Thanksgiving.

After my parents got married they lived in an apartment in Waukegan Illinois. Verna and LeRoy Bidgood, also newlyweds, were their downstairs neighbors. They were a few years older than Mom and Dad. LeRoy shared Dad’s interest in aviation and they both built and flew model airplanes. The four of them became close friends. 

When I was 3 and my brother was 4, my dad got a job in Indianapolis and we moved. The Bidgoods ended up in Dayton, Ohio, about 3 hours’ drive away.

Through most of my childhood, we spent Thanksgiving with the Bidgoods, alternating years. I don’t remember having a preference for one house or the other, just that my brother Michael and I looked forward to seeing them every year. They had no children and they doted on us. Maybe doted is the wrong word. They seemed to enjoy our company as much as we enjoyed theirs. They included us in conversations, talked to us like people, not like children. Verna was dry and funny. She had a smoker’s laugh (and a smoker’s cough -- she and LeRoy both smoked Kent cigarettes one after another all day long). She was a great cook, as good as Mom. She made something called a French apple pie that had a sort of eggy filling and a streusel top. I didn’t like it as much as my mother’s more traditional apple pie, but I thought it was very sophisticated. They had a dachshund named Duchess who would snap at your fingers if you weren’t careful, so you were.

Their house, like ours, was full of books and I loved, like I still do, to scan the titles and pull out and read a bit of anything that piqued my interest. One year I found one called something like “Why I Don’t Believe in God,” and it was way over my head but I devoured it anyway. I never had “believed in God,” but it hadn’t occurred to me till then that not believing was its own belief system. On their living room wall they had two framed reproductions of Margaret Keane paintings of sad little girls that I loved to just gaze at.

Around the time my sister Kay was born (she’s 6 1/2 years younger than I), the Bidgoods adopted a baby girl and then a few years later a boy. Their son had what they used to call a learning disability. I remember the year when he was 1 1/2 or 2 and just starting to form words I picked him up and carried him around the house pointing to things and asking him what they were called, like “lamp” or “chair” or whatever, and if he didn’t know I would teach him. Thanksgiving was always such a long, slow day, with Mom and Verna in the kitchen and Dad and LeRoy usually out in the garage or the driveway. Michael was probably out there with them; he took more of an interest in airplanes and cars than I ever did. Behind their house was a woods with a creek and a huge uprooted rotting tree and we’d spend quite a bit of time out there poking and digging at it.

Soon after the Bidgoods adopted their second child, Verna got pregnant and had another girl. By this time I guess my sister was a toddler. The yearly gathering had turned quickly from a party of four to ten, six of them kids, and then my brother and I were teenagers and I guess less interested in a long day with the adults, who were older now, and I don’t remember exactly when but the Thanksgiving tradition fizzled.

I think Verna and LeRoy were probably always Republicans but back then Republicans and Democrats could be friends. By the 1980s they’d become much more stridently right-wing which Mom and Dad found hard to take, and the smoke-filled house was too much for my dad’s asthma. Their long friendship suffered. They continued to exchange Christmas cards. Verna would write a newsy letter every year in her nearly illegible handwriting. When they retired, they moved to northern Wisconsin, closer to where they came from. Chan and I send them a card every year and most years they send us one too. Verna’s handwriting still takes some effort. They must be in their 90s now, and I haven’t seen them, I don’t think, since my sister’s wedding to her first husband, around 1990. I don’t know anything about their children, who would all be in their 50s now.

I was thinking about the Bidgoods because this year Chan and I are flying to Indiana to have Thanksgiving with my sister’s family. Since Mom died, for enough years to get used to it, Thanksgiving at Kay’s has been a big gathering: Kay and her husband, Chan and I, Kay’s 3 sons and the two older boys’ partners, Michael and his wife Sandy, Dad, and my friend since childhood, Martha. But my oldest nephew lives in San Antonio now and can’t manage such a long trip for the weekend, my second nephew, the one who lives in the East Village now, is working at Starbucks and can’t get the time off (even if he wanted to go home which he says he doesn’t). Michael and Sandy are caring for Sandy’s 99-year-old father whose wife just died, so they can’t make it. Martha will be with her dad this year. Dad lives in Muncie, about 45 minutes from Kay’s, and won’t go very far from home any more. So this year it’ll just be Chan and I, Kay and her husband and their youngest, who is 19.

Obviously I was cooking, not “playing with matches.”

I don’t think I’m feeling particularly sad about the smaller Thanksgiving this year. The cooking will be a little less hectic and for decades I didn’t spend Thanksgiving with my family at all. I usually cooked at home in whatever ratty apartment I was living in, invited friends — for several years in my 20s my boyfriend at the time, Brian, and I invited 20 or more people and cooked the whole meal in what passed for a kitchen but was really just a stove and sink shoved into a closet in our Ft. Greene apartment. I miss those dinners intensely. I miss the holidays in New York, which were always lovely and melancholy, but the winter holidays are sad no matter where you spend them.

Thanksgiving is always just as much about who is not at the table as who is.

Mom.