Memoir: Epic Post Thanksgiving Edition
In which I review material left on the cutting room floor
At one point during writing my memoir, my eyes were bigger than my appetite.
My ideas for my memoir grew to the size of Infinite Jest. Working off of The Waste Land as I was, I experimented with lots of forms: screen plays, epic lists, iambic pentameter, TV scripts, chat transcripts, poetry, prose, flashbacks, flashforwards.
It was fun to write in all these forms and at the time it seemed to fit my conception of what this memoir was about. But during editing, I began to peel back the onion to get at….well, more onion. Let me re-metaphorize that statement: I stripped away the overcoats to get at the brand new fitted clothes beneath, the story in all its finest garments.
One of the parts that got left on the cutting room floor was a description of my childhood home and my mother’s epic meal making to go with all of our holidays. This description will be better served in a different book.
My Own Private Waste Land is focused on a decade of my adult life (2004 - 2015). Of course, as a life, there are tendrils from my earlier days that interact strongly with my later life. However, I am not working in the realm of autobiography. It’s clearly a memoir I am writing, focused on my life being disrupted by the mental illnesses of those around me while I tried to have as normal a life as possible. Unaware of what was happening, I was completely thrown off my path through life and entereing a decade of dysfunction.
My childhood in the San Fernando Valley, however, was a dream. It was as pristine, stable, and loving a childhood as one could ever have. It was an Idyll of a King, or at least a Prince, since I was young. My parents were a large part of this sumptuous childhood. They were the most gracious hosts and our house seemed a revolving door of characters and visitors, amply feed and pampered with all the social graces my mom and dad could muster.
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Below you’ll find an excerpt that I cut from my memoir, a description of my childhood home and the holiday foods my mother prepared. Feast your eyes on this.
When I was born, eight people lived in our house: my parents, the four kids, and my maternal grandmother and great-grandmother. My father’s parents and my aunt moved from Ohio to live nearby and were frequent visitors. After my paternal grandmother died, “Gramps” remarried an aunt by marriage on my mother’s side of the family, “Aunt Irene.” The family joke was that Grandma-Auntie Ireney liked to cook, and Gramps liked to eat. As kids, we would clap his gourd-like belly, round like a watermelon, to hear the hollow sound, and he’d laugh. When relatives visited from Ohio or Arizona or the California desert, my parents made up beds for them. Two families of close friends, the Bastians and the Parkinsons, were included in almost every event and treated like family. Others too, the Quinonez’s and “Auntie” Evelyn were also frequent guests. A birthday party usually included about 15 people and sometimes could swell to 25. My mother always made sure everyone felt welcome. Food and drink were plentiful. There were always seconds.
People gathered at our four-bedroom ranch-style house with added den, swimming pool, and artificial grass covered patio for every event, birthday and holiday party. Once when my brother drove down from Washington in his VW bug, he picked up two Swedish hitchhikers. Our house was already full, but we made room. Unaccustomed to the modesty of our American ways, they darted from shower to bedroom without clothes on, my introduction to boobs. My parents took it all in stride. We gathered for every Triple Crown horse race, wearing fancy hats for the Kentucky Derby. We rose early to watch Wimbledon and then held family table tennis tournaments. We lounged on the couch in pajamas to gawk at the Rose Parade on New Year’s morning, complete with champagne mimosas. We never missed the World Series. We dressed up to watch the Academy Awards. My parents held card parties. We played poker wearing green plastic visors and played with pennies or colored chips. We had family game nights: Yahtzee, Pictionary, Trivial Pursuit, Uno. Scrabble was reserved for quiet nights or for when my sister Lisa visited from college. Every birthday party was an event, including homemade cake, ice cream, Dad playing “Happy Birthday” on the piano, and blowing out candles for a wish. We celebrated every holiday – New Year’s, Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, Easter, Memorial Day, the Fourth of July with fireworks in the backyard and later picnics at the neighborhood park until fireworks were outlawed in Los Angeles County, Labor Day, Thanksgiving until we started having Thanksgiving in Laughlin, Nevada, Christmas.
My mom made sure each event had the proper foods: a special cake for every birthday; strawberries and cream for Wimbledon; hot dogs and hamburgers on the grill complete with trays of sliced tomatoes, onion, cheese, pickles, and iceberg lettuce leaves, corn on the cob, watermelon, and strawberries, bags of potato chips and coolers full of Shasta sodas for the kids and beer for the adults for the 4th of July; hot apple cider and small white powdered donuts for after trick or treating at Halloween; a bagel extravaganza at Christmas – dozens of bagels along with fresh lox (cuttings from a butcher), cream cheese, tomatoes, sliced red onion, and capers; potato pancakes and rosettes for holiday parties; baskets of nuts it the shell – almonds, Brazil nuts, filberts, pecans, and walnuts – with nutcrackers and nut picks at the ready; for special events roast leg of lamb or prime rib, turkey roasted on the Weber kettle grill, and Honey-Baked hams. Every dinner or meal was served with the appropriate fancy plates and silver, washed and polished for the occasion, and if warranted, mom would commission place cards for each table setting – pilgrim hats or turkeys for Thanksgiving, hearts for Valentine’s Day (also Grandma Aunty-Ireney’s birthday), usually put together by my father and me or my sisters, or a combination of us, with appropriately- colored construction paper, glue, and a sharpie.
For multi-family picnics on Easter or 4th of July, we always had large coolers full of food, including Joan’s green salad, Barbara’s orange salad, Dori’s ambrosia, along with fresh-made potato salad, dozens of deviled eggs sprinkled with paprika, cole slaw, and pies – rhubarb, pecan, lemon meringue (Aunt Irene’s specialty), and family games of softball or frisbee. At Thanksgiving, we had extra-large gatherings, complete with two kinds of salads and stuffing (Dori wouldn’t eat onions), trays and trays of hors d’oeuvres, appetizer plates, and pickle and olive plates, silver plates and crystal dishes with cocktail forks, with small sweet gherkins, black olives, and green pimento olives, mashed potatoes and gravy, yams, green beans, corn, the assorted green and orange salads. Nothing ever came pre-made from a store, except for that short window of time when Honey-Baked Hams were so popular, and they had to be ordered ahead of time and picked up.
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Happy Thanksgiving. I hope your Thanksgiving included a wonderful feast with family and friends and that your holiday weekend includes love and literature, rest, and all the things you like to do. Here come the holidays!
Until next week! As for me, I’ll….
Just keep writing!
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