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Thanksgiving, 2024
Thursday, November 28 2024
It was a cold clammy morning with a wet snow falling, not a great day for a dog to spend outside. Fortunately, though, Charlotte had spent the night with us and not by herself out in the forest. Our neighbor A from the green house next door came over with her dog Henry and they went for a walk with Gretchen, Charlotte, and, briefly, Neville.
In addition to Gretchen, me, and Gretchen's parents, four other people would be coming to our Thanksgiving (two others who had been a maybe weren't coming). Gretchen and her parents had been working for days to make all the various foods we'd be eating. My contribution would mostly be the after-Thanksgiving cleanup, which is just as well given the anxiety I experience watching other people letting valuable hot water run down the drain.
The first to arrive was Fern, whom Gretchen picked up at the Kingston bus station (she lives with boyfriend Josh — currently in Paris — in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn). While I was washing all the accumulated grease off our wine glasses (what happens when you store them in the open upside down near the kitchen ceiling), she opened a bottle of white and the drinking commenced.
I was sitting by the fire drinking wine when our neighbor A and her dog Henry arrived. (Her daughter was off in California and her boyfriend J was in Bangladesh taking photographs in a Rohinga refugee camp, among other things.) The last two to arrive where Cathy and Roy, the couple who own the falafel shop in Rhinebeck (which I tout as "the only reason to go to Rhinebeck). Note that all our non-family visitors were not American. Fern is Australian, A is Canadian, and Cathy and Roy are Isræli.
After spending customary amount of time in the living room with a roaring fire grazing on vegan cheese and crackers, Gretchen called us over to the dining room table, where we easily sat eight people. [REDACTED]
We began with some sort of mushroom soup (into which both A and I added tiny pieces of ghost pepper). The two main dishes at dinner were triangles of tofu that had been breaded and fried and a big tray of mac & cheeze. There was also a tray of roasted potatoes & cauliflower, a salad, and bourekas that Cathy had made. A hasn't been enjoying a television production she's been cast in (the filming has been in Alberta, which is a long commute), but she seemed to be enjoying herself at our Thanksgiving. She drank a bit more than everyone else, and, because she was the smallest person present, it was having noticeable effects. She railed at times against various famous producers using the tell-tale volume of the overserved.
A had brought over a couple of bottles of wine, including a weird white wine that tasted more like spoiled apple cider or the unexpected product of a dorm room fermentation experiment. Somehow a discussion of that led to someone using the term "shrub," which, in this context, means a vinegar-adjacent fruity beverage. I thought "shrub" might be a relatively new term, perhaps with an origin in hip-hop culture. So I asked, "what's that song about leaning out of a Mercedes driven by your friend to hassle the ladies?" This caused A and Fern to immediately burst into song, singing TLC's "No Scrubs":
No, I don't want no scrub
A scrub is a guy that can't get no love from me
Hanging out the passenger side of his best friend's ride
Trying to holla at me
I don't want no scrub
They would've been about thirteen when the song came out in 1999, which is maybe the single most important year for processing pop culture.
Between courses, I would discretely slip over to the sink to wash all the dishes that had just been dirtied, and this kept the amount of dishes I had to wash at any one time small, which is great when there are eight people making dirty dishes. Our festivities stretched from about 3pm until past 8pm.
[REDACTED]
Neville with his dinner today. Photo taken by A.
Click to enlarge.
Our Thanksgiving dinner. I'm furthest left. From there clockwise it is: Gretchen, Cathy, Roy, Fern, and Gretchen's mother. I don't know where Gretchen's father was. Note the chairs, all destroyed by cats. Photo taken by A.
Click to enlarge.
An overhead view. Photo taken by A.
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Gretchen's father has joined us. Photo taken by A.
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