SOTD #24 brings us to Thanksgiving. That means I’m only seven days behind. Thanksgiving did not start off promisingly. Chris woke up at around 2 to commence a night of barfing. I woke up almost every time he did. Plus, I hadn’t gone to bed until 1 because I was up watching Dave and Conan with my aforementioned brother-in-law John. My father-in-law has this enormous flat panel hi-def TV in the family room of the new house. It is the defintion of the word “sweet,” but seeing Dave larger than life, warts, weird bumps, and gap that I could wedge a can of Diet Coke in was a little more than I could take.John and I were mesmerized by Peter Gallagher’s performance of a Lucinda Williams song.
According to Chris, Peter Gallagher is a wonderful singer. He saw him perform at the big Alzheimer’s Foundation benefit he went to with his parents last spring. It used to be that I had a secret life in L.A., but these days, it seems that Chris has taken on the parallel identity thing. Frankly, I’m far more interested in having a secret life in Ney York, Paris, or Mexico City.
One more note: Peter Gallagher looks a little tight in the face. Perhaps he’s had a little work. A little too much work. The big screen never lies. Seems it takes but a second for me to return to my L.A. ways.
Thanksgiving was a big mix of me and George-Ann cooking, Peter and George-Ann “debating” the placement of the tables, the girls watching the Macy’s parade nearly large as life, and everybody coming over to see the new house. They started arriving at 3, and I was still in jeans and unshowered. The flowers looked great, the peace accord table was set, and I’d done a half million pots. Chris had roused himself and then gone back to bed. He reemerged for the party.
Who came: well, the California family. I could give you all the details, but this is supposed to be about the song.
I didn’t listen to music all day, which probably explains why I was in something of a foul mood. That and the sleeplessness and the helping while George-Ann’s three sons did whatever they wanted (sleep, hang out with his best friend, and drive from Berkeley with his girlfriend and Chihuahua, resepectively).
Chris, back in form, was in a bad mood because he didn’t want to wait for dinner. His mother wanted us to wait for Nick. So we waited for Nick. While we were waiting, once I’d had a shower and managed to both change and talk with my mother, getting an update on the Southern Gothic holiday unfolding in the Appalaichans (maybe there are good reasons for some of the stereotypes), I was trying not to eat too much before dinner and to psyche myself up for the task of carving the turkey. Apparently, George-Ann’s cousin Bob is the traditional carver, and with him in Florida, I had to fill the void.
This is the poetic justice part of my Thanksgiving.
I was asked to carve the turkey. Every one was happy that I carved the turkey. I did an adequate job with the turkey. When Chris complained that it was dry, I informed him that when I carved it, it was moist. The waiting (according to Tom P., the hardest part) made it dry out. That was my little Thanksgiving nod to my grouchy husband. I’d told him to chill out on his mom and brother, to let them wait for Nick, to accept the things he could not change; I was not sympathetic. But at least I kind of backed him up by letting him know that if we’d eaten immediately after I carved it, the turkey would have been delicious. At the same time, I was defending his mother’s turkey, which he had it in for from the beginning because she didn’t brine it. Between Chris and the brining and Peter and the tables, George-Ann was fighting on two fronts.
So, the poetic justice is this: on the last Thanksgiving I remember spending with both my mother and brother, my mother forced my then 17 year old brother to carve the turkey. Since he was the only man there, it was his job, according to Ms. Women’s Liberation.
Obviously, we were in the nether region of logic.
When my brother completely botched carving the turkey to my mother’s satisfaction, we left the nether region.
My father was raised to carve. He grew up in the WASP world that trained sons to stand before the women sat down, to help mothers with their coats, to carve. He’s one of three sons. I’m sure my uncles are just as skilled as my father is. I’d bet that my three male cousins are up there with my uncles. But my brother had the misfortune to come of carving age just as my dad rejecting everything about his upbringing. There were no carving tutorials for Taylor, unlike the evenings when we used all the silver and learned which fork went with what. No tests like buttering the bread in a manner acceptable to Emily Post’s bastard son who just so happened to be my stoner dad. The guy who wore blue jeans everywhere, when no one wore blue jeans anywhere, expected his children to have his command of patrician conduct.
As did his ex-wife.
So, there were a few mixed messages there. And they kind of converge for me at Thanksgiving, the holiday that we usually forced to be on one team or the other. (There was only one dual Thanksgiving that I remember–two too many, as I remember). And for me to then receive the message that I, the daughter-in-law, would be carving, well, it was just a little weird. They have no patrician tradition holding them back in Chris’s family. The sexism was alive and well, as far as I could tell, given how I spent the day and how my husband and brothers-in-law did. But, there was no feeling that the low gal on the totem pole shouldn’t have the honor of carving.
But the truth is, in the Hyams family, it’s not an honor. It’s just something that must be done. The idea of carving a turkey as some sort of badge of honor is completely silly there. The idea is just to eat and be with everyone. The idea is to have a good time. The idea is to wait for Nick. The idea is not to blow your top or get drunk or insult your parents or scream in the kitchen.
So, while we were waiting for Nick, Chris was talking in the hallway with cousin Michael and “Uncle” Lance. Michael is George-Ann’s cousin–I can never keep the first second, once removed, twice removed stuff straight when we’re all together. That’s their thing, not mine. Michael lives in Ventura, grew up on Long Island and has an eleven year old surfer dude son, Joe, whom Emma and Mazie adore. He’s multple removals away, but he acts just like my first cousins acted.
Lance is Chris’s Aunt Danna’s boyfriend/partner and the father of Chris’s first and only first cousin Jack, who just so happens to be eighteen months old. Danna is Peter’s fourteen year younger half-sister. At 46, she is the girls’ great aunt. I guess she’s been a great aunt since she was 36.
There are other people, even more removed in cousindom, who come as well.
I am trying to launch a movement in the family–the “Uncle Lance” movement. I love Lance, whom we’ve all known for a long time. I want us to call him Uncle Lance. He has this incredible gift of being able to remember people’s birthdays. He looks at me and thinks, “OJ Simpson, Tom Hanks, and Nicolai Tesla.” He’s an actor. And he’s a musician.
Michael is also a musician, a serious pianist and guitarist. He has four more years at the post office and then it’s just him and his music and his wife Sandy (molecular biologist, world champion ultimate frisbee player) and son Joe. He has this way of mixing jazz and ultimate frisbee lingo whenever he’s describing anything or anyone he thinks is foolish that makes the Wilson brothers seem uptight. You don’t realize that he’s just called someone an asshole until ten minutes later.
Chris and Michael and Lance were in the hallway talking about music. They were talking about Hendrix, about Joe liking Hendrix. Clearly, nothing could make the three of them prouder than to have the youngest male in the clan demonstrating proper musical development. Me, Hendrix is not the end all and be all. If he were, there would most likely already be an entry about him in here.
But it was the first time I’d been able to think about music all day. The first time music came to mind, so it was liberating and the only place I wanted to be. The turkey, like the rest of us. was waiting for Nick.
Since Lance was there, the requisite conversation about Mick and Keith’s birthdays being the same as Peter and Nick’s was taking place. This is an interesting fact, but sometimes I get a little tired of how fascinating Chris and Lance seem to find it. I don’t know. We don’t have any particularly amazing contrasts, unless you consider my brother as one of the best presidents ever (April 13th, Jefferson) and my dad as the worst–until now (January 9th, Nixon) and my mom on the date of the Watergate break-in (June 17th) as somehow ironic, with OJ Simpson waiting in the wings to either run, charm, or murder, well, we don’t have anything quite so captivating as the Mick-Keith thing.
We got into a brief Keith v. Mick, who do you like thing, to which I replied, “Charlie.” It’s true, I’d answered the same thing in some silly Evite quiz I been asked to take in association with Liz and Andrew’s wedding. And then it segued into songs. I think Michael said “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking.” I said it’s my favorite Stones song. And it is.
Just thinking about the song was like hearing it loud. It changed everything. I was in the hall, talking with guys about music, not trying to carve the turkey or to remember the cranberry sauce or to go get the placecards the girls had made. I was in the hall talking about music.
I think sometimes how it must be for Chris to have Michael and Lance in his family, there when he’s tired out of his parents’ tug-of-war or fretting about his brothers. In walk Micahel and Lance, and in walks a conversation with people who love you and treasure you for being their solace the way they are yours. They’re all members of the same tribe.
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