Tomorrow, we’re going to sit down to turkey and all the trimmings. I wanted to write something that woud convey the thanks I feel at just being alive. Susie and I have now spent 45 Thanksgivings together and we have come a long way in that time. To illustrate this, I am going to paste my Thanksgiving column for 2006 into this post. Have a great holiday
g2
It was 1964, just barely a year after the assassination of President John Kennedy. My wife, Susie and I were living in Lansing, Michigan having arrived there three weeks earlier for a new job. We had been married 5 months and found ourselves facing our first Thanksgiving together away from home and families.
Michigan was a different place than I had ever been in. There was snow on the ground when we got there and there was even more snow on the ground as Thanksgiving approached. I was beginning to have second thoughts about the new job.
The best thing to be said about this job was that it offered opportunity. On the other hand, it didn’t, initially at least, offer much money. We found ourselves living on a shoestring and the optimism of youth. We were also in the throes of a housing crisis. Students at Michigan State University were occupying all the 1 bedroom apartments in town; the only kind of place we could afford.
We were forced to rent a whole house with 3 bedrooms. Luckily, the place was out at the edge of town so the rent wasn’t much more than the apartments in the city. Of course, there was no snow removal and we had no shovels so we constantly tracked the stuff inside.
The little bit of furniture we had acquired in our short time together seemed lost in the house. We had no kitchen table so we made do with a card table. The 2 chairs we had acquired were too high so the card table rested on our legs when we were seated. We had to make sure everything we needed was on the table before we sat down because the balancing of the table only worked with two people, one on each side.
Also, there was a slight problem in that the house had no refrigerator and neither did we. There was no money to buy one so we solved this dilemma by leaving items requiring refrigeration on the back steps. It was cold enough outside to preserve our milk, lunch meat and a few condiments and we congratulated ourselves on our ingenuity. However, once the neighborhood dogs stumbled upon our hot dogs and bologna, it was obvious we should have given this more thought.
We solved the problem by moving our refrigerated products into the smallest bedroom and then opening the window. This created a huge refrigerator when the door was closed. It required a little experimentation to keep our milk from freezing so I became quite adept at regulating the room temperature by varying the size of the window opening.
The Thanksgiving holiday was a big deal in both our families and we wanted to continue the tradition. However, what with there not being much money to spare, we found ourselves just a few days before the holiday still having no idea what we would eat. There was just the 2 of us so a whole turkey was much more than we could eat or afford. A ham was also out of the question for the same reasons. We needed something smaller and cheaper. We were in a quandary as we walked through the supermarket aisles until we came to a freezer case where we came across a frozen duck.
. A duck, eh? What with being from meat and potatoes families, neither of us had ever eaten anything as exotic as a duck. It seemed a good time to become sauve and debonair so we took that duck home to what was probably Lansing, Michigan’s largest refrigerator.
Susie spent the better part of Thanksgiving day, basting that duck with an orange and honey glaze that slowly turned the duck a golden brown. She captured the drippings from the duck and turned them into a wonderful looking gravy.
When we sat down to balance that card table on our legs, we gave little thought to what lay ahead in our lives. Children, careers, good times and bad times. None of that mattered. All we knew was that we were about to share our first Thanksgiving together by eating a roast duck.
It was awful. It was as greasy as the floor in a quick lube station and the gravy made from the duck drippings was so sweet, it made the mashed potatoes taste like duck flavored ice cream.
We lasted in Michigan only a little more than 3 months. My job depended on good transportation and we didn’t have it. Shortly after the New year began, our 8 year old gray Volkswagen Beetle gave up the ghost. The thing threw a rod through it’s little engine, stranding me 50 miles away from Lansing with only 30 cents in my pocket.
It was a blessing in disguise. The heater never worked anyway, an automotive trait that was not unusual in those days but one that was intolerable in the frozen wasteland of central Michigan. We found ourselves with no transportation nor any resources to acquire any. It was time to go back to Indiana and lick our wounds.
I rode a Greyhound bus to Indianapolis, borrowed my father-in-law’s car and returned to Michigan to pick up Susie all in the same day. The optimism with which we had entered Michigan with was gone but life has a way of working things out and it did for us.
Now here we are preparing to give thanks for our 42 Thanksgivings together and for our lives working out better than we ever dared to dream they would. Also, we’re not in Michigan; we’re in Florida. There is no snow on the ground nor will there be any. The only thing we will track into our camper is sand.
In our oven will be an 8 pound turkey breast basted only by butter. It’s still too much for just 2 people but chances are we’ll find somebody to share it with.
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G2 note: Last summer, Susie and I went to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and we drove through Lansing on the way. We made a valiant effort to find that house on the edge of town but we had no luck. As a matter of fact, we never even found the edge of town. It was just as well. I would never have recognized the house anyway without 2 feet of snow piled up around it.