I had always wished my family could have just one perfect Thanksgiving dinner with all the trimmings. I knew where that wish was perfectly personified. It is in that Norman Rockwell painting with the grandmother proudly bringing in the golden brown turkey on a platter and setting it before all the happy family gathered around the table. Just looking at that picture makes me feel all warm and fuzzy and nostalgic inside. But every year as November rolls around, no matter how hard I try to orchestra it, it never happens. Year after year my best-laid plans fall to ruin and we end up with a Thanksgiving experience that would make Norman Rockwell blanche. I think it is time for me to face the fact that there are too many differences between my family and the one in that Norman Rockwell painting for a dinner like to ever happen for me.
The first problem is the cooking. Whenever anyone asks me what my mother is making for dinner, I can always answer “reservations” and it is not a joke. Growing up I ate out more than a New York Times food critic. So asking my mother to cook a turkey at home is like asking an elephant to waltz. It just isn’t in her nature. The one year I finally convinced her to try, after hours and hours of cooking in the oven, the bird came out black on the outside with parts still frozen and raw on the inside. She didn’t understand the whole idea of thawing it out first and had put it in to cook while the turkey was still rock hard. As the time for dinner approached and the bird wasn’t close to being ready, she got panicky and kept turning up the oven heat in hopes of getting it to cook. All that accomplished was setting bits of it on fire. After surveying the smoking fiasco that was to be our main dish, she dropped it into the garbage and grabbed her coat. I do have to admit that her favorite restaurant does prepare a tasty turkey dinner with sage stuffing, but it wasn’t a Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving by any stretch of the imagination.
The second problem is my family. In the Rockwell painting, all the family members are sitting around the table nicely, expectant and smiling. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that many pleasant expressions around a table at one time in my house. There is just too much history, much of it hostile, to get that group together happily. With all the second marriages and step-this and step-that everyone has somewhere else they could’ve gone and by time our Thanksgiving dinner finally rolls around they all seem to wish they were at one of their other choices. Except for Cousin Bill. He has no other place to go because he has burnt his bridges everywhere else. But when he pulled a gun on Aunt Felicia last year and we had to have the police come to calm him down he probably used up his last chance with my mother, too. I don’t want to leave the impression that my family’s Thanksgiving dinners are entirely bad. My relatives enjoy the exquisite love-hate relationships they have built up over the years. I definitely do not get Norman Rockwell’s Thanksgiving with my family but at least I can’t predict exactly what is going to happen each year either. Although this Thanksgiving I can say with fair certainty that Cousin Bill will not be attending.
Works Cited
Rockwell, Norman. Freedom From Want. 1941. Media image of painting. Saturday Evening Post. Web. 14 September 2013.
