Thanksgivings Around a Newspaperwoman’s World

I was overjoyed to find that the Colonists’ first harvest meal with the Wampanoag Indians included mussels. The mussels were not  buttered, or steamed with garlic and wine, but picked by hand along the shore and served with lobsters, mashed corn, deer, apples and squash. The first Thanksgiving was cold and bleak but maybe not as cold as that one my family spent in a Cortland, N.Y., farmhouse  with no heat but a wood stove whose chimney buckled as the ambient temperature moved up to the low 40s. I felt for those early settlers. It was chilly in this old farmhouse, too. Did you know that gravy can coagulate on its journey from pitcher to turkey?  Tony and our boys were having a wonderful adventure in this rural place. Wonderful and temporary.

My first Thanksgiving as a married woman was very different. President Kennedy had just been assassinated, and an eerie conversion of temperatures turned New York City into an odd, steamy, gray place. Everyone picked at their food and told me it was delicious and we all felt terrible and sad. It was a case of insisting on tradition in the face of overwhelming sorrow. As though doing otherwise would break us.

Our oddest Thanksgiving was in Atlanta, Ga.,  a foreign place for New Yorkers in the 1960s. And isolating. Tony was in graduate school, and the  professors at Emory used to evaporate for the holidays, while the graduate students were too argumentative to spend  unnecessary time with each other (Vietnam War, racism, political divides, anti-Semitism). We decided to enjoy someone else’s holiday cooking. 

So, we headed for a luxe hotel restaurant in downtown Atlanta. There were two other families there and the dinner was stunningly sober.     

As for really foreign places, we spent one Thanksgiving in Jakarta with Ambassador Paul Wolfowitz (later noted for his hawklike stances) who welcomed us all to the American Embassy with a rather cheerless reception. Some people there had the notion he said, “Don’t come back.”  I did not hear that. I was too busy checking the china for nationality. Varied. This was a lot like many gatherings of Americans in Indonesia, who checked each other out carefully. Anyone vague about what they were doing there was nailed immediately as a spy. 

I spent another Thanksgiving at an unusually spacious apartment  in Beijing with English speakers hired to work for China Daily, an English-language newspaper devoted to hiding bad stuff and celebrating everything else: Our job was to fix sentences like: “Two people died at the scene of the accident and three others were killed in the hospital.” Language is a tricky thing. Although the best headline I saw that year was by a Chinese reporter who wrote: “Metrification has miles to go.” Anyway, there was no turkey, at this Thanksgiving party, no cranberry sauce, no pumpkin pie, only Great Wall white wine, Old Grouse Scotch, and shrimp chips. I biked back to my apartment during one of the city’s extraordinary windstorms, clouding the air with yellow dust and battering metal garbage cans down streets and alleys. 

 It was time to come home.And for some reason, like the early Colonists, we serve mussels with every Thanksgiving turkey. That’s home cooking.