Gather ‘Round the Table

 

For some strange reason, the year my younger brother Tim made his First Holy Communion in 1970, our parish thought it would be a great idea for that to occur on Thanksgiving Day instead of the customary springtime like I had two years prior. Aside from making it difficult to find Communion attire, greeting cards and decorations at that time of the year, it posed a great quandary for my parents: Do we hold a Communion party and skip the traditional Thanksgiving dinner or host a crowd for turkey and all the fixings?

Of course, a hue and cry rose from those attached to a turkey dinner when my mom tossed out the idea to toss the turkey that year. So, my mom, to appease the family, opted for a sit-down, turkey dinner for 28 people. At that time, my dad had not yet put in our game room, and we had a small kitchen, and a dining room that only accommodated our family of six comfortably, and a living room.

To help my mother, both of my grandmothers offered to cook a turkey.

On the big day, my family set up folding tables and card tables everywhere and both sides of my family came for the happy occasion. My paternal and maternal grandparents were very different in temperament. My widowed Grandma Aggie Lane went to Mass most every day and never swore except for one time when my youngest brother, David, squirted her in the butt with a hose, and she exclaimed, “Damn you, David.” It was shocking and still lives in family lore.

My maternal Grandma, Gert Hughes, and her mother, my Great-Grandmother Cornelia Ledergerber, swore like crazy (not F bombs, but vulgarities.) Grandma Gert smoked, read novels, and loved soap operas. She believed in God but was not nearly as devout at Grandma Aggie.

If you want to create tension, throw four cooks into a tiny kitchen to prepare a massive Thanksgiving dinner. The Hughes side of the family made their stuffing with an egg in it, and the Lane side of the family liked their stuffing dry. One side liked the jellied canned cranberries and the others liked whole cranberries. My Grandma Leder was old school and wanted to sew her turkey shut with twine after stuffing it, while Grandma Aggie thought the new metal wires that closed the cavity and came on the turkey was a great innovation much to the disgust of Grandma Leder.

Each of these women had their own method for making gravy, and as they stood in the kitchen with their turkey drippings in cups trying to concoct their “best” gravy, my Uncle Bill on his way to get a drink, called out, “I’m next in line to make gravy!”

To which my Grandma Leder replied, “Oh, Billy you’re full of sh*t.”

I neglected to share that among the guests that day was my dad’s Aunt Gert, Grandma Aggie’s older sister, who was officially known as Sr. Euphemia, a Mercy nun.

When Grandma swore, my mom shushed her, “Grandma, the nun.”

And Grandma replied, “Ah, the hell with the nun.”

When dinner was ready, we all sat down for a memorable Thanksgiving dinner. Although my grandparents’ personalities were very different, they always respected one another and, in fact, liked and got along well, even under stressful circumstances like competing to make the best gravy.

And why? Because they shared something. They loved us.

There’s a home movie of that Communion Party/Thanksgiving Dinner, and on it are all my grandmas, clad in their aprons, crammed in the kitchen. In the next segment, Grandma Leder is standing with several of her great-grandchildren, including my brother, Tim, the Communion boy, and she’s hugging us and giving Tim a kiss.

It doesn’t matter who makes the best gravy, how you stuff your turkey, or if you’re stuck sitting on a telephone book at a card table. What matters is if there is love around your table, and this Thanksgiving, I hope you have an abundance of it.

Feeding the Beast

When I turned eight, my mother let me have a small birthday party with two other neighborhood girls. It was probably a scaled back affair because later in the month, I would be making my First Holy Communion, and a big shebang was planned.

To protect the innocent, I’ll name the two other girls at the party Karen and Debbie. Karen lived closer, and we played together a lot, but as is often the case, when Debbie, whom I went to school with, came up the street and joined in, there would be tension as Debbie would try to monopolize Karen. It was the classic case of “three’s a crowd.” Most of the time whenever Debbie commandeered Karen and turned her against me, I’d come home crying.

I can’t tell you much about the party, what kind of cake we ate, what paper hats with rubber band chin straps we wore, or what presents I received, but more than 50 years later, I can remember in great detail an incident from the party.

Normally, I’m a very even-tempered person, but as the three of us were playing outside after eating cake and ice cream, Debbie lapsed into “mean girl mode” and began to gang up on me and try to turn the head of Karen.

I was doing a slow burn until we began to play a game in our front yard and was using an old stump as base. Debbie suddenly shoved me off the stump, and I remember thinking as I lay on the ground, What? This is my birthday! This is my day! I jumped back on the stump, looked her in the eye, and hauled off and punched her in the face.

Shocked, Debbie stared at me, and as I stood on the stump towering over her like some little Mussolini, I pointed at her and shouted, “You, go home! Now! This is my party, and I don’t want you here!” 

And she did.

I admit as I was winding up to punch her, I had this great feeling of relief as I was giving in to this beast inside me demanding vengeance for her treating me so shabbily on my big day. When my fist connected with her freckled face, it was a very satisfying, consuming feeling. Until it wasn’t any longer.

Though Debbie had it coming to her, that feeling of giving in to a misplaced, unbridled passion is still palpable and left a big impression on me as I knew it was wrong. As a little girl soon to make her Communion, I had been schooled that my reaction was wrong, and later, I’ve come to know that giving in to that base emotion of anger is dangerous.

 

With all that’s been happening in the world with injustice, violence and riots, maybe you’re feeling that ravenous beast of anger and vengeance within you rearing too, demanding to be fed with acts of meanness and violence, but I caution you. Don’t feed the beast. 

Why?

Because the beast is never satisfied. The beast, once unleashed, is difficult to rein in. The beast isn’t interested in justice, righting wrongs or giving peace a chance. The beast only wants to create discord and destruction. And the beast’s ultimate prey is you. Once unleashed, the beast will not stop until it devours you too. 

This article originally appeared in the July 2020 edition of Northern Connection magazine.