I’ve always marked the birthdays in my family with the holiday it’s been conveniently tied to. My little brother symbolized new birth at Easter. For my mother it was the last of the long summer beach days of Labor Day Weekend. For my father, it was Thanksgiving.
Celebrating gratitude and my father have always gone hand and hand, pulling my brother and I home from wherever we were that year; more so than Christmas. Thanksgiving Day always seemed to be the natural prelude to Dad’s birthday – a big gathering of extended family that ate all the traditional American food Dad had never experienced until he married my mother and settled with her in California: the turkey, the stuffing, the pumpkin pie, cranberry sauce, a Jell-O salad from my grandmother’s 1950s-era plastic mold, Hawaiian rolls and buttered walnuts from their trees in the backyard. Before we’d start, my brother would always recite the same Thanksgiving-themed poems that he had learned by heart by age 11, involving football and turkey-carving, and we’d all sit patiently through this, rolling our eyes, then pass around the bowl of corn kernels, putting as many as we liked on the bare white plates to symbolize what we were grateful for, before a prayer of thanks, led by Dad if we were the hosts that year.
As lovely as that day, crammed with traditions, has been, it’s been the aftermath that I love and miss in the years that I’m not there. The lounging around in pajamas the next morning, eating pumpkin pie and coffee with leftover whip cream, going for bike rides and hikes, having friends stop by to say hi and watching All Creatures Great and Small episodes by the fire in the evening with bowls of ice cream. In the morning there was often a layer of fog over the field across the street from the house. In some years they grew pumpkins there, horses and cattle grazing on the hill marked by oak trees just beyond this, and I’d sit on the couch with a coffee and watch condensation burn off. Dad would either be up and raking walnuts outside or bringing out the tandem bike from the garage that he and Mom would do their morning ride on – her way of keeping them both in shape.
In many of these years, Dad’s birthday was a post-Thanksgiving, pre-Christmas road trip an hour up the coast to San Luis Obispo, all four of us crammed into their car, listening to holiday music mixes my brother had put together. We go out to breakfast at the Apple Farm, where we’ve been going for vacation breakfasts for about 30 years, and go find a Christmas tree at the farms that were starting to pop up. One year we went to the beach and Dad and my brother threw footballs and frisbees back and forth, while Mom and I read in beach chairs. Dinner on Dad’s birthday was often just grazing through the free samples at Costco – his choice – while Mom bought us socks and underwear and coffee in bulk. We’d drive home that night with a tree tied to the top of our car and Dad and my brother would set it up in the living room. If we were ambitious, or if one of us had to leave the next day, we’d decorate it that night.
As adults, the last weekend in November was often the only time we were together for, so it was all crammed together in one Frankenstein-ed holiday weekend. Maybe it’s weird, but that was just us. To me, it was wonderful.
My brother, who is in the Navy, is stationed on a ship touring Asia and the Middle East until next April. I won’t be able to make it home to my parents this year for the holidays. I think it’s in these years when we’re missing each other, that we value the memories of Dad’s Birthday Weekend the most.
GRATIFY
Your mother just forwarded these past writings of yours which John and I so enjoy reading and re-reading -drawing us into your world and yet conjuring up feelings that connect with us. Do you think you’ll someday compile them into a book one can pick up at bedtime and go into a peaceful night’s sleep?
May you enjoy peaceful travels tomorrow as you head for home.