The Zeitgeist with Howard Barbanel
Wednesday, November 23, 2011 at 04:10PM 
The Ghosts of Thanksgivings Past
As time marches on, Thanksgiving and other major holidays trigger a stream of memories stretching back over the decades. Invariably the years have a way of painting everything in a kind of Norman Rockwell-esque sepia tone as nostalgia for days and people gone by come flooding back from the deep recesses of one’s memory banks and hard drive.
As a kid, we used to have big Thanksgivings on my mother’s side of our extended family. Most of the people who previously populated these gatherings are, alas, no longer walking this earth. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, some cousins. The holiday used to be an extravaganza of first cousins at the kids’ table running amok and getting into all kinds of mischief. It is hard to fathom that it’s been 27 years since my Great Uncle Si passed away (he used to be our family’s “official” turkey carver) and all the Thanksgivings past that took place at my Great Aunt Gerri’s place on the Grand Concourse in The Bronx, then migrating to my late Aunt Mona’s and then my late Aunt Stephanie’s places on the Upper East Side. The food was almost beside the point. It was more about the atavistic tribal re-bonding of an extended family of striving Romanian-American Jews and the frisson of turbo-charged intellectual and political discourse where even precocious kids could sometimes participate. Debates would rage for what seemed like hours on the relative greatness (or lack thereof) of the late New York Mayor John Lindsay and other saints in the liberal pantheon. These relatives always seemed “so old” to me in those days, yet, I’m probably now about the same age as so many of those mythic figures from my bygone youth and I can well imagine my younger relatives invariably view me from a similar prism now.
Back in my “salad days,” (my late teens and 20s) before I became a full-fledged adult with spousal responsibilities, serious job responsibilities and mortgage responsibilities, the arrival of Thanksgiving weekend signaled a slew of parties which were often beer-infused reunions with friends from high school, the neighborhood, childhood and college with no end of mental transporting to the “glory days” of adolescence. In hindsight, I really don’t know how I was able to capably drive home from places like AJ’s in Atlantic Beach to my parents in Woodsburgh. We drove cars without airbags, shoulder seatbelts, radial tires, anti-lock brakes and often even without rear window defrosters. I can only think that the good Lord was my co-pilot on some of those late evenings.
The amazing thing about Thanksgiving with one’s extended family (especially people you might not see regularly now) is how despite the time and distance, everyone slips effortlessly back into their pre-assigned and pre-determined roles from long ago and grown-up siblings and cousins jostle and tease one another as though it were 25 or more years ago. It doesn’t matter if during the intervening years you’ve become some kind of a big shot or a parent to many, you’re still someone’s little brother or sister or kid cousin and it’s this kind of re-grounding and re-grouping that compels so many of us to trek even great distances, like salmon swimming upstream, to feed again at the wellsprings of our roots.
Today, heavily imbibing in alcoholic beverages on Thanksgiving (which is not to say, abstaining from them entirely) is out of the question for a myriad of reasons including the potential for lethal bodily harm from driving under the influence, DWI arrests and that hangovers, while viewed nostalgically from a long, safe distance, are something our middle-aged bodies really can’t handle and that our personal trainers will give us no end of grief about. Heavy eating is also generally left to the much younger participants who have that fast metabolism and perceived immortality of youth and are able to take that third helping of stuffing or additional ladleful of sweet potatoes with marshmallows without having to pay any price the next day around their waistlines or G.I. systems.
The earth turns and the years pass. Our hair goes thinner or grayer, the leaves are shorn from their trees for the last time yet again, fireplaces are lit, the afternoon sound of football games (just on TV for most Jews, in reality, actually playing on their lawns for many other ethnic groups) redounds and ricochets throughout the house, mixed in with the clatter from the kitchens to form a cacophony of American life that is comforting, embracing and welcoming, telling us all for a day at least, as Dorothy said, “there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home” and even if some of your relatives are munchkins, wizards or witches, there’s no place you’d rather be on Thanksgiving.
