Thanksgiving Ghosts

While New Alt staff and volunteers dished out a thanksgiving meal to any clients who stopped by, I stayed home where we marked the holiday with four cans of Friskies’ turkey and giblets. Jackson was particularly enthusiastic, literally racing across the room when I filled her bowl. There were places I could have gone, but since I am off on Wednesdays and Saturdays, two days in a row to myself was too tempting to pass up. It’s also awkward being the guest who was invited because they have no family, showing up with my assortment of ghosts like a bunch of balloons bobbing along at the end of their strings, trying to keep them out of sight. Snuggling the cat crew while listening to more and more cars pull up to the house across the street, parking every which way on the street and in the driveway, people arriving to celebrate with my neighbors in their newly purchased home, my mind went wandering back in time. The first thanksgivings I can remember were in Yonkers, at the home of my Dad’s close college friend, a cheerful poet named Charlie. I was young enough that what I remember is fragments – the peacock feathers in a vase, the taste of the port wine cheddar he served, the year my mother was mortified when her multilevel cake carrying case fell apart on the subway going home, spilling leftover pie all over the subway floor. Charlie wound up moving to Florida with his elderly mother, where he wound up keeping her ashes in the front seat of his car for so long that my Dad finally pointed out that they could be stolen. He called all the time and if he didn’t get Dad, he would talk my ear off, telling me about his travels and the underground gay scene in 1940s Turkey. In their 80s, Charlie’s mobility was limited, but his mind was sharp and he took to keeping Dad on the phone for hours, his way of making sure that Dad’s creeping dementia did not get him in trouble. Florida is full of seniors, but the services for them are very lacking. I knew Charlie was not getting the physical care he needed, and I would have moved him in with Dad so that I could keep an eye on them both, but there was no way Charlie could navigate Dad’s 4 flights of stairs. Charlie died less than a year after Dad. The years after Charlie moved when we were in Brooklyn for thanksgiving are mostly a total blank, except for various disasters – the year my mother, always better at the life of the mind than actual physical life, cooked the turkey in the plastic and then called the company to see if could still be eaten stands out. And then there was the year Dad was on sabbatical “improving his Spanish” while roaming through his favorite countries- Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala. Something had gone wrong with the power of attorney he had left, and my mother could not access his account. During the days it took her to track him down by using his predilection for grand hotels growing somewhat dilapidated in the post-colonial era, calling hotels in city after city, often to be told that “Senor Bray” had been there but had traveled on, our electricity got turned off for non-payment. It was thanksgiving day, and my mother was melting like soggy cardboard in her distress about not being able to cook without power. I was still in elementary school, but I knew it was my job to rescue her. I had helped my Dad as he very slowly renovated the empty apartment above us, and I knew there was power up there, so I convinced my mother to bring her food processor and various pots and knives and ingredients to the second floor. There was no furniture up there, so we sat on a sheet on the linoleum floor to eat. The next day she found him, at a hotel he loved because he could pick mangoes from the window of his room, so ripe that he would remove all his clothing and eat them in the bathtub to contain the juicy sticky mess. When I was in junior high, another of my Dad’s eccentric artsy Black Mountain college friends, Gisella, invited us to her W 12th st townhouse for a meal of only Native American foods. Gisella was a novelist, dress designer, and one of the original vendors at the Union Square Farmers market, where she had a booth selling healthy baked goods. I don’t remember a lot about the actual meal except that it was a lot more vegetarian friendly than the typical thanksgiving spread. Mostly I remember the cold smoothness of the agate bead necklace I wore, and the witty chatter of the other guest, a dutch man. Gisella died in 2021, 92 years old. Once I took over the cooking, saving us from my mother’s distracted and whimsical efforts, I did the entire meal myself for years, for various combinations of people. I would make the family cranberry relish, not sweet like the gelatinous canned stuff, but fresh cranberries and chunks of oranges, peel and all, diced in the food processor into a relish, with a bit of sugar added. I made pies, experimenting until I settled on a couple of favorites – perking up the boring traditional pumpkin pie with a gingerbread crust, studded with bits of candied ginger – and a cranberry pie with a caramel syrup poured over whole cranberries, leaving them glistening and sweet. The year after my mother died, her old friend Gloria invited us to Roosevelt Island for thanksgiving, kind of her but with an undertone of pity. I made a pie and navigated Dad with his limited vision through the identical buildings to their apartment. I know their family well, when we were little her daughter and I were so close that we took to switching underwear at preschool, but it had been years since I saw her, and it was hard to get comfortable with the reason for the invitation hanging unspoken in the air. One year Kate’s younger sister came from Maine for thanksgiving at her apartment. Dad was always happy to eat what was put in front of him, so it didn’t occur to any of us that Jess would be unhappy about a vegetarian thanksgiving. She didn’t say anything in front of me, but her complaining and whining left Kate fuming. Another year Kate left me furious by going to spend the holiday with her family in Maine, leaving me alone with Dad, who was by then having trouble managing food that required utensils. After Dad left us in 2012, Kate and I started escorting the clients to Craft Bar, Tom Colicchio’s restaurant near Union Square where they would do a whole thanksgiving meal for clients from several organizations. The clients really enjoyed getting to eat in a place they could normally never afford, and they enjoyed meeting Julianne Moore, who would be volunteering in an apron and blue jeans along with her family. One year I had to intervene when a client with mental health issues kept pestering her with suggestions about what to wear to the Oscars. Craftbar closed in 2017, a victim of landlord greed, but by then Kate was gone as well. My mind was jolted back to reality by my persistently ringing phone. I picked up to hear an unfamiliar young man, who explained that he was 22 years old and had just come out to his entire extended family, and now he was feeling like he might have to leave home. I explained his options, including what to do if he had to leave abruptly. Holiday or no holiday, queer young people keep losing their homes.