Thanksgiving 2007
I’ve been trying to slow down and notice for a while now, living in DC my life gets filled up so quickly without much effort, it’s easy to forget all the little things that make up a day. I tried to take a little time yesterday and today just writing down some of the little moments of my thanksgiving day yesterday. I want to concentrate on knowing and appreciating the little things, because that’s what all the big things are made of. (Half & Half, no Sugar, for instance…)
So without further adieu: A brief synopsis of Thanksgiving Day, 2007.
I woke up in the addition to my parents house we all call “the apartment.” I padded over to the kitchen and found some good whole wheat bread to toast, and three of my favorite jams waiting for me. (Sour Cherry, Blackberry, and Red Raspberry) I had some toast and talked with my dad for a little while. After breakfast I went back over to room and had a quick shower, the sun was shining and I sent a text message. Then I wandered back over to the main part of the house and my dad and I decided to go for a bike ride. My Dad has a nice big bike, but my mom’s is pretty small so my dad and I had to spend a bit of time getting it adjusted so I could fit on it. (And got covered in grease in the process) We took off down our long winding leaf colored driveway, the colors are really spectacular down here. We biked down through Guilford, across the playing fields, and down New Garden road to the old Jefferson Pilot area. That area is being completely built up which makes me really sad, it was really nice to have such a large wooded area in town like that, and now it’s all mixed retail and schools. Anyhow my dad and I went down New Garden till we got to a new elementary they’ve built there, wheeled past it and biked up a moderate hill to the new public library. It’s a nice building, nestled up on the hill with trees all around it, but the woods are gone and you can see past the trees all the way to Jefferson. After a brief dalliance on a trail there that turned out to prohibit bikes we cruised back down a little side trail we found behind the new shopping mall. There was a little lake back there, and my dad has been spying on some persimmon trees there, he loves persimmon pudding and wants to transplant one of those trees back to our house. On the lake was a crowd of ducks, maybe resting before going further south. Dad and I biked along looking at the trees, we saw a red tailed hawk up close before the trail ran out. We’d come to where the sidewalk ends. Of course in Greensboro there are a lot of moments like that. The sun was shining and the leaves were spectacular, I was sad that I didn’t have my camera with me, but I’d left it home to recharge. My dad and I biked back down through New Garden Friend’s school and through another trail behind the school that came out behind the Guilford Apartments. It always brings up a lot of memories to bike through there, I had quite a few of my life lessons in those buildings, and hopefully haven’t forgotten some of them.
After my dad and I got home and stowed the bikes, we started pitching in with dinner preparations. My Aunt Penny had arrived as my dad and I walked around the back of the house examining the stanchion where electricity comes into the house. A branch falling on the line has pulled the stanchion out of true and it will have to be replaced somehow. Penny gave me a big hug when she came in, and shared with us some news about a dear family friend whoosh husband was in the hospital. Scary times, he had just had a heart transplant about a year ago and had seemed to be doing better until he came down with pneumonia. We held him and his wife in the light, Thanksgiving day was our friend’s birthday as well. After catching up on that news, my dad showed me a clever way to dice onions by making side cuts into an onion half and then vertical cuts that leave the onion diced at the end. I then worked on my lever technique dicing apples, celery, various herbs, and what not for the stuffing. There was a break in the action and Penny and I caught up a little more. We talked about skydiving, I had just gone the day before, and about things we wanted to do but had missed, and things we still dreamed about doing. I heard about a scary plane ride that Penny had once gone on, a friend had organized a chartered flight to a bluegrass show as a treat for Penny, but the flight made Penny queasy, the pressure made her head pound, and the best part of the whole thing was the landing, Penny even ended up catching a ride back with a friend rather than risk the plane again. Penny also told me about hiking the Appalachin trail with some friends for a week, it sounded really great aside from being so grimy. Looking back she remembered that you could drink directly from the streams when she went, not much risk of giardia or what not then. My dad broke out an interesting Sardinian fortified white wine he had found that looked interesting, we tried it, but it was a bit rough, but nice to have. The stories of the cold on the trail led to other reminiscing. Penny was telling me how she looked after my sis while my parents rushed off to the hospital when I was being born. It was a cold, icy night that night, snow and ice on the ground, treacherous to walk. About 1 am my parents woke Penny up to let her know they were going to the hospital. When they got there they rushed my mom off to the birthing room, my dad was settling down into the waiting room when a nurse ran in and told him that if he wanted to be there when I was born he was going to have to run! He dashed off, and as my mom was getting ready to have me the fire-alarm went off and lots of doors in the hospital automatically clanged shut, my sister had taken hours but I was ready to rocket out into the world. My parents came home by six or seven am that morning.
I showed penny & my mom the pictures from Danny and I’s skydiving expedition on Weds. I tried to explain what the different parts of the experience felt like, how amazing and beautiful the world was from 13,500 feet up, the different things I thought about as it all happened. It’s one of the few six minute experiences in life that’s so dramatic, so exhilarating, and so intense that you come out of it a changed person on the other side. It’s not just facing death, it’s about facing yourself. After that Penny and I were talking about trips we’d like to go on, and Penny told me about a trip out to the Frontier Days Rodeo in Cheyenne she had taken a long time back, and how cool the chuck wagon races were. We spent a good 30 minutes watching chuck wagon races on youtube, it’s funny how technology lets you color and experience a story now, and talking about Canada and the Trans-continental railway. It reminded me of a documentary I’d like to see, “The Festival Express,” that catalogues Janis Joplin, the Band, and the Grateful Dead’s tour across Canada just before Janis died. Apparently Joplin looked and sounded really great on that tour, just weeks before her death. The connection between art and being unhinged, between brilliance and normality always intrigues me. So many people “the rest of us” find so gifted have been so anti-establishment, it makes me wonder if I’m limiting myself with a day job. 
My Dad had found an article written by a former Guilford student I think, about the end of farming at Guilford. Guilford used to have both it’s own dairy farm and regular farm, and there are some records of food & milk being transferred from the farm to the Guilford mess hall. As time went on the farm got more and more divorced from the core of Guilford, and the board eventually closed it down. The article was very flowery, but basically raised the idea of the increasing value of locally grown and sustained foods, and Guilford’s perhaps need to again find meaning and connection with the land it sits on, that it isn’t enough to teach physics, english, math, you have to feel it and show it in the world and land around you. Perhaps the students of chemistry would be more humane if they were applying their skills to the problems of a local dairy farm rather than the problems of Dupont. My parent’s house is really near Guilford College, in fact you drive through the campus to get to my parents house, and it’s hard to visit them and not think about my college years. As if right on queue, I got online to check my email and saw that I had a new friend’s request from a woman I went to school with there, Sarah Morris. She’s apparently a lawyer in Arkansas now, married with a kid, and perhaps having her own thanksgiving reminiscences.
Sometime during that afternoon my sister had called, she and her boyfriend Julian, were coming down for Thanksgiving that day. Their original plan had been to rent a car and drive down, but being New Yorkers and inexperienced with these sorts of things my sister had only brought her debit card to the car rental place. They told her they were going to put a big deposit down on her debit card since it wasn’t a major credit card, a sudden unexpected expense. It was too much for her card, and they decided too much lost time to go back for her credit card and then back to the rental place, so they ran over to the train station and managed to catch the Carolinian headed South. They called my mom and caught us up on that saga, and let us know they’d be there fairly late. Most of the time we have thanksgiving dinner around three or four pm, but their train wouldn’t even get in until around 6:30. As it turns out it got a little delayed and didn’t end up getting into Greensboro until seven. I drove out to the train depot and picked them up, sending some happy thanksgiving wishes on the way.
We got back and after some warm greetings, set down to dinner with a vengeance. We were all very hungry and ready to dive in. Penny needed to get back to chapel hill to see our family friend and give her some support, so we had a quick blessing and quick toast and broke bread. Penny makes wonderful rolls, and she had made some vegan ones for the first time, I thought they were quite good, I wouldn’t have guessed thy were vegan. My mom had made a very interesting sort of leak appetizer, it had a firm flaky crust and was piled high on top with various green vegetabley looking things. It was surprisingly good to me, I’m very picky, but I’ve been trying to branch out culinary lately. We had some sort of wonderful wine with the appetizers, I’m not quite sure what it was, but it was a deep red with complex fruit tastes such as raisin and a very smooth finish. Dinner had all the normal highlights of Thanksgiving at our house, cranberry sauce, turkey, mashed potatoes, vegan stuffing, stuffing from inside the turkey, and my holiday favorite, spoon bread! We had another wine with dinner, it was good, but had a novelty name “Bitch.” The bottle was fun, pink label, pink top, a heart with a dagger through it as the logo. It would be a fun wine to bring to a party, it had a strong spicy/sweet flavor to it, not as good as our first wine, but not awful either.
We had all been so hungry and dinner had been so late, that we stuffed ourselves rotten. For dessert we were having my dad’s family recipe favorite, blackberry roll, which normally I can not wait to have. I was so stuffed though, I could only look on with moderate anticipation as it was prepared. It’s a simple yet elegant dish, tart, unsweetened blackberries are cooked in a flaky crisp crust and then a warm sauce of brown sugar and butter is put on the side for you to mix in with your bites. You get this incredibly intense mixture of sweet and sour, and the sugar and butter really bring out the blackberry flavor. When I think of holiday desserts at home, that’s what I think of.
As dessert wrapped up, Penny had to leave, so we said our goodbyes and she and I traded phone numbers, she recently had her mac upgraded and when the tech guy did that he lost all her old mail and contacts. I’m going to try and swing by her place on Saturday and see if I can find that stuff for her. I don’t really know mac’s very well, but hopefully I can muddle through. Anyhow off she went, and we were all sitting in the living room sipping coffee and relaxing. My sister decided it was time to play “Bonanza!” Bonanza is a game that’s creation is somewhat lost in the mysteries of the Parsons Family Tradition, but it’s played on a hand made, hand painted miter board that has been in my Dad’ family for 40 years or more. The game is complex and difficult to explain, but it has all sorts of mixtures of things, bits of hearts, poker, canasta and other games thrown in, it includes an ante and a penalty for having cards left in your hand at the end of the game. It’s a lot like monopoly as well, you can keep playing and playing and playing. My dad has recently started the process of wrapping up the game more quickly by doubling, tripling, and sextupling the ante. After an hour or so we were up to the highest ante, and people were a bit worn out from playing. I actually managed to win for the first time ever, but undoubtedly a lot of my victory could be chalked up to player fatigue. =)
Bonanza wrapped up, and my sister and her boyfriend were planning on turning in. I’d missed a phone call from my friend Danny earlier that night, noticed that I’d missed one from my friend Dave while having dessert, and then saw I’d missed one from his wife Christina just then. I had been planning on catching up with all of them, but the night had dragged on later and later and I was worn out. I had worked a full day on Tuesday, been in rental car hell for well over an hour after work, came home and packed up and then driven six hours in Holiday traffic, slept for about 4 hours Tuesday night, woken up weds to some serious conversations, driven two more hours to pinehurst, jumped out of a plane, watched another guy jump out of a plane, driven my buddy Danny’s mom back from pinehurst, had another long night weds night, and had just gotten through another packed day, and yet, it wasn’t over yet. I called Christina back and they said it was still going strong over at David’s, so I hugged mom and dad goodnight and headed over to Dave’s. Dave has a beautiful new house over by where I went to highschool, and has built himself a full bar including keggorator & tap behind his house. During holidays it’s not unusual for him to invite friends and coworkers over for some beers and good times. I got over there around 11 or 11:30 and found Danny and my buddy Robbey there. I hadn’t seen Robbey in person in a couple of years, so it was a real treat to catch up with him. We chatted for a bit, I caught them up on my sad love life, heard about their respective significant others, and laughed and reminisced about the old times. Robbey took us for a spin in his new Honda Element, which was actually a surprisingly cool car. The rear seats have suicide doors, and are raised above the front bucket seats so you can see down the road, they apparently actually call that “stadium seating” at the dealership, I guess maybe it’s good for people who get motion sick? Anyhow that was fun, we rode around the block a couple of times listening to Kanye & Jay Z. I was pretty worn down by now though, so around 2am I hugged everyone goodbye and motored home to get some sleep. It’s nice to come home though, even that late it felt comfortable and reliable. I slept in my childhood bedroom listening to the sounds of steam trains going by on my white noise generator, thankful for an amazing day with my family and friends. I just hope someday I get to share it with someone I love.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
[...] Original post by kerry [...]