Ah, Thanksgiving. Relatives gathered. Mom, grandma, and sisters toiling away in the kitchen. Dads, brothers, uncles, and granddads in the living room boo-yah-ing incoherently over the TV’s earsplitting football-bloodlust blare. Kids running around. Dogs yapping. Kids yapping. Babies crying. Smells wafting from the kitchen. Too warm. Streaky winter light, smoky and close air. Card table set up for the little kids. Hand-washing Aunt Mary’s Spode. Wright’s Silver Cream and the good silver and grandma’s old platter. Candles and flowers on the table. Not enough chairs. Not enough room in the oven. Monster turkey cooling its heels on the kitchen table. Marshmallows and yams. Dressing. Julia Child-wannabee hogging the stove for half an hour making watery gravy while the other cooks roll their eyes at each other: I could do that in five minutes flat. Unpeeled, forgotten pearl onions. Uncle Jim has to have his creamed onions. Flour and butter; now for a clean saucepan; is there any milk left? Ridiculous, near-useless electric knife trotted out yet again. Rolls in the oven for warming.
Being one of those folks with kitchen chops, I spent most of my adult Thanksgivings chained to the kitchen. Anybody can do the turkey, especially mid-American style as in wash it, season it, and dump it in a roasting pan while the giblets (except the liver) and some veggies simmer away merrily. But I always got stuck with the harder stuff; I had to peel the onions, trim the green beans, peel the potatos and the yams, make the piecrusts, strip the membranes off the oranges for the ambrosia. Oh, why don’t you make your yummy homemade rolls this year? Oh, you’re not going to buy the cranberry sauce, are you? Oh, don’t forget that Uncle Tom and Aunt Helen will be so disappointed if there’s no orange-jello salad. Some years I wised up and did as much as I could the day before. But most years, by the time all those kids and moms and dads and grandmas and granddads and aunts and uncles and brothers and sisters and nephews and nieces and fiancées and boyfriends and girlfriends and roommates and old chums and The Joint Chiefs of Staff sat down at the various tables, I was dead on my feet. Triumphant, to be sure, but dead.
I haven’t been obliged to slog through that particular corner of mid-American hell for some time now, and with any luck I won’t have to do it ever, ever again. This year a friend and I decided that money trumps slave labor, and so we went out for Thanksgiving. We had our dinner in a restaurant, a lovely place right on San Francisco’s Embarcadero, complete with spectacular views and that oh-so-chic-but-casual atmosphere that San Francisco does better than anywhere else. No cooking. No quadruple dishwasher load. No digging out serving spoons. No ransacking the cabinet for platters and plates and gravy boats and butter dishes. No catty remarks about paper napkins. No complimenting Aunt Martha on her nauseating green-bean-with-tomato-purée-and-pecans casserole. No crushing bore skewering the entire dinner table with an endless story about a visit to Forest Lawn Cemetery to gape at movie star graves.
Nope. Just the two of us, stress-free and jovial, waited on by chipper serving folk and enjoying a skilled four-course blend of foodie-chic and traditional. And plenty of booze to go along with it.
Now I’ll allow that not everybody could follow our lead. Those responsible to a big family almost certainly must commit to the whole big-family-Thanksgiving-Purgatory enchilada. But in dispensing with the big family thing, I’ve allowed myself the pleasures available to those who travel more lightly through life. For two folks, Thanksgiving in a nice restaurant is certain to cost a lot less than the home-cooked variety. And I returned home to a house that didn’t look as though a bomb had gone off inside. And I don’t have to contemplate all those leftovers.
Going out for Thanksgiving: what a fine and marvelous notion. I shall be doing it again.