I do not remember Thanksgiving. OK, I remember when Thanksgiving is; I just do not remember the Thanksgivings of my past. Well there are the really fun ones I spent in Chicago that started with mimosas for breakfast, moved to gin and tonics while cooking and ended with a bottle or two of Beaujolais Nouveau with dinner but those Thanksgivings I do not expect to recall too clearly.  I am talking about when I was a little kid. I really do not remember any Thanksgivings.

Maybe it’s my bad memory or possibly they were so traumatic I’ve blocked them out. I clearly recall the prep that went into fancy meals in my New York house when I was a little kid. Mom’s good dishes (i.e. the ugly china with the funky pattern that my Parents got as a wedding gift) were kept in the basement. To prevent major en-masse damage, my four siblings and I had to carry the dozen place settings up the two flights of stairs one piece at a time each. I might not recall any Thanksgiving meals but I sure as hell remember the slow parade of carrying the dishes up the stairs and then after the clean up carrying them back down the stairs one at a time to be stored for the next occasion.

Years later my Mom admitted to always hating those dishes that she treated so preciously for decades. After finally getting a beautiful set of gold trimmed Royal Daulton for everyday use, she invited some friends over for dinner, served a meal on what for years had been the good dishes (the ugly china with the funky pattern that my Parents got as a wedding gift), then brought out a trash can and made us throw the dirty dishes into the garbage. Many of us objected but she demanded we toss them out fulfilling a dream of hers that grew stronger with each passing meal served on the wedding gift ugly china with the funky pattern.

My parents are old fashioned and from an era that I would expect them to have served a very traditional Thanksgiving meal but as much as I strain my brain I cannot come up with a memory of any of them. I will have to ask my siblings about what we did every year, I bet they can get some of those cob-webbed memory cells in brain to start firing up again. I do remember one Thanksgiving my oldest brother worked half a day making salads at a restaurant and we had to pick him up after he got off but I do not recall the ensuing large meal.

The earliest Thanksgiving that I remember clearly from beginning to end was during my first year of college. Just prior to the holiday a group of old friends got together for a pre-Thanksgiving weekend long party a few hours away at a mutual friend’s place. Unfortunately it turned into a weekend long miserable fight about infidelity between my girlfriend and I. This threw me deeper into the life-questioning funk I had already been in.  My parents were traveling during that time and my siblings were all spread out around the country so rather then sit alone for the holiday; I flew to Memphis Tenn. to see folks. 

Nothing brings more cheer to a young depressed teenage college student more then sharing a dumpy hotel room with his parents at the Admiral Benbow Inn for an isolated impersonal Thanksgiving Day meal in the middle of nowhere. My Folks really tried hard to make sure I enjoyed myself that weekend but I was too busy brooding in own little self-inflicted angst-ridden crisis world trying to figure out what to do with my life (I’ll let you know if I ever do). The first night was fun; we took a small tour that culminated with a dinner at a little blues club on Beale Street. Things went downhill from there.

Thanksgiving day we had a nice meal at some nondescript restaurant but we mostly just sat around the hotel watching TV because everything in town was closed.  For Friday my Mom had made a long list of fun things we could do. Unfortunately as we criss crossed town from one tourist attraction to another, we learned that in Memphis in the early 1980s everything is closed the day after Thanksgiving as well. Riverboats, museums, aquariums, zoos, breweries, state parks, trolleys… everything was shut down.

My Mother was (and still is) not a fan of Rock in Roll music. She was born and raised in a very different era and she already had four kids of her own before Elvis came along. She referred to Rock music as ‘Yeah Yeah’ music. My Mother has traditional values and views. Yes, she was the type of woman who kept ugly china with a funky pattern that she got as a wedding gift for decades longer then she really wanted to because that was what you were supposed to do.

This trip to Memphis was only a few years after Elvis died and Graceland had not yet become the carnival-esque freakshow mega-tourist stop that it is today.  That Friday morning as we drove away from each closed attraction on my Mom’s long list I kept saying in jest that we could always go to Graceland.  By noon we had exhausted every possibility on the list and now my Mom was faced with the reality, it was Graceland or nothing.  I think the memory of that Thanksgiving has not slipped away because never before could I have conceived of the image of my Mom and I standing in the cold November wind looking at Elvis’ grave together.

Happy Thanksgiving, I hope it is a memorable one.

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A few extra words about the Admiral Benbow Inn.  After writing my blog I did some research and found out that this local motel chain has quite a sorted history. Most of them do not exist anymore but 25 years ago, the one we stayed at in the Memphis suburbs was no palace but it was certainly not the cesspool that apparently they later became. If you are at all interested, the reviews in the first 2 links are short hilarious ‘must read’ reviews and the next link has an extremely long but great history of this dubious faded Memphis icon.

http://reviews.metroguide.com/d.asp?pi=29999

http://reviews.metroguide.com/d.asp?pi=29966