Thanksgiving (Part I)
Posted by JavaChick on 200711.20 at 08:05 | Tagged as: Marin, earth, holiday
Thanksgiving at Bella Luna was always a boisterous affair. I don’t remember when my parents began hosting their private party on that day - I was probably five or six - but I vaguely recall it having something to do with a couple of young employees who were in school and didn’t have the money to fly home to be with their families. My father, was probably the instigator. It would be just like him to wipe his hands on his apron, leaving traces of milk and cocoa powder, run his fingers through his sandy curls, and say, “Here’s what we’ll do…”
From that phrase were born million of ideas. Every school project I ever had to do, for example, my father inspired. “Here’s what we’ll do…we’ll see if you can measure the pressure from the espresso machine.” “Here’s what we’ll do…you can pick three of our family recipes and use them in our report, and we can make samples for your classmates…” The list went on as far back as memory and time.
All this is not to say that my mother wasn’t completely on board. She was - she just wasn’t quite so impulsive about it. “Ben,” she’d say, about a week before the holiday arrived, “I think that we should invite people to help trim the Christmas tree, after dinner.” Or, “I know he’s just the milk man, but I think we should have Dave join us this year. His wife died last winter, and he’s been lonely.”
And so, on Thanksgiving day we would be open from six am to ten am, only, for people to pick up their pies and rolls from our bakery, and grab a cup of coffee, and then we would close, and we’d push all the tables together in three long rows across the main floor, and my job would be to set them.
All the while my mother would be babysitting the roasting turkeys, while Aunt Molly would be back at the inn, in charge of the trays of lasagna - you couldn’t have any kind of holiday without lasagna. It was a rule.
The mix of people changed every year. The first year it was us, Aunt Molly, a couple of the college kids who worked in the café, and my best friend Vanessa and her mother. The next year, Vanessa’s mom had a new boyfriend - a very sweet man with dark eyes who read “A Visit to St. Nicholas” to us in Spanish accented English, and gave us carob drops to hold on our tongues til they melted. He had a long pony-tail, like a hippy, and ran the health-food store, and we could always count on him for interesting snacks - carob drops, dried fruit, little bars made from sesame and honey. His name was Manolo, and he was from Cuba, and everyone called him Manny.
My favorite Thanksgiving was probably the year I turned thirteen. Vanessa and her family had gone to visit her grandmother in Iowa or Idaho that year - someplace cold that began with “I,” anyway, and I’d had a crush on a boy in our class, Ethan. Ethan’s hair was sandy blond like my father’s, and he had big liquid blue eyes, and the first time I met him, Vanessa liked him, and I didn’t because he scored better than me on a math quiz. I made a point of beating him on the spelling test the next day, however, and we’d settled into a healthy rivalry, with classmates even “betting” on which of us would come out at top of the class.
When I found out that Ethan and his parents were new in town, I invited them to our dinner. Of course, then I had to tell my parents there were three extra people coming.