Thankful

I don't eat turkey at Thanksgiving anymore. It kind of grosses me out, quite honestly. I can still remember eating it one year and getting a piece of uncooked skin. Gross. This year, I am making lasagne. Last year, I made spaghetti. The year before, my mother tried to cook a turket breast and didn't cook it long enough, so we basically just ate stuffing and mashed potatoes and pie.

One year, she made Cornish hens. Why she thought this might be a good idea, I don't know. One usually does not serve a Cornish hen to a seven-year-old. But, whatever. I probably just ate mashed potatoes that year, since I hated stuffing at that point.

Is there a regional thing with stuffing and dressing? I was discussing Thanksgiving with someone this morning and they referred to "dressing." I always call it "stuffing." I knew what he was talking about but it still struck me, because I so rarely hear to it referred to as dressing. Is it a southern thing? An east coast thing? Or a midwest rural thing?

I've eaten out a couple of times for Thanksgiving. Once in New York, with my mother. We only nearly killed each other about five times during that trip, most notably when I dragged her up to the Cloisters by taking the longest subway ride ever, then walking uphill for a half mile or so. She wasn't pleased. But I wanted to see the unicorns.

We went out a couple times when my dad was still alive, too. He liked the brunch routine at the local fancy hotel. Pots of potatoes, mounds of stuffing, slabs of turkey. Paired with omlettes cooked to order, breakfast sausage, oysters on the half shell, sushi and a long table filled with dessert. I know that buffet spoke to him, reflecting, as it did, the Puritan spirit of deprivation and self-restraint.

Mostly, when I was in high school, we'd go pick up my grandmother and go to my great-aunt's house for Thanksgiving. My second cousin would bring his humongous dog and his east-coast wife and his sister would show up with whichever artsy-fartsy dude she was dating at the time. Everyone would argue about politics and I'd be the only kid at the table, thankful, mostly, that I didn't have to share my family with any other children or, worse, have to sit at a kid's table.

My great-aunt is gone now, as is her husband and my grandmother and my dad. I don't get to see many people from my family anymore. My great-aunt's house had belonged to her parents, my great-grandparents, and I hope whoever has Thanksgiving there nowadays enjoys it as much as I did.

This year there will only be a few of us, eating lasagne in a condo in the cold north woods. But I'm thankful for what I've had. And for what is yet to come.