Going Cold Turkey

"It sounded like an explosion in the kitchen..."

(Waiting for turkey, 1971. All that remains of our first Thanksgiving.)

Waltzing Matilda, Waltzing Matilda,
Who'll come a-waltzing, Matilda, with me?

It’s funny how the memory works. While our first married Christmas is something of a blur, I recall every detail of our first Thanksgiving. It was 1971, just a month after our wedding. We were living out of boxes. Even our boxes were living out of boxes.

I had to work on that Thursday, but Barbara was going to stay at home and cook our feast, which would be ready just as I walked through the front door. It sounded heavenly.

Instead, the day would play out like an “I Love Lucy” episode, except that I didn’t play conga drums down at the Tropicana.

The first thing that morning, Barbara called her mother, who was an excellent cook. Mom would talk her through making the dinner, no worries.

“You’re sure your turkey is fully defrosted?” her mother asked.

Barbara pulled open the freezer door to see that our turkey was still safely frozen on Thanksgiving morning.

Things kind of slid downhill from there, unless you consider 11 p.m. to be a perfect time for Thanksgiving Dinner. I suppose it probably would be, if we lived in Barcelona.

As icy shards of white meat stabbed at our gums, we looked forward to dessert, a made-from-scratch pecan pie which was baking in our oven even as I worked at sawing the turkey.

Stop laughing. Do you think it’s easy to carve a turkey while wearing mittens?

“Did you just hear something?” I asked.

“I did. It sounded like an explosion in the kitchen,” my new bride responded.

There is actually a scientific explanation for why our pecan pie exploded in our oven, having to do with moisture turning to steam and getting trapped and stuff, but did we really need to know that?

All that mattered was that we were going to spend the long weekend scraping sticky lava from our oven, and we were going to bed hungry on the very evening we were traditionally supposed to feel ill from gluttony.

That was our Thanksgiving, 1971.

Moving on, I told you in an earlier story about our disastrous 1979 Thanksgiving. Barbara’s employer, the New York Times, had just assigned her to move Upstate from November through March, to write about the upcoming Lake Placid Olympics.

As I wrote in Pardon the Pun, I did not take this news especially well. November 22, 1979, was the Thanksgiving That Never Was. Instead of feasting, we argued until we had no more words.

In 1979, just as we had done in 1971, we went to bed hungry.

The years passed. Recipes were improved and perfected. Expectations were raised. Barbara’s famous stuffing became my single favorite dish in the world, and it remains so to this day.

Thanksgiving, 1984. Barbara was very pregnant. By Christmas we would be parents. There was no alcohol at the table, for obvious reasons, but we had plenty to be thankful for. A baby was heading our way at warp speed, and what more could we want? A month later, we had it all.

(Dr. Jackson, the perfect Thanksgiving host)

Moving on ahead three years, in 1987 Reuters posted me to Hong Kong, and the three Baslers moved halfway around the world. If you happen to own a large ceremonial brass gong, at this time please hoist the mallet and give it a big whack for dramatic atmosphere.

Suddenly we were 12,000 miles from home. Soon after arrival, we went through a very sentimental stage. One evening, we stood with friends in the living room of another Reuters couple, who were gifted musicians.

Using only a guitar and a fiddle, they magically managed to lead all of us back home again, wherever home happened to be.

We swayed, we clapped and we sang each other’s songs. “Danny Boy” for the Irish. “Waltzing Matilda” for the Australians, “White Cliffs of Dover” for the English. There was not a dry eye in the room. If you could bottle homesick and sell it…

Then, for the Yanks, a bold choice. “American Pie,” every word, and we all sang together.

“So, bye, bye, Miss American pie, drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry…”

As our first overseas Thanksgiving rapidly approached, finding the ingredients was a challenge. The hardest thing was tracking down the stuffing.

One grocery store manager understood what I was asking for but shook his head. It was the strangest thing, he said, there had been a whole bunch of stuffing mix in stock, but very suddenly, it had all sold out.

Not to worry, he had ordered a new shipment and would have all the stuffing we wanted by January. The poor guy knew nothing about the seasonal demands of my people, and I didn’t say anything to burst his bubble.

In the end, we settled for a vile boxed stuffing mix from Britain. It was saturated with sage, but we held our noses and ate it. We still laugh about it every Thanksgiving.

I helped make the dish that year. I chopped the curly parsley and mixed it with the sage stuffing. There might be a good song there, but I didn’t have the thyme to write it. Think about it. Never mind.

(Barnum’s favorite holiday)

Let us fast-forward through the decades and arrive in 2020, 49 years after our newlywed Thanksgiving.

We were retired, living back in Indianapolis, and there was a raging global pandemic. Death was claiming people by the hundreds of thousands, and we were fearful. Everyone was.

In November, Barbara began experiencing lethargy, loss of appetite and an alarmingly low oximeter reading. On November 11^th we gulped and took the test.

Both of us were positive, back in a time when that was extremely bad news.

I showed no symptoms, but they said to get Barbara to the emergency room, quickly, and so I did.

When I pulled up to the entrance, we didn’t know if a good-bye kiss was even appropriate. People were going to the hospital and not coming home.

I was afraid to answer the phone for the next few nights, thinking it might be “That Call,” a swamped but sympathetic nurse telling me it was time to say my farewells.

Five agonizing days later, I picked Barbara up at the hospital. Her numbers were good, she had her appetite and she had energy. The pneumonia they had found on her lung was in retreat. She was back among the living.

The very sophisticated wireless home monitoring equipment they had given us was repossessed after just a few days - they needed it for other people.

Thanksgiving was a mere one week away. We would not be sharing it with anyone, of course.

Given critical supply chain shortages and curbside pickup nightmares, we lowered our expectations and chose just three of our favorite traditional dishes: Barbara’s famous stuffing, my famous caramelized shallots and our famous sweet potato casserole with bourbon.

Never before had there been such a feast. We sat across the dining room table from each other, toasting our impossible reprieve. The word grateful hardly seemed to cover it. We quivered and bubbled over, like that pecan pie on our first Thanksgiving.

I hope you have a very special feast of your own, dear readers.