Please enjoy a guest blog-entry from my mom, Nancy. The title is Thanksgiving 2006.

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“I’ll never cook Thanksgiving Dinner for the whole family,” my daughter said after a observing me making dinner.

“Me either,” my daughter-in-law agreed.

“I like cooking Thanksgiving Dinner,” I replied. This was a few years ago. Both my daughter and daughter-in-law are college-trained-this-generation women’s lib. Time will change that.

Thanksgiving Dinner is a glorious hassle. I love it. You cook the rutabaga for the mash potatoes the day before, and you cut onions until your tears flow freely. Some want dressing with giblets. Some think giblets are gross. I owe my most famous creation to Martha Stewart. According to her, root vegetables add zing to gravy.

The year Martha communicated this I’d been given a plethora of a root vegetable. I’m not sure whether the beets improved the taste, but everyone remembers the year I served pink gravy.

Of all my memorial dinners, the hernia operation Thanksgiving is a pinnacle. I flew to Philadelphia ten days early in November of 2006 to watch my grandchildren ages three and six months during my son’s operation. My granddaughter’s third birthday fell on Thanksgiving Day. There was a school party for three year olds and their parents, and a friend’s party for three couples and their seven offspring in addition to Thanksgiving.

My son picked me up at the airport at mid-night the day before his operation.

“I’ve got a five hour exam in four days. I’m not going to talk to you,” my son announced.

“You scheduled your operation four days before a five hour exam? I know you need this operation but can’t you postpone the exam?” I asked.

“No, I’d have to repeat the course.”

“Will they do anything to accommodate you?”

“I can put my feet up on a chair,” he replied. My son was thirty with a wife and two children, and this was his first semester in medical school. He’d quit his job and sold their house in Wisconsin. There was no turning back.

“I appreciate your coming, Mother. I hope you can do this,” he said grimly.

The next day my son and daughter-in-law left at 7:00 am. I strolled my grandchildren to my granddaughter’s preschool and picked her up at 11:00 am. I was confident.

“They haven’t been able to fit Sam into surgery yet,” my daughter-in-law said when she called. Delays happen. It was a new relatively simple laser surgery. He would return home at 3:00 pm the same day, but after several calls, it looked like they would be gone longer than expected.

I’d brought books and toys. We read. We played. I gave my granddaughter her birthday present. I put my grandson to bed for a nap. We took walks, and we watched movies. I made peanut butter sandwiches and warmed baby bottles.

“Your son is ready to be released, but we can’t find his wife,” the hospital called at 6:30 pm. Jill hadn’t run out on him. She’d gone to eat after waiting all day, but my grandchildren hadn’t seen me for months. I was a stranger, and they were getting cranky. I loaded them into a double stroller and took them outside for the forth time. It was dark. I became mildly confused. Which house was it?

My son and daughter-in-law had recently moved to New Jersey not far from my son’s medical school in Philadelphia, an old fashioned small town much cheaper than Philadelphia. The town houses were architecturally coordinated, individually owned duplexes with shared driveways, trees, gardens, and yards. The town was charming, but in the dark all the houses looked the same, and their new address slipped my mind.

At seven pm, my daughter-in-law drove by. “Are you lost? Sam is home. He’s fine. I have to pick up his medication,” she said. She took the baby. Reoriented I took my granddaughter home.

“Your Dad is home. You’ll see him soon,” I said. May was elated. She ran inside crawled into her father’s bed and threw up on him and the bed. Agile for post-surgery, my son changed the sheets and washed his hands and May’s hands--- a prime directive in medical school.

May threw up every two hours all night and the next day. The next day my daughter-in-law got the stomach flu, and then I got it. Each of us threw up every two hours. I don’t know about baby Ben. He didn’t throw up, but he woke up five times every night, and my bed was in his room. We took turns comforting Ben.

My son didn’t have time for stomach flu. Perhaps the antibiotics helped.

“Maybe we should cancel Thanksgiving dinner,” I said to my daughter-in-law.

“Oh no, it will be fine,” she replied.

“I’m going to the library to study. I can’t stand this chaos,” my son said.

“Good,” my daughter-in-law and I chorused. He’d been notably glum. His post operative care was a disappointment. At Thanksgiving with two babies, hovering over the patient was improbable even before the stomach flu. As he slumped in to make lunch, we tried not to trample him

“Aren’t you supposed to stop lifting after a hernia operation?” I asked my son as he picked up the baby.

“They don’t say that anymore, and I don’t have a choice,” he replied.

In 2006, my daughter worked at a museum in NYC. She was to arrive five days before Thanksgiving with my ex-husband, but there was a delay. In NYC my ex-husband had emergency angioplasty, a balloon inserted in a vein, and the stomach flu. My daughter couldn’t leave without him.

Back in New Jersey, we sped through parties, and my son took the exam finishing in four and a half hours. We toured the library, the farmer’s market, and the children’s museum. At the children’s museum, I raced for an hour through a child shrieking labyrinth stopping only for a second to envy the lounging python. Invoking glares as I grabbed at someone else’s blond three year old child. Both children cried when we left.

“It’s time to go, May,” my son said quietly.

“Just five more minutes, five more minutes,” May said as tears rolled down her face.

“OK, five more minutes,” my son said. I wasn’t consulted, and we’d left Jill for an hour of peaceful cleaning.

On the day before Thanksgiving, my son picked up his sister and their Dad at the Philadelphia Chinatown bus. Under stress, he failed to observe an auto as he pulled out of his parking space. Crash, boom, not tragedy, a minor scratch, no one was injured. They exchanged information without official intervention. The only addition to our Thanksgiving dinner was that the mother of the driver called my son three times on Thanksgiving Day. “Do you have insurance? Are you sure you have insurance?” she said.

“It was the other driver’s fault,” his Dad opined.

My son’s house was small, so his Dad was to sleep in a relative’s apartment thirty minutes away. They arrived at 9:00 pm. My ex-husband looked like an escapee from an institution. His shirttails were half-out, his collar askew. He was rumpled, dirty, and couldn’t sit straight.

“I don’t think you can drive him anywhere, and he looks bad,” I said.

“You’re right, Mom. I don’t want to drive. He’ll have to stay here,” my son said.

“You’ll sleep here tonight, Dad,” my son reported.

“Good,” my ex-husband replied, and he crawled upstairs into the only double bed. Everybody else scrunched together.

On the morning of Thanksgiving Day, we discovered May’s birthday cake was missing. My daughter-in-law left to find a cake.

May has friends, and the doorbell rang with tribute all day. Piles of toys scattered everywhere. She couldn’t unwrap all her presents in one day.

“I will make quite an impression in this,” my granddaughter said holding up a new dress.

“No food fights, Ben,” I said as my grandson hurled grapes and mash potatoes.
The law practice in Wisconsin was beginning to seem relaxing. Bedtime for me was 8:00 pm, and I was taking naps with my grandson.

The day before I left I decided to make a difference. Every sheet in the house was an emblem of the stomach flu, and the clothes had gone astray while we partied and company came and went. I searched for clothes and did seven loads of laundry.

As I folded the last batch, my son said, “Is that it, Mother? Did you do it all?”

“Possibly,” I replied.

“That’s what drives me crazy about you. That’s a yes or no answer,” he said.

How was Thanksgiving Dinner? What did we eat? Dinner was great. I’m traditional. Fill in the blanks.