Linda Chavez
Thankful and a little guilty
http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday. One of my first memories is of sucking on a big turkey drumstick, which remains the most prized part of the turkey. My family's meals were never as elaborate as the ones pictured in ladies magazines or posted on the bulletin boards in school, but they were special nonetheless. Since my mother worked full time, unusual in that era, our cranberry sauce came from a can, a thick gelatinous concoction that wobbled on the plate like Jell-O. But the turkey and the gravy were homemade, as was the sage stuffing, which I refused to taste until I was a teenager. Meals in my family were always quick affairs, hastily put together and eaten on TV trays in front of the television set, with Chet Huntley and David Brinkley providing the only dinnertime conversation. But Thanksgiving was different.
My mother brought out the tablecloth her mother had crocheted
and set the kitchen table with platters, a gravy boat, and silver-plated
flatware handed down from her grandmother. She would get up at the crack of
dawn, often still tired from working late nights in a restaurant, dress the
turkey and put it in the oven to cook slowly all day. My job was to baste
the bird every 20 minutes, until it reached a lovely caramel color, and peel
the potatoes that my father would later mash with lots of butter until they
turned a creamy consistency with not a single lump. After my mother took the
turkey out of the oven to "set" before carving, she whipped up a batch of
biscuits that somehow managed to have a crunchy crust with a fluffy center,
a feat I have yet to master.
Thanksgiving dinner was never complete without my father telling
the story about his own childhood memories of the holiday. Growing up in the
Depression was difficult enough, but for much of my father's early
childhood, his father was in prison in Leavenworth, Kan., for violating the
Volstead Act, which prohibited the sale of alcohol in the United States. My
grandfather, Ambrose, was abstemious himself but saw no reason why others
shouldn't enjoy a glass of whiskey or a beer or two on occasion, and was
happy to supply much of Albuquerque with alcohol he obtained by regular runs
across the border into Mexico. The federal government saw things
differently. Ambrose spent 11 years in the penitentiary, leaving his wife
and four children in desperate poverty. My father would always begin the
meal by telling of the time an uncle dropped by before Thanksgiving to give
the family some money for their dinner, but it was only enough to buy a
pound of bologna at the local market. He described his humiliation standing
at the butcher's counter waiting to buy the lunchmeat while his neighbors
collected their turkeys and yams.
The story made me feel both thankful and a little guilty. We had
so much more than my father did when he was a boy, but we would probably be
considered poor by today's standards. We lived in a two-room basement
apartment until I was 13. My parents slept on a pull-out couch in the living
room, while my sister and I slept in one bed in the tiny bedroom, and we
shared a single bathroom with several other families in the apartment
building. But we always had enough food to eat, and we never missed a
Thanksgiving meal. Television was a less pernicious influence then in
fostering a sense of deprivation than it is today. There were many
working-class characters on TV in the 1950s, and I could identify with the
shabby little apartment that Ralph and Alice Kramden shared on "The
Honeymooners," while aspiring to a room of my own like Betty's in "Father
Knows Best." Still, like most kids, I envied what some of my friends
possessed. My father's stories helped put everything in perspective.
My father died in 1978, but every Thanksgiving I remember his
story as if it were my own. Like the cranberries that I now cook from
scratch, it gives the feast its bittersweet edge to remind me how truly
thankful we all should be every day of the year.
JWR contributor Linda Chavez is President of the Center for Equal Opportunity. Her latest book is "Betrayal: How Union Bosses Shake Down Their Members and Corrupt American Politics". (Click HERE to purchase. Sales help fund JWR.)
