Grand turkey ball

Turkey, Lions and grandmother are the three essential ingredients that make Thanksgiving Thanksgiving. This year’s Thanksgiving celebration is a relatively small gathering for us but all the essential ingredients are here.

We’ve brought spring rolls and deviled eggs to this year’s feast. Other family members claimed dibs on all the principal, traditional foods. At least, we assumed so, from fragmented memories of fragmented plans from fragmented conversations. The drawing together of these fragments is what makes a particular Thanksgiving. This year, grandmother’s daughter is hosting.

Sister is missing, being at her husband’s family’s Thanksgiving, a bit like when everyone realizes no one is bringing pumpkin pie. Awareness of the lack persists before, during and after the event, which becomes defined both by what is present and what is not.

I’d been the first to pull this kind of disappearing act when living and working abroad during the mid aughts. After several years in a row, the dynamic changed somewhat.

Visits with family during the holidays (by way of video call) became how I imagine convalescents and invalids experience them, each family member taking a few moments to catch up either individually or in pairs or trios, generally ebullient and most speaking a little louder than necessary.

Grandmother was born April 19, 1926, around six years after the formation of the National Football League and a little more than eight years before the first professional football match held on Thanksgiving Day in Detroit against the visiting Chicago Bears. It was the first nationally broadcast professional football match in U.S. history.

She is afflicted with tinnitus so we tend to speak a bit louder than normal for her benefit. It’s a change from my youth, when father’s side of the family was so much quieter than mother’s Irish Roman Catholic counterpart. The latter is calmer now than in their boisterous young adulthood, wedding season being an occasional exception for some. Less than half of my cousin cohort have married so an end is not yet in sight. In the annual period beginning in late spring and lasting until sometime mid autumn, at least one of us will wed.

I could throw my own stateside soiree at any given point, since we’ve only performed the rites in the presence my spouse’s family, close to a decade ago on the other side of the planet.

Renewals of vows take many forms.

Mother was born in 1957, a few months before the Detroit Lions won their last national championship, that is to say, Superbowl.

She has two grandchildren now and the Detroit Lions are expected to proceed to the playoffs again this year. Grandmother is great-grandmother and the Lions are championship contenders even in the eyes of the realists.

Meanwhile I am just a middle-aged man with memories of unfiltered Pall Malls smoked in a diner that stayed open all night. The Clock, it was called, but no longer, except to those of us unstuck in time.

So it goes, so it goes.