to our turkeys, keeping busy, keeping moving, searching for the meaning, as ever, I remembered.
I remembered late September, and our friend Deborah, hiking with us and her husband Patrick, and their dog, out into the hills amidst the scrub and across the arroyos near her home in New Mexico, and visiting the vast and glorious Santa Fe Farmer’s Market, and breathing the roasting Hatch Chiles and meeting Dorothy Massey at Collected Works, and going back to the house to await the arrival of Deborah’s friends, and cooking and laughing and listening to music and feeling like if the house next door were available, we would buy it without a second thought.
I remembered Becky Selengut walking us out into the woods somewhere south of Tacoma, Washington on a soggy, gray day early last month, and, for the first time in my life, foraging pounds and pounds of magnificent Chanterelle mushrooms, slicing them way down into the ground with the small, ancient folding knife I found buried in a pile of sawdust in my late mother-in-law’s garage before we sold her house last spring. There we were, Susan and Becky and I, in the middle of nowhere, finding gobs and gobs of mushrooms, real food, from the earth — the actual EARTH! — covered in dirt and Douglas Fir needles, and at last, I learned why the act of foraging is as electrifying and thrilling as it is grounding. It gives and it gives; the key is not to take and take which, it seems, is the human impulse.
I remembered Barbara Marrett, Susan’s dearest friend from college, who we never see, and who welcomed us to her home in Friday Harbor on San Juan Island, the veritable ends of the earth. There was the long drive to Anacortes from Seattle, and the way the air became sweeter and warmer, and the ferry ride that left me weeping for the beauty of the water and the mountains — I tried to hide my sobbing from Susan; I told her it was just the wind — and arriving there and being introduced to a guy, just an old grisly guy, who plays sea shantys on a button accordion at a local pub a million miles away from anything, and it turned out to be Mike Cohen, who I’ve listened to for years, and whose brother is John Cohen, of The New Lost City Ramblers.
And how Barbara, who happens to be the Communications Manager at the San Juan Islands Visitor’s Bureau and knows every single square inch of the islands and the incredible farmers/producers/growers/wine-and-spirit-makers who live and work there, introduced us to the miraculous food of the islands. And how, on our last night, she and her lovely man, Bill — who plays the harmonium, and leads chanting! The harmonium! Like Krishna Das! — invited friends for dinner, and the salmon, which Bill caught, was extraordinary, and the friends were as warm as bear hugs, and the night ended with hours of guitar and mandolin playing and a bunch of old hippies sitting around and crooning, as old hippies tend to do. When we got ready to leave the next morning, I stepped outside to breathe the air off Barbara’s deck, and heard rustling in the trees less then eight feet from where I was standing; someone had come to say goodbye.
So this Thanksgiving feels different, somehow; I get it, I understand. And I’m grateful.
Sauteed Mushrooms on Toast
It might seem a little bit lackluster to put up a simple recipe at a season of such great excess; maybe that’s the point. The fact is, amidst the giant turkeys and the platters of vegetables and stuffing and tables creaking under the weight of our bounty, I sometimes think that Thanksgiving needs to be scaled back; the food needs to be simpler, less fussy, and more, well, of the earth. The day that Susan and I went foraging with Becky Selengut, author of the seminal book on mushrooms, Shroom, we came home with a gift that literally changed the way I think about food. There was nothing to do to these chanterelles but give them a (very) gentle wipe, a quick chop, and a saute in a hot pan with some sweet butter. And give thanks for them.
Serves 2
1-1/2 pounds of the freshest Chanterelle mushrooms you can find, gently wiped of dirt
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
sea salt
4 slices sourdough bread, toasted, and rubbed with a clove of garlic
fresh parsley, chopped
Give the mushrooms a quick chop; remove any woody stems, and save them for stock. Place a large cast iron skillet over medium high heat, warm the butter in the pan until it stops foaming, and add the mushrooms to the pan. Lower the heat a bit and cook, stirring frequently, until the mushrooms have released their liquid and most of it has evaporated, about 8 minutes (taking care not to burn them). Season with a little sea salt and spoon them out onto the toast along with their buttery juices. Sprinkle with some chopped parsley leaves, and serve immediately.
