...are you ready for some gravy?

Maybe it’s a morning game of touch football with family and friends, half-watching a festive Manhattan parade, the aroma of a roasting turkey or the prospect of watching America’s most evil team get annihilated in hell (Texas) while a national audience rejoices,  but there’s just something about Thanksgiving that most Americans seem to genuinely enjoy. People seem to like the simplicity of it. You don’t have to mess with any presents, decorations are usually pretty limited, and for the most part if you don’t have to cook and clean, all you really need to do is show up, eat, drink, eat some more, and then recline on the sofa in digestive agony while you watch some football and doze a bit.

There’s just kind of a basicness to it as well. It’s just turkey, stuffing, potatoes, gravy, yams, gravy cranberries, gravy and pumpkin pie. You can add a whole bunch of other crap too, but most people are really going all in on the staples. As a matter-of-fact, if nobody was looking I could gladly get by with just the turkey, the stuffing, the gravy, the mashed potatoes, the gravy and the pie…and the gravy. Throw in a couple of bottles of red wine (or more if it’s more than just you) and some friends and family and you have a pretty good holiday.

Attempts to overcomplicate Thanksgiving don’t work either. I remember sitting around a conference table in the nation’s capital the Monday after Thanksgiving a couple of years ago where we began the meeting by going around the table of about a dozen folks with each participant offering their best holiday recipe. Most of the best ones sounded pretty good to me…but I distinctly remember somebody proudly offering a high-browed “bourbon infused stuffing.” Listen, there’s plenty of people in the red states infusing their livers with whiskey, but you don’t need to put it in your stuffing. All you really need is some Mrs. Cubbinson’s dressing, the recipe on the back of the box, and double the amount of real butter that they recommend. If you make a broth by boiling the neck (of the turkey…not your mother-in-law) and such and mix it into the stuffing it’s even better…but if you find yourself chopping too much celery or fussing with pine nuts…you’re going overboard. Maybe one of the other fun things about Thanksgiving is arguing about recipes too.

The cool thing is that it’s all just kind of straight-forward. Friends, family, food and a time to be thankful before the insanity and hustle and bustle of the rest of the holiday season blaze by at an unforgiving pace. You eat some turkey, blink, and the next thing you know you’re de-decking the halls and getting ready to freeze your butt of for a few months as you look forward to Memorial Day. If you don't think so...think about how many days have passed since Halloween.

So…take some time this weekend and in the days that follow to really enjoy the shortened work week. If you can, try to take a minute or two to think about the things that matter most…and the things you’re most thankful for too. If you’re struggling to find things to be thankful about and you’re sleeping indoors on anything other than a cardboard box…start there. Then on Thursday, huddle with some friends, or family or even just your dog and then kick back in the Lazy Boy and set up two IVs. Fill one bag with Pinot Noir, and the other with gravy. The Cowboys game starts at 4:30pm EST.

Happy Thanksgiving.

 

Not cease from distressing...

...and it's a good week to thank a Veteran

“Hey Slug” my dad would say as he faked a punch to the gut of my Uncle Ted… “How the hell are you?”

My dad always seemed to greet my Uncle Ted the same way when my aunt Helen (my dad’s younger Sister) and my uncle would come over to the house. Then he’d usually follow it up with the same question… “What are you having…the usual?” That was always a double bourbon and water on the rocks in a tall glass…and in all the time I was growing up and they’d come over to our home in West Los Angeles (or host us over at their home in Long Beach), I never recall any of them having more than two drinks. For that matter, I don’t really ever recall my dad having more than one.

My aunt and uncle were always impeccably dressed. They both passed away a couple of years apart about 10 or 15 years or so ago, but in all the time I knew them I never saw them wearing anything that didn’t look like they’d just stepped out of a Bloomingdales catalog. My fiery red-headed aunt always had on a high-end dress and usually some kind of mink (especially in the winter months…where the wind chill in southern California can dip into the 60s with a stiff Pacific breeze) and my uncle Ted always wore pressed slacks and a nice sports coat. He’d usually have on a tie too…but I remember he gave that up on most visits sometime in the mid-seventies…times were a changing for sure.

After my dad would mix the drinks they’d usually move out by the pool on the back patio. Though it’s at least 25 years since I saw them there, I can vividly picture my dad and uncle sitting on the patio, knocking back some bourbon and seeing the glow of their cigarettes as they each took drags on their respective Lucky Strikes. I never knew my father to smoke…but he’d always bum a cigarette or two to share with my uncle Ted…and he always looked like he’d stepped off the silver screen when he did it too…so it was pretty obvious he’d had some practice when I wasn’t around. Frank and Dean probably had something on these guys, but it wasn’t much. They were pretty cool.

At some point early on, my uncle Ted would invariably and modestly mention that he’d just got a new car, and without fail, my dad would leap up from the lounge chair and enthusiastically walk down the side driveway to check out the new rig. We’d buy a car about every 8 years in my family…and we always only ever had one. My uncle however, who was a devoted Ford man, would trade them out every year or so…sometimes more often than that…so it was always exciting to see his latest purchase.

He always drove these huge sedans…but then again, seems like everybody did. He was particularly fond of LTDs…and I remember he’d purchased a couple that had this kind of dark avocado paint job with a dark vinyl roof. My father, who only had a high school education, was an absolute a Dale Carnegie master of making my uncle feel like a big shot. He’d walk around the car a couple of times, demand my uncle pop the hood, stand and marvel at the engine a bit before checking out the interior and commenting on how beautiful it was. Just as a side note, my uncle used to wipe down the engine and carburetor top of his vehicle several times of week. When he would pop the hood, the actual engine looked every bit as good as it did on the showroom floor. That was under the hood mind you…I’ll let you imagine how the rest of the car looked.

Both my dad and uncle served in the U.S. Navy, and that’s where they had met when my uncle started courting my dad’s sister. As noted here before, my father served on a couple of big ships including the Battleship Mississippi and the carrier Ticonderoga (the one that was later used to pick up the Apollo astronauts). My uncle was in Pearl Harbor on December 7^th, 1941…and though I’d have to pry them out of them both…they had their share of stories. My uncle could provide a blow-by-blow eyewitness description of  that Sunday morning in Hawaii…and I’d give a lot right now just to hear him recount that day just one more time. Those guys both endured so much…and it never dawned on me for a second at that young age that they wouldn’t be here forever.

What’s the point of all this? Well, if you’d been following this blog for any length of time you know there isn’t one. Just following the number one rule on this site, and writing down the first thing that comes to my mind on a Friday morning at 4am. So happens that this Veterans’ Day week, I was thinking about these two guys and the legions of other men and women that have served sacrificed so that I could worry about my big problems like whether the gardener shows up on Monday to pick up these damn leaves or about getting the hood ornament replaced that was stolen on my luxury sedan.  

Anchors Aweigh.

 

I'm coming home...late tonight...