In 1968, my bride and I planned our first Thanksgiving Day feast with dampened spirit. Married on August 31, I got the letter in October. Not the plague, but the draft felt like a terminal disease.
At first, Selective Service told me to report on November 15, 1968. I managed a postponement, and would report on January 15, 1969. Thanksgiving and Christmas, then New Year, then I'd disappear. Disappear maybe forever, Barbara feared, had I gone to Vietnam and been killed. A lot of draftees got killed in those days, so we were feeling rotten.
There has been a single thanksgiving day meal we haven't shared together, otherwise for the past fifty-two years, Barbara and I have enjoyed the national eating holiday feasting on cocono.
Guajolote, other gente call them, I learned cocono. My grandmother raised gallinas and a few coconos. My elementary school teachers requested the bags of turkey feathers my gramma saved for them. Emilia Macias was the best poultry dresser in California. Customers drove from Pomona to DeYoung's Poultry on Highway 99 outside Redlands, to buy a thanksgiving turkey dressed by "Emily."
Emilia's great-granddaughter, Amelia, raises gallinas and a few coconos. This year, Christmas heritage turkeys will be on several holiday tables, fresh from McDonald's Urban Farm, dressed by Emily's great-grand-daughter. Thank you, Time, for coming around and going around.
Tamales For Thanksgiving
Miss McCartney begins her fourth grade class with the annual holiday poll, "What did you have for Thanksgiving?"
The weeks leading to the holiday weekend we chattered about the upcoming holiday. We were taught to know our place--at Thanksgiving it was noble Puritans feeding sluggard indios. We were set up to beg for turkey because it was American.
Kids already knew the score. The northside was the wrong side of the tracks, where the poor people live. But there's poor, and then there's dirt poor. Playground talk sorts it out. A few families went for cocono, for most, it was pollo. The dirt poor Sepulvedas had a really festive meal, the twins reported. Tamales.
"Felix, what did you have for Thanksgiving?" Felix had turkey, and stuffing, and everything. "Irma, what did you have?" Turkey. Freddie, Foodo, Zeferino, Michael. Turkey, Turkey, Chicken, Turkey.
Inevitably the teacher turns her attention to the Sepulveda twins. Painfully quiet and normally uncommunicative, their faces show the tension of the upcoming inquisition. "Carmen, and what did you have for Thanksgiving?" Carmen bows her head in silence. "Oh, come now, Herlinda, what did you have for Thanksgiving?" Both girls hunch their shoulders and hang their heads lower.
"Now, speak up, girls, what did you have?" the teacher cajoles and wheedles.
We sit in uncomfortable silence until one of the one of the Weeks twins whispers loudly, "they had tamales."
"Oh, no," cries Miss McCartney, "no one has tomallies for Thanksgiving. You're supposed to have turkey, and cranberries, and . . ." The young teacher lists an exquisite menu while the twins do their amazing shrinking Mexicans act. Pulling their shoulders to their ears, the sisters' heads slide lower and lower in their desks until the two girls disappear before our eyes, only four trenzas hang over the ladder back seats.
The First Thanksgiving, 1968
Barbara keeping a stiff upper lip. I have just opened the envelope drafting me.
Thanksgiving made us sick. She feared I was going to get killed in Vietnam and this would be her only Thanksgiving of the idyll she envisioned for the happily ever after. I scoffed at getting killed, but teevee pictures infected my self-confidence with flag-draped aluminum tubes of doubt. This might be our only Thanksgiving. Not that I would know it, if I did get killed in the Army. I had to leave in January.
We determined we’d make a great big Thanksgiving Day dinner that couldn’t be beat and share it with Karen and Mike, who’d been in our wedding August 31st.
The Salvation Army stove cost me twenty-five bucks back in July, and the appliance fried and boiled our food all summer, making me confident the oven would roast the turkey. I struck a match and got the oven going. Barbara studied her Rombauer & Becker and got the bird prepped.
Flames squeezed out from around the oven door. Black smoke poured out the top under the burners. Barbara was not calm.
I pulled down the hinged door to see turkey grease and butter splatter pooled on the oven floor boiling and burning angrily, fed into spatters and growth by the infusion of air I’d introduced. The turkey carcass had acquired a black coating of soot from the grease fire.
I grabbed the orange cardboard box of Arm & Hammer out of the refrigerator and ripped off the top. Turning to the smoking fire box I nodded at Barbara who pulled down the door.
The turkey was covered in baking soda, coagulating spatter, and black grime. Barbara washed it off in the sink while I called our guests over in Isla Vista. Karen and Mike had a cliffside apartment, a functioning oven, and Alice's Restaurant.
That’s where we finished roasting that turkey and had us a great big Thanksgiving Day dinner that couldn’t be beat. We laughed every time the theme came round on the guitar again, and we had the record on replay for nine hours and that was our first Thanksgiving, 52 years ago.
Thanksgiving Dinner With All the Trimmings. Class "A" Bummer.
Army chow has a deservedly bad reputation. Holiday chow usually makes an exception, and a year after our burning turkey, I looked forward to the Army's promise of an "old-fashioned turkey dinner" in the mess hall here at Bravo Battery. I would not pull duty up on the mountain, where the dinner would arrive after an hour ride tucked inside aluminum cans, not for this upcoming feast!
The site buzzed with excitement at the posted menu of real food. Up in the crew hootches on the mountain, guys passed the hours reminiscing about family favorites, trading stories, getting lost in memories of the taste and smell of grandma's stuffing, playing football in the yard, getting stuffed, and then having pie.
Warm thoughts of home help men ignore the routine hardship of the world's "highest and ruggedest HAWK site." Bravo Battery and Site Seven-five lie six thousand miles from home, and two hours from the nearest PX. Men live in close quarters, with the same five or six men, 24/7, North Korea fifteen miles a constant presence in every breath.
Forget that crap, in a few days, we'll be eating like Thanksgiving back home. The Army says so.
Turkey, roasted by our own cook, and all the trimmings: stuffing, cranberry sauce, yams, green beans, peas and carrots, mashed potatoes, gravy, rolls. And pies. Among all the other food we didn't get at Bravo Battery, we never get dessert. And now, not only can we look forward to a great big thanksgiving day dinner that couldn't be beat, there will be pie. Alice's restaurant didn't have pie.
The cook laments the all-nighter he's going to pull, so I tell him I'll make the pies. Tyner agrees. Tyner could get an Article 15 for letting me into the kitchen, a remote risk. I wait for the mess sergeant to disappear into the ville. I watch Tyner work with impressive efficiency. I am proud of my friend's skill at his work. The chow sucks but it's not the cook's fault.
I had never seen a refrigerated pie crust. Tyner rips open white waxy boxes and dumps the things on the stainless steel workspace next to a stack of pie tins. I make apple and cherry pies, I don't remember how many pies, enough to feed 75 soldiers.
I was a bit disappointed there was no magic, anticipating mixing dough, rolling crusts, trimming and pinching edges. I simply filled the crusts with canned pie fillings and Tyner did the rest. That disappointment was nothing compared to the next morning's news and the outrage it produces.
Top ruins everyone's day at morning formation. The uniform of the day for chow will be the Class "A" uniform. Incongruity slathered with absurdity tempered with last-minute notice is a slap in the face. Wear coat and tie, all your brass, formal wear out here where locals don't have electricity and running water.
Had we been ordered to wear pink tutus, the outrage wouldn't have been matched. Thoughts of home smolder behind spit-shined dress shoes in the middle of nowhere. The Lifers, of course, love it. They keep their brass polished and dress greens pressed. We enlisted men dig Class A traje out of the bottom of our duffel bags and wear them wrinkled and looking like shit.
The BC knows it, Top knows it, we know it. Out here, GIs wear a dress uniform when they land, then roll it up and stuff it in the bottom of their duffel. A week before we leave, the houseboy presses it and the soldier wears the Class A home.
We make the best of it, looking like shit. We eat seconds, laugh a lot and darned if we don't look good all dressed up military. And, of course, we eat the best pie in the United States Army. I have cherry.
The Second Thanksgiving
The two happy people in the foto are eating a perfectly-baked turkey. This is the second turkey the woman roasted, and the first that did not catch fire. They remember how grim their first thanksgiving day had been, this is their next. Today, they talk about that time in their lives, they listen to "Alice's Restaurant" on repeat, like they played during that awful day, and they begin again.
That terror never completely extinguished itself, until recently, for Barbara. That flaming bird never happened again. Barbara became a skilled cook, happily ever after. Every Thanksgiving Day, the couple puts "Alice's Restaurant" on the turntable, play the song on repeat all day, recalling how scared they were at what might have been, and how that absurd scenario gave them nightmares.
And the people in that foto, they laugh, because things turn out good, and the couple sits there and they know it.
1 comment:
Looking forward to watching Alics Restaurant again this year.
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