Thanksgiving Conversations

It's a frosty pre-winter morning, and I'm luxuriating in pleasant thoughts of Thanksgiving recently past but ever-present. I'm also listening to some random tunes by C. P. E. Bach played by jazz pianist Keith Jarrett.

The Thanksgiving holiday may have gotten started a few weeks ago during a Sunday morning breakfast with my cousin Pat. She always has good stories to tell about her high-stress position in the banking world, her daughter Natalie's horse ranch, and the perils and rewards of her volunteer activities at the nearby animal humane society. "I'm a dog-whisperer," she says. And I believe her. After years of volunteering, she has also finally reached the rare status of having her own locker.

She and Hilary always have lots of books in common to talk about. (I don't.) Family stories are also likely to emerge, though they're sometimes about people I never met. The names sound vaguely familiar... 

At our recent breakfast Pat's stories turned to someone I knew quite well: her dad. I had no idea how many different lines of work he pursued, dragging the family along with him to Colorado, Oregon, and elsewhere, before finding his calling as a forest ranger supervising firefighters in the Gila National Forest of southern New Mexico.

We had Hilary's family and a few family friends over on Thanksgiving, and it was a lively scene. I enjoyed listening to my brother-in-law David describe a trip with his wife, Debbie, to visit her family in Florida and South Carolina in an antique camper they purchased recently. 

David was also excited about a new book by Pete Jesperson, long-time manager of The Replacements, who first played in a rock-n-roll band in the Sylvestre family basement. "My parents were the only ones in the neighborhood who could stand the noise."

At dinner Hilary's mother, Dorothy, who's now 97, described to me in some detail a documentary she watched recently on our local public television station. (Now I'm the one who can't remember what the show was about!).  

It was also fun hearing Miles describe how it feels to be "in the zone" on the basketball court. Brother-in-law Jeff shared some photos on his phone of his family's newly remodeled kitchen, and we reviewed the career of film director Ridley Scott together in light of his upcoming film about Napoleon. 

After dessert several of us at the far end of the table got into a lively discussion of language usage. It ranged from the difference between "supper" and "dinner" to the excesses of the  "periodic style"--with difficulty I refrained from fetching my new copy of the Yale Selected Works of Samuel Johnson from the other room to illustrate the point. We also explored the use and misuse of the semicolon and the egregiousness of the phrase "one of the only... ."  

At one point Nora's mom, Mary, said, "My mother would have loved this conversation."

With the average age being  in the mid-sixties, of course there was also plenty of health talk: dreadful migraines, expensive medications, dietary restrictions, sore knees and hips and necks. Many of us were nevertheless eager to take a postprandial walk around the block before we fetched the pies from their cache on top of the piano.  It's a family tradition.

Back at the table, but for the most part sitting in different places, conversation continued for quite a while before everyone headed for home. To my ear, the din of multiple voices exchanging views on a variety of subjects in a single room is one of the most beautiful sounds on earth.

A long Minnesota goodbye

Later, with darkness encroaching outside the windows, while Hilary and I were doing the dishes, the phone rang. Cousin Laura had left her cell phone behind. She and her husband, Rick, stopped by the next morning to fetch it, and we sat in the living room in front of the fire chatting once again. We told a few stories about our recent trip to Duluth. Rick, stimulated by the fire, told a few stories about splitting cords of wood with a maul back in the days when he and Laura managed a sheep farm in Vermont. We discussed the likelihood of the northern lights putting on a show and the new Native American photography exhibit at the institute. Rick, a professional photographer, didn't think much of it; the rest of us found it was well worth a visit. On these and other subjects, including the dangers of "post-truth" that Rick's brother Charlie is pushing on his Boston website, we spent the morning.

But we weren't quite done with the Thanksgiving conversations. The next afternoon we drove out to Lake Minnetonka to visit my cousin Rich and his wife, Sarah. A few years ago they bought a house in Mound just down the street from their daughter Willa's place, and during their visits from Lincoln they've been spending quite a bit of time dealing with the house's sub-standard wiring and plumbing. "I know the man at the hardware store a lot better than any of the neighbors," Rick says with a grim chuckle. 

Coffee and conversation, the classic combination

We discussed a few detective novels set in Southern France and the widespread popularity of Aperol in northern Italy. And it was just our good luck that Willa stopped by on her way home from shopping—we hadn't seen her in years—and we got a chance to find out what's been going on in her life, how the boathouse remodel is coming along, and how the kids are doing. The big question facing her daughter Clare, now a fifth-grader, is: basketball or hockey? (She's going with basketball.)

On a brief foray into family history, I confirmed with Rich a vague notion I had that grandpa Toren, who had a fine tenor voice, served as cantor at the synagogue in Lincoln on Saturdays, while also singing at the Swedish Covenant church he and grandma attended on Sunday. It's true.

We also touched briefly on Grandpa Toren's role as a secretary at a Palestine peace commission of 1918. A few years ago Rich scanned all the letters grandpa sent home from Europe and sent me copies.

These are a very few fragments of the many connections and conversations that filled the holiday. Such things are hard to remember except in random snatches, and harder still to describe or recreate, unless you happen to be a novelist. The snatches above are grossly inadequate to capture or do justice to the family spirit. 

But there's no harm in trying.