A Journal of My Mid-Life Crisis

30 November 1997 - Cranberry Tac Toe

Part 1: Thanksgiving - the conventional lists

I vaguely remember that in elementary school we had to write an annual essay on things we were thankful for. I can't, however, for the life of me imagine what sort of things I might have listed. In retrospect, I can think of lots of things I should have been thankful for as a child but I am fairly sure I didn't appreciate them at the time and probably wrote trite things about being thankful for my parents and our cat and my turtle and having my own room and such. I should have been more thankful for things like good health and reasonable affluence (more by a world standard than a U.S. one, seeing as how our clothes came from thrift shops and more toys than I care to admit were obtained from the dumpsters on the factory blocks with the rest coming mostly from the job lot store, though I did have a Barbie from John's Bargain Store) and, more than anything else, for freedom.

So what am I thankful for now?

• Independence - the ability to do more or less what I want is very important to me, though I do worry about whether this is always a good thing as it makes it hard for me to compromise in relationships. This is probably really a mix of affluence and the political freedom I talk about below.

• Community - the only way one can survive in a large city is by having smaller communities that create the artificial village. I feel blessed to have such communities both in Los Angeles and in cyberspace. Do we ever let our friends know how much they mean to us?

• Political freedom - Okay, this sounds sappy, but I really do think we in the U.S. have the best political system in the world. Not that we don't often have fools in office, but we get to push those levers or punch those cards or tick off those boxes each November and select who our fools are. In one of the college essays I found in my father's study after he died, he wrote about seeing someone he thought he knew on the street in the Bronx and hesitating to go over to him and then reminding himself that "in America, they can't arrest you for asking questions." In one of the oral history interviews Elliot did while in his "roots" phase, Dad talked about the Russians coming into Lithuania when he was 13 and mentioned that there was a plebiscite but "how do you vote when they hold a bayonet to you?" Every time I stand in the ballot box (or when I've been on a jury), I think about his words and get all teary-eyed.

• Eclectic culture - this is another thing that is probably really a side effect of affluence, but I can sit in my living room and listen to music from almost any continent, go to museums and see fine art, listen to a wide range of stories, and, of course, read! But it goes beyond just having the money for books and cds and all. We were exposed to a lot as children that we didn't appreciate then. I remember the day I was surprised to realize that I liked Gilbert and Sullivan, for example - up to that point, I'd just assumed if my folks like something, I wasn't supposed to. And, of course, I've been fortunate to see splendor by traveling. That probably struck me first at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam in 1980. I just wanted to grab random people and pull them over to paintings and show them how exciting they were. I've had that same feeling several times since - from the Sistine Chapel to the Taj Mahal to Bryce Canyon just to name a few - and that's a lot of what keeps me traveling.

Part 2: Speaking of money

The car situation turned out not too badly. Three hours Monday morning and a few hundred bucks took care of a new alternator and a new battery. Apparently, with modern electronic everything, almost any warning light could really be caused by the alternator failure. It seems fine now, so my faith in Saturn is only slightly shaken.

But the big money thing of the week was paying the balance of the Africa part of my trip. Land expenses, air fare, travel insurance - I could hear those cash registers ka-ching-ing away as I wrote the checks. So I am really committed now, which is both exciting and scary.

And then I went to REI Friday and bought a bunch of things I need for the Antarctic trip. Just call me the Goddess of Goretex!

I went over to the antique mall at the Farmer's Market on Saturday because I just had to get out of the house. There were oh so many things I was tempted by - mostly toys and books - but there are no bargains and nothing was calling to me so loud that I felt willing to have to pack it away and store it.

Part 3: Thanksgiving - traditions

Mary Joan mentioned that her daughter had a school assignment to write about a Thanksgiving tradition and they really didn't have one for her to write about. They go different places, eat different foods, etc.. These days I go to whichever friend has issued an appealing invitation (and I have hosted a couple of Thanksgiving dinners myself, which is fun but a lot of work.) Elliot and Ramona sometimes do things themselves and invite friends and sometimes accept invitations. And Mom goes with Uncle Herb to Atlantic City. Still, when I was growing up, we had definite traditions.

What sticks most in my mind is not the menu, though that varied little from year to year. You have to understand that my mother had very rigid ideas about menu planning, in general, back than (she's loosened up in the past decade or so) and every dinner started with a half grapefruit for each person and a green salad. In the case of Thanksgiving, this was followed by turkey with two types of stuffing (normal bread stuffing, probably from a mix, and a mixture of chopmeat, soaked matzo and onions and garlic that was sometimes used to stuff poultry and sometimes to make meatloaf), two types of cranberry sauce (actually, that was post-7th grade since that was when I learned to make the cranberry-orange relish. Unlike most recipes for the relish, mine is cooked. We always had the jellied canned stuff, too, though.), baked potatoes and sweet potatoes, and a green vegetable (probably green beans, but I think we might have had broccoli sometimes) and, for dessert, pumpkin pie.

No, my first thoughts on Thanksgiving traditions were two other things.

1. Mom had these little candles in the shapes of a pilgrim man and woman and another set in the shape of turkeys. These were always on the table. I don't really remember ever having a centerpiece or real table decorations of any sort any other time (other than in the religious context of the seder plate at Passover) so it was something unusual enough to feel significant. I called Mom to ask if she still has those candles and she says she burned them long long ago. She said we also used to have a paper turkey centerpiece, one of those things that unfolds and you tape together, but I don't remember that at all.

2. Remember I mentioned the jellied canned cranberry sauce? We each had a slice or two of this on our plates and Elliot and I used to cut ours into 3 x 3 arrays and play tic tac toe by eating appropriate pieces. We actually did this with frozen waffles, too, when we had them for breakfast. I can't eat either of these food items without mentally plotting winning tic tac toe strategies.

Part 4: Other Odds and Ends

I got a lot of books catalogued and packed this week. I'm up to 890 in the database. I have been trying to be good and keep myself from rereading everything tempting, but I did allow myself to read one Nero Wolfe book and the delight of rereading as much Edmund Crispin as I want.

I am worried about my mother. She seems horribly depressed and she knows that's what it is, but she doesn't want to get help. I tried to make a lotof suggestions, but I think she resents them. My key issue in this is whether I should talk to other members of the family (Elliot, Uncle Herb) about my concern.