Thanksgiving could have been a sad day for me. I dreaded it.

Alone with my grandson in a place where no holiday exists, I expected I’d miss it all. But I didn’t.

 The day was as unThanksgiving-ly as I expected. People were at work, kids at school, and the rain was relentless.  No decorations adorning the stores, no premature Christmas music wafting on the air. And, to my surprise, no soggy sobbing from morning till night. I was fine. 

Once upon a time, when I was part of the huge, giggling gaggle of disparate personalities we called family, the cozy congeniality of the holiday was indeed beautiful. And bountiful. As the day approached, the smell of baking pies, the sight of the giant turkey defrosting in the fridge filled me with genuine, near-tears rejoicing.  The thought of that convocation and the laughter that would resound from the dining area were what motivated my excitement for Thanksgiving, and I made sure I could participate in the whole ritual year after year, with family or with friends, depending on where I was.

Times, however, change.  The characters in my memory story have morphed into strangers or moved off the planet, and in their absence, rather than nostalgia, I am left with a more realistic picture of the holiday scene.

Instead of laughter and conviviality, my stomach churns at the thought of the after-dinner bloat battle.  Turkey never agreed with me, and because we ate little sugar every other day of the year, along with the indigestible bird, the pecan and pumpkin pies caused turmoil in my digestive tract, from which it took days to recover.

The minute the last crumb of desert was wolfed down, the company split into small cliques.  Some went to watch football on TV while others went out to play or ride horses or visit friends.  We were no longer connected once the food was cleared.

And then the cleanup. The inevitable sorting of leftovers, boiling the carcass to make a soup, washing greasy pans that revived the after-dinner queasiness. 

No, I did not miss any of it. 

This year, my grandson and I went for a long walk, made chocolate chip cookies, talked about people who were not there to share the day with us. We laughed. He got silly, as small boys do, and we ate fried rice.  It was a great day.  A day that filled me with boundless gratitude.

Much better for me than a day of gorging into gassy oblivion.  I spent the day with a precocious child, whose doe eyes shine  with my mother’s dark brown wonder and remind me how lucky I am that she escaped the Holocaust and found her way to my father.  We looked at pictures of cousins who visited us last summer – cousins with my father’s  April blue eyes that teared with joy when his children gathered round him. I told him about the Thanksgiving my brother, whom he will never get to know, took his mother up a mountain and taught her to drive . . . at the tender age of 9. Then I reminisced about a holiday I spent with my long-gone sister and her now-departed sons and how her daughters remind me how very strong and powerful she actually was. We watched a video of a time we spent with my son’s children, each of whom bears the name of one of my parents, one whose eyes are dark and inquisitive like mom’s and the other whose eyes are oceanic, sensitive like dad’s.  The laughter resounded in my memory. The joy of holiday moments, the ones where we joined hands and thanked God for blessing us all by keeping us alive, for sustaining us,  and for bringing us to this season.

It was a perfect Thanksgiving Day.