Thanksgiving Day Memories

My mom loved Thanksgiving.  She loved getting up early Thanksgiving morning and stuffing the turkey and putting it in the oven and basting it over and over again.  She always said that it reminded her of when she was a girl back in Poland before the war.  She came from a big family -- a mom and dad and 8 brothers and sisters -- and every meal was a production that would take hours of loving labor.

And every meal would bring the family together.  I think that’s what she loved most about Thanksgiving.  The way it brought family together.  

When we first came to America, of course, we had no family here. It was just my mom and dad and my sister and me.  We had no one else to share Thanksgiving Dinner with.  My dad came from a small family, but only his brother survived the war, and he went back to Poland after he was freed from the slave labor camps.  My mom was from a big family, but her story was similar.  Of her 8 brothers and sisters, only 3 survived the war.  And of those 3, one was sent to Siberia by the Russians at the end of the war and died there.

This all changed as my sister and I got older and we started our own families.  The small family Thanksgiving Dinner of 4 got bigger and bigger.

Soon my sister was bringing her husband and her three daughters to my parents’ house for Thanksgiving, and then I was bringing my wife and daughter to my parents for Thanksgiving.  

I remember how much my parents loved those enormous family dinners.  But it wasn’t ever about the food.  It was about watching the little kids crawling around and laughing and playing with their dolls.  It was about sitting with my sister’s husband and hearing him complain year after year about how badly the Chicago Bears were doing that year.  It was about listening to my sister talk about how her in-laws were doing with their new place in the suburbs after a lifetime of living near the corner of California and Division.  It was about my wife Linda talking to my mom about what her Thanksgiving Dinners were like in Brooklyn when she was a kid and about my mom nodding and smiling the happiest, biggest smile ever. 

It was all about family coming together and being the loving family we all need.  

—

Originally appeared in the Dziennik Związkowy, the oldest Polish newspaper in America.

Stay Home! Part 1

Stay Home!

My wife Linda and I love to cruise.  We started cruising about 30 years ago, and we only stopped when the pandemic showed up and blocked all cruising for 2 whole years.  You can imagine how happy we were when cruising finally came back.

We had a great 8-day cruise from Baltimore to the Bahamas scheduled for the beginning of November.  We were supposed to go to always luscious Nassau and then to a private island called Coco Cay, full of great beaches and swimming ponds and free restaurants and all that stuff.  But we didn’t go.

On the third day of the cruise, as we were leaving Port Canaveral, FL, for Nassau, Hurricane Nicole showed up just south of the Bahamas.

The Captain announced that because of the threat caused by Nicole we had to return to Baltimore.  So we turned around and started back to our home port.  We not only sailed away from two beautiful ports, we sailed into bad weather.  

The bright sun suddenly disappeared, the temperature dropped from 80 degrees to 50, the wind picked up to 30 miles an hour, and the sea started rolling and rocking.  The ship’s stewards placed vomit bags on all the staircases because the Captain knew what a rolling sea can do to a person’s stomach.

We were stuck inside the ship.  We couldn’t walk around on the decks, couldn’t sit and drink a beer at the pool bar, couldn’t go swimming in any of the 3 pools.  

But that wasn’t the worst of it.  Usually, the ships pick up food at each of the ports.  Since we weren’t docking at two of them, we were missing the food we would have been picking up.  So the chefs had to abandon the super menus they had planned and fell back on food they could make.  Tacos!  Risotto!  Mashed potatoes and Mac and Cheese!  Forget about dessert! 

And it got worse!  The ship started running out of wine!  First, they ran out of our favorite cruise wine, Andrew Peace cabernet!  Then they ran out of Robert Mondavi’s cabernet! Then Kendall Jackson’s cab was gone.

And then it got even worse.  They ran out of entertainment!  The featured entertainers usually get on at one port and off at the next, so they can entertain on a number of ships.  Because we were not stopping at fresh ports, we were not picking up fresh entertainers.  The last good entertainer got off at Port Canaveral and his replacement was stuck in Nassau.  

Instead of great shows featuring headliners, the ship had to fall back on the guys and gals from the chorus singing and dancing their hearts out. They tried, but it wasn’t enough!  So the cruise director started showing movies in place of live entertainment.  The movies were good films, a new Thor movie and a new Jurassic Park movie.  The problem was that they showed these films repeatedly on the pool deck where it was cold and raining and the wind was howling!

And if we turned on the TV?  We’d only get bad news about the elections because the midpoint of the cruise was Election Day, November 8.

 But that wasn’t the worst of it. 

Then I got COVID.

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My latest article for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy, the oldest Polish newspaper in America!