Memories like that Christmas of ’83 when your Uncle Phil, breath heavy with the scent of too much egg nog, positively insisted that you weren’t “too old to sit on your favorite uncle’s lap,” despite all your protests. Or that Easter Morning when it turned out that those special “Easter eggs” that were round and strung together you found in your parents’ closet were actually anal beads.
Your dad’s anal beads.
You know, the kind of memories that only come up during the holidays, or after years of intensive therapy.
In any case, for me the Thanksgiving that comes to mind every November is Thanksgiving, 1999, when I was living in Red Wing.
At that time, my friend and sometimes roommate Eric was in the midst of one of the off-again periods in his on-again, off-again relationship with his then-wife Sally, and so, along with our roommate Tim, we decided that we were going to hold a big Thanksgiving get-together at our house.
When I got home from work the Monday of Thanksgiving week, I found Tim and Eric already home, sitting in the living room with grave expressions saying that they “needed to talk to me.”
I thought, “Oh crap: it’s an intervention!”
And it was. Kind of.
They had decided that we needed to figure out our shopping list for the party and that there was a subject that had to be broached.
“Jon,” Eric said, with a surprising amount of gravitas, “we’re going to be buying a lot of beer for the party. We need you to understand that at least some of it has to be for our guests, so you can’t drink it all.”
After I solemnly swore that I would do my best not to drink all of the beer, we made our list and went shopping.
In the next couple of days, Eric and Sally went on-again, and early on Thanksgiving morning Tim decided that he was going to head back to South Dakota for the weekend with his friend Brad.
So I found myself alone with a refrigerator full of food that I couldn’t do anything with (I wasn’t much of a cook in those days), and a great deal of uncertainty as to what was going to happen.
Fortunately only one of the people we’d invited actually showed up, and he left when I explained that I didn’t know what was going to happen.
At around 11 AM I decided to break open the beer and do my best to break my promise.
At 1, Eric and Sally showed up and Eric began cooking.
He was grilling the turkey, and having prepared everything that he could, we decided to leave the turkey grilling and head to the only bar in town that was open.
The open bar was the one indicated by the cent symbol in the diagram, a bar that I hated being dragged to because a) they had no good beer on tap and b) its clientele consisted entirely of people who would consider Milwaukee’s Best to be a good beer.
By this time I was already pretty tanked, though, so it didn’t bother me as much as it normally would. What did bother me was the reason we were there.
During one of their off-again periods, there was a chick – an old friend of Sally’s – that Eric had hooked up with. Turns out that this was the bar that said chick normally hung out at, and Sally was there for the purposes of ambushing her should she show up.
At this point, I had decided that Eric and Sally should have called it quits for good an off-again or two ago, and given that she had hooked up with a couple of guys herself – some of them during the on-agains – I found myself disgusted and frustrated by the whole thing, and, tongue loosened by the beer, decided to speak my mind on the subject.
This didn’t go over well.
We went back to the house and ate our Thanksgiving dinner in silence. Bitter, resentful silence, which, come to think of it, makes it just like many family Thanksgiving dinners.
After Eric and Sally left, I settled into a chair to get my second wind so that I could head out to my regular bar, which was opening at 7. While there, I slipped into a food and beer-induced coma.
So I never made it the bar that night, but troubled by the events of Thanksgiving, I did hit the bar every night that weekend, and I hit it harder than Mike Tyson ever hit Robin Givens.
(This led to a conversation on Monday afternoon when he came home to find that I hadn’t gone in to work because I’d been too hungover, in which he asked, “Have you ever thought that your drinking problem is getting worse?”
My response was, “It better be, considering how much time, money, and effort I’ve devoted to developing it.”)
It was more than a month before Sally would even speak to me again, and that made me sad. Not that it really mattered, though, as it wasn’t long after that she and Eric moved to Maryland and eventually finally decided to quit trying. Apart from one day in the spring of 2000 when she was in town and had stopped by to pick up a few things they’d left behind at my place when they moved, I never saw or spoke to her again.
Still, I had always liked Sally and considered her a friend in her own right, not simply the wife of one of my friends, so despite how things worked out between her and Eric, it always made me sad that she and I had parted on such frosty terms.
In any case, I just thought I’d share some of my festive memories with you on this holiday weekend. I hope you all had Thanksgivings that were at least as good as that one.
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