Thanksgiving 2023

Today is the day before Thanksgiving. We used to host a blow-out all-are-invited open house party on the night before Thanksgiving. People would start arriving at 7 and the last stragglers would depart at 1 AM. And then I’d get up in the morning and spend the entire day cooking a giant Thanksgiving dinner. Madness, I tell you. I don’t know how I did it, really. I had a lot of energy then. 

“Then,” of course, means 2019 and earlier. We couldn’t hold the party in 2020, of course, and for one reason or another, we just stopped altogether. It’s OK. That party had a good, solid 12-year run. People still talk about it. Oh, the before times. But since we don’t have guests tonight, we’ll go to the Capitals game instead. Always a silver lining, 

*****

I didn’t work today. Well, I took a vacation day and didn’t work at my paid job. But I worked like a fiend all day. Today is Thanksgiving prep day, and Thanksgiving prep day means potatoes, and potatoes are a lot of work. How much work? Maybe I’ll tell you. 

*****

It’s 4:03 PM on Thanksgiving Day. Or day. You can style that however you like. The rest of the food is done and has been done for some time. Only the turkey has stubbornly refused to reach the recommended temperature of 165. It’s at 162 now, and it’s on the stove, resting. That turkey can fuck right off. I’m the one who should be resting. We’re going to wait five minutes, or maybe ten; and then we’re going to cut that turkey, and we’ll just see what happens. It’ll be delicious or it’ll be undercooked and we’ll all end up sick. There’s only one way to find out. 

*****

I made a lot of mashed potatoes - enough to fill two large baking dishes. That is what I do - I make the potatoes a day in advance, spread them out in glass baking dishes, and then warm them up in the oven on Thanksgiving day. It takes almost ten pounds of Yukon Gold potatoes to make enough mash to fill two large baking dishes. Why two large dishes? Because these potatoes are really good and everyone wants leftovers, and I like to give the people what they want. 

I worked like a swimmer, in sets - take five potatoes, peel them, cut them, and then take a  two minute break to clean up or stretch or move the laundry from the washer to the dryer; and then back to the potatoes. Work methodically, psyching yourself by chunking tasks and setting very short-term goals, and you’ll be done in two shakes of a lamb’s tail, as Sue Ann Nivens used to say. I hate peeling potatoes like nobody’s business but it’s very satisfying to complete a hated chore a little bit at a time, and to watch your progress, counting down in five-potato units until you have a nice pile of potato peels and two pots of chopped potatoes boiling merrily on the stove. 

Of course, that’s not all there is to it. There’s the mashing and the beating, adding butter and cream and salt (this is not vegan spa cuisine), continuing to beat until you have a nice fluffy puree that still has some potato texture. When you finally have the perfect potatoes, you dish out two huge bowls for your college student sons to have as a “snack,” and then you spread the rest out into the baking dishes, warning all present that the preview was a one-off, and that the rest of the potatoes are off limits until dinner on Thursday. 

And then you clean up. And let me tell you that there’s no mess like a mashed potato mess. The coffee maker and the toaster and the sugar and tea canisters have absolutely no involvement in the making of mashed potatoes, but they all have to be thoroughly scrubbed afterward, along with the countertops, the stovetop, and the floor. Is it worth it? Yes, it 100 percent absolutely is. That’s how good these potatoes are.

Still, I won’t be making them again for another year, not in those quantities. I don’t know why, but if you double or triple a recipe, you will increase the mess by 10-fold or 100-fold. It’ll take a while to recover from that. The kitchen’s been through some shit. 

*****

Did I tell you that the turkey was perfect? Well, it was perfect. It turns out that 162 is a good out-of-the-oven temperature, and that the turkey will continue to cook from the inside out for a few minutes after you take it out of the oven. I let it rest for 15 minutes, and then my husband started carving, and it was just right - not dry, but not undercooked, and very flavorful thanks to salt and pepper and onion and apple and celery stuffed in the cavity, and butter slathered all over the outside and underneath the breast skin. I have had very good luck with turkey roasting, but every year, I worry that the previous year was just a fluke and that I won’t be able to duplicate my turkey success. So now I have a written record. Even if no one reads this, I’ll at least have some notes to refer back to next year. 

*****

The holidays are now well underway. We put up our Christmas decorations on Friday morning, as has become our custom since 2020. I used to put up our indoor decorations two weeks before Christmas, but 2020 changed that, too. And it’s nice having the Christmas things around a little earlier. No tree yet, because we get a real tree and it would dry out by Christmas if we got it now, but the house is festooned with all of the other Christmas swag and trinkets. 

Last Tuesday night, I went shopping for some last-minute Thanksgiving groceries, and the Safeway was alive with the happy energy of all of the other parents welcoming college students home for the holiday, looking forward to four or five blessed days of having everyone under the same roof again. Those five days passed with lightning speed of course. Thanksgiving leftovers in the family room, Christmas movies on TV, kids coming and going, a house full of kids watching college football together, perfect silvery pale skies and early blazing gold sunsets, and now it’s over. We’ll all be back in the grocery stores later today, laying in supplies for the week, but the energy will be very different. Yes, they’ll be back for Christmas but every holiday is just a reminder that they’re only visitors now. But I’ll take what I can get, and I’ll be thankful for every minute. I am thankful for every minute. 

High effing finance

Do you know why I can’t be a rich person? No, it’s not because I keep buying stupid handbags (although that doesn’t help). It really has very little to do with income or spending - I could make a lot more money and/or spend a lot less money, and I still couldn’t be a rich person. And this is why.  

I have two checking accounts in two different banks - a smallish community bank and a credit union. The credit union account is really both a savings and checking account. It earns a little bit of interest, and it’s where I save money for short- and medium-term goals; things like travel and holidays. My emergency fund money is also in that account.

I keep a very simple tally - on paper, mind you - of money in and out of the credit union account, categorized by type of expense or fund (travel, holiday, emergency) for which deposits are intended. Every so often, I reconcile my total with the actual account balance to make sure that I have the money that I think I have. 

This is all fine. Where it gets complicated is electronic transfers between the accounts. 

I have a Visa card, which is my only credit card, from the credit union. I normally pay the bill for that Visa card, on the rare occasions when I actually use it, from my primary checking account, which is how I pay all my bills. However, I used the card for some holiday shopping and rather than pay the bill from the primary checking account and then transfer funds from the credit union, as I normally do and definitely will do again for reasons that will be clear in just a moment, I decided to pay it directly from the credit union share draft account that holds my holiday short-term savings. The money intended for holiday shopping goes directly toward the credit card that I used to make the purchases. Eliminate the middleman. That makes sense, doesn’t it? Except that I made this payment on November 8 and on November 17, it still does not appear in my payment history, although it is showing clearly as a debit to the share draft. 

I don’t usually use the banking app for the credit union, because I don’t pay bills from that account, and so I had been hesitant to pay a bill using this untried app. Rather than pay the entire balance as I normally would (it was about $470 or so), I made a $100 payment. Even as I sent that payment, I thought that the test payment amount should have been $10, not $100, because who am I, Oprah? Anyway, just to be sure, I checked for this payment every day for several days, and when it didn’t appear in my credit card transaction list, I realized to my dismay (dismay defined as 20 percent “what happened to my money?” and 80 percent “Oh my God, I have to CALL SOMEONE?”) that I had no choice except to call the credit union to figure out where it had gone. The money came out of one place but didn’t go into the other, so where was it? That was my question for the member services representative who answered my call today. 

Long story short (yeah I know, too late) the representative also saw the payment on the outgoing side but not the incoming side. He and I agreed that this was very weird, very weird indeed. He suggested that the whole mess was kind of my fault because I made the payment using the bill pay application and not the credit card application (although there is absolutely nothing on the bill pay application site that tells customers not to use that application to pay credit union Visa bills). Then he said that I could wait a few days to see what happens, or stop the payment for a mere $30, or 30 percent of the amount in question.

Lol! After firmly but politely disabusing him of the silly idea that I should pay for the credit union’s mistake (remember -  it was a payment from the credit union to the credit union) I decided to wait until Monday, and see what happens. No big deal, right? Easy come easy go. A hundred here, a hundred there - whatever. What's a single Benjamin in the fast paced world of high finance?

******

Sometimes, I tell myself that I long for the days of Friday-is-payday, so you go to the bank and deposit your check, you take out some cash so you have some walking around money, and then you write checks for all of your other bills. It was a simpler time. And it actually sucked. Imagine having to stand in line at a Center City Philadelphia bank at lunchtime on a Friday, you and every other schmoe who just got paid, because direct deposit didn’t exist. Credit cards existed, of course, but they were not as easy to obtain as they are today. We even had ATMs, but they weren’t on every corner and in every grocery store like they are now. And the check-writing. My God, the check-writing. I hate writing checks SO MUCH. Just thinking about having to open all of those envelopes, dig through the inserts to find the bill, write the checks, address and stamp the envelopes, and then get them to the mailbox or the post office - it just doesn’t bear thinking about. So no, I do not long for those days, not one bit.

****

The payment finally posted, ending a few days of minor stress and worry. I think I’ll go back to my old way of doing things, when I’d just spend the holiday or travel funds as appropriate, and then reimburse my checking account by writing an actual check from the credit union share draft account. 

And that is why I cannot be rich. I can earn money, save money, and save money, but I don't want to track the flow of cash through the electronic ether of the American banking system. I don't want to balance my books. I can't manage this level of administrative complexity. I need to keep it simple. 

Late in the year

It's Sunday morning, and I'm on my way home from visiting my mom in Philadelphia. It's golden November now, the short interlude of perfect light and color as autumn winds down and winter comes swanning in, throwing its weight around and trying to assert its dominance. The deciduous trees are at peak color right now and the sky is milky pale blue, decorated with delicate pink- and gold-edged clouds. The air is light and fresh, soft and slightly misty, not dry and crisp. It’s lovely, so much so that I’m going to stop writing so that I can just look out the window at the fleeting November beauty. It’ll be gone in a week or two. 

*****

We made the drive home in near-record time. My mother is OK, except that she’s not, and there is not much we can do about it because she persists in certain terrible health habits, and refuses to take care of herself and refuses to listen to anyone and refuses to even acknowledge that anything is wrong with her. Living in her own reality is a top ten skill for my mother, and it always has been, so at least some things never change. 

Does that sound harsh? Yes, it does and it probably is but there we are. I’m just here to keep it real, and to tell you that it’s possible to love someone and be furious at them at the same time. It’s possible to both blame someone who chooses to do the wrong thing all the time, and to feel sorry that they have to live with the consequences of their choices. Sometimes people cannot help their poor health but sometimes they can and it’s hard to watch someone stubbornly cling to their worst habits and not be angry at them. 

*****

Yes I know. I’m one to talk. I don’t really have any bad health habits to speak of, but I do avoid doctors like rich people avoid the IRS. I’ll do better, and I’ll stop being so judgmental. 

Well, I’ll do better and I’ll TRY to stop being so judgmental. No promises. I can only do what I can do. 

My mom is doing better now or so she says. She insisted on going home to her own house, which is really not the best place for her right now. But I understand. I'm very attached to my own house. I like being in my own environment surrounded by my own things. I like living by the house rules when they happen to be my rules. When I’m old, I don’t think I’ll want to live with grown people other than my husband, even if I grew them myself. There is really no freedom like the freedom of home.

*****

It’s Wednesday now and I’m so immersed in my routine that I’m not thinking about my mom every minute of the day. For a few minutes at a time today, I forgot about her and her health and what I think she should do; and instead, I just did my work and lived my life. But it’s always there, always in the back of my mind. Today, a coworker’s mother suffered a stroke, and it was a reminder that my own personal mama is not in the best shape and that any moment could bring bad news. 

But there’s no bad news right now. She was fine yesterday, and I’ll check on her again today, and I’ll keep doing my work and living my life until she needs me again. I’ll shop for Thanksgiving groceries and read books and walk outside in the still-perfect November light and watch college swimming and compulsively clean my house until other priorities intervene. We’re all living on borrowed time, anyway. 

Leaves

I live in the suburbs, in an old-fashioned Levitt neighborhood filled with colonial, ranch, and Cape Cod-style houses built in the late 1960s. If you grew up in the 70s and 80s and 90s in America, then you’d probably picture something like my neighborhood when you hear the word “suburbia.” 

In the suburbs, you cut your grass and you shovel your snow and you rake your leaves. Well, someone does all of that, and it’s usually not me. My husband and sons have always been in charge of the outside of the house, and I have always been in charge of the inside of the house. It’s not necessarily a good bargain for me, but it at least keeps me out of the cold and rain. 

But it wasn’t cold today. It was a balmy, mild early November day. Our yard, front and back, is buried in leaves, and no one has been home to deal with them, except me. So I finished work at 4 today, fired up the leaf blower and went to work. 

Yes, yes, leaf blowers. I know. Everyone hates them. Well, not everyone, because a lot of people including me have leaf blowers and so it’s not possible that all these people have leaf blowers, and that everyone also hates leaf blowers. That doesn’t add up. That math doesn’t work. 

It’s more accurate to say that certain influential, thought-leader-type people hate leaf blowers. For example, there is a very prominent historian and writer who sometimes dedicates an entire issue of his Substack newsletter (one day, I’m going to write about Substack) to his hatred of leaf blowers. He especially hates gas-powered leaf blowers and I suppose I don’t blame him. But most of this man’s leaf blower opposition centers around noise. My leaf blower is battery powered so it’s not discharging fumes into the air. But it is loud. And I don’t care. I have too many leaves to gather them all with a rake. I don’t use the leaf blower early in the morning, nor later than 7 PM or so, so I’m not waking people up first thing in the AM nor keeping them awake at night. I don’t use it very often at all, full stop.  And who said that Mr. Man was entitled to perfect quiet and peace at every moment of the day, anyway? Rich people really are something else. I wonder what he does with his leaves. I am guessing that other people take care of his landscaping and his other menial chores, leaving him free to complain about the noise as the poors clean up their ramshackle little properties. 

Really, every time I hear a rich person complaining about leaf blowers, I want to go and buy a jackhammer. 

God, I’m petty. LOL. 

*****

My front yard is pretty big, because we don’t have sidewalks in our neighborhood. I think that sidewalkless streets with lawns that slope right down to the road were a suburban ideal in the late 1960s. We have three shade trees out front, and those three trees drop a great deal of leaves. Somewhere between a boat load and a shit ton, if we’re being exact. With a rake, it would take all day to wrangle those leaves into a pile. With the leaf blower, it took me one hour. I moved in methodical rows, the leaves swirling and eddying as I blew them down toward the ever growing leaf pile. I watched with satisfaction as neat green paths of grass opened through the leaves until the entire front yard was pretty much clear. 

*****

That was Tuesday, and now it’s Friday, a Federal government holiday and an unearned gift of a day off, which is my favorite kind. Blowing those leaves was much more fun than I expected; so much so that I would like to do more today, but it’s raining and I’m not going to do yard work on a 55-degree rainy November day. It was also much more physically demanding than I’d have guessed. The leaf blower is heavy, but it’s well balanced, so you don’t necessarily notice how heavy it is until you blast leaves for an hour. I had to stop because it gets dark so stupidly early now but I’d have had to stop anyway because I was physically exhausted, and my hands hurt so much that I had a hard time holding on to a glass of water. But I was fine the next day, and my front yard looked very nice. 

*****

It’s Saturday now. I might have planned to do the rest of the yard today, a beautiful sunny, not-too-cold November day, but I have to drive to Philadelphia in a few minutes to see my mom, who is not in good health. That’s probably all I have to say about that right now. Except that she probably can’t live in her house anymore. She can’t take care of herself there, and she certainly can’t take care of that house. There aren’t many leaves to rake - there are no more than five trees on the entire street - but the house has three stories and a dungeon-like basement, and no first-floor bathroom. She hasn’t really been able to live there reasonably for some time but she is stubborn and would never listen to the slightest suggestion that she downsize and find an accessible and safe place to live. But she fell last night and ended up in the emergency room, and likely cannot return to the house at all. And so I think that someone else is probably going to have to finish our fall yardwork here in the Maryland suburbs. I have some work to do in the city. 

Red Line

We are going to our second Capitals game of the season later today. Just two of us, so we’re taking the Metro, which I vastly prefer over driving to the game. My husband is a much more aggressive driver than I am (to be fair, almost everyone is) and the ride down Georgia Avenue through jaywalking pedestrians and crazy kids riding in and out of traffic on their bikes and scooters and skateboards and people randomly flinging open the driver’s side car door without a care in the world is hair-raising on a good day. It’s raining today and it’s Marine Corps Marathon day, so it really will not be a good day on Georgia Avenue or any other main state-named avenue in the District of Columbia, so I’m happy that my husband agreed to take Metro, a quick and easy 20 minute ride on the Red Line from Glenmont to Gallery Place. 

But does that mean that I am not anxious about the trip? LOL, that is hilarious. It’s like you don’t know me at all.  Well, you don’t, but you know what I mean. There’s always something to worry about. There’s always a new source of anxiety. 

You might be thinking that urban crime is my biggest Metro-riding fear, but you would be wrong, and it’s not even close. I’m not cavalier about crime; I know that it’s a real problem But I grew up in Philadelphia in the 70s and 80s and early 90s and have been a crime victim myself - several times, in fact - and so crime is not a fear that keeps me awake at night, because I have been there and done that. The things that keep me awake at night are either a) stupid and trivial or b) vanishingly unlikely to happen or c) genuinely horrible but unknown to me. The unknown is the scariest, especially for people like me who can imagine the worst and then make it even worse through sheer panic. It’s a skill. 

But we’re talking about Metro, and the things that scare me about Metro fall into categories a (What if I drop my phone on the train? What if I leave my jacket on the seat? What if I fall asleep and end up at the wrong stop?) and c (What if the train derails? What if there’s a fire in the station? What if the tunnel floods and we all drown?)

*****

Well it's Tuesday now and we traveled to and from the game without the slightest of hitches. Trains arrived quickly, the ride was smooth and uneventful in both directions, and I came home with everything that I had with me when I left the house, and that’s an accomplishment because I had to carry my wallet and my phone in either my hands or my stupidly shallow pockets thanks to the even stupider handbag embargo at Capital One Arena - but I digress. I didn't get left behind and I didn't leave anyone else behind. And it wouldn't be a big deal if someone had been left behind because we're all grown ups now and no one is going to get lost on the Metro. 

That leaves me with a brand new cause for alarm. It's 745 AM, or 0745 as we say at NSAB and I'm preparing for a very large and important meeting. I expect at least 100 people in person in the lecture hall, and another 150 or so online. There are a lot of moving parts, lots of things that could go wrong. But everything is set up, the technology cooperated, and my speakers are here and ready to go. It'll be fine. 

Well, it totally wasn’t fine, but it was still fine, if you know what I mean. The audio wandered in and out at will, the recording randomly stopped in the middle, and we had to admit online attendees one by one even though we set the meeting up to allow self-admittance with no waiting room. I do love it when Google decides to do its own thing. I find it whimsical. Charmingly quirky, even.  You’re delightful, Google Meet. 

*****

That takes us to Wednesday, also known as today. Today’s worry spiral is actually legitimate. My younger son has COVID - for the very first time - and he’s home recovering. As delightful as it is to have him home, I’d sooner he stay healthy. And I have another meeting tomorrow, which I really should attend in person, but I’d rather not carry the gosh-darn coronavirus into a closed meeting room filled with 40+ military physicians. I don’t want to be a disease vector. I’m going to just stay at home but I’m worried that people will think that I’m attending remotely because I’m just too lazy to attend an 0730 meeting. 

*****

Ridiculous! I hate 0730 meetings more than I hate pumpkin spice latte, but I show up for those meetings in person, all the time, and no one is going to think that I’m lazy if I work from home for an extra day. My reputation around there is sterling. No one blamed me for the Google Meet fiasco, either; first of all because it wasn’t my fault, and second of all because I work really really hard to do things right and people are inclined to let me slide a little bit when things go awry. That is the upside of being an extremely anxious, overly conscientious people-pleaser. There is always an upside. There’s always a silver lining. 

*****

It’s Thursday now, and my son tested negative this morning. He’s technically not allowed to return to school until Sunday, but his coach is trying to persuade the AD and campus health services to allow him to return tomorrow, pending results of a PCR test, so that he can swim in Saturday’s meet. He won two of his three individual events last week, and swam the eighth-fastest 100 breaststroke time in program history. He’s a point-scorer. He is a mainstay of the team, just one week into his freshman season. 

*****

Friday afternoon. It’s been an extraordinarily long week. My in-office and at-home days were all out of order, and we started the week with August-like weather, and finished with an overnight freeze last night. I was in shorts last Sunday, and this morning, I had to scrape the ice off my windshield. Halloween came and went. “Spooky season” and its accompanying sweaters and jeans and PSL are gone, replaced in a flash with early winter sunsets and Christmas decorations in the grocery store and Christmas carols on the radio as we enter the relentless, no-turning-back run-up to the holiday season. Once again, I’m amazed by people who look forward to the imminent “fall back” time change and its hour of extra sleep in exchange for six months of darkness. It’s not a good trade, people. It’s not a good deal at all. We’re getting ripped off. We should complain.  

*****

And now it’s Sunday. I’ve had the benefit of that much-lauded extra hour of sleep, and it’s all downhill from here. My son did get to swim yesterday and although he didn’t win every time he got in the water, he did come away with two 2nd place finishes and a first place - not bad after a week of COVID and no practice. And I conquered one of my biggest new demons, which is driving on the under-construction and heavily barricaded George Washington Parkway. It was a clear, bright afternoon, with moderate traffic, and I told myself that it would be ridiculous to take the long way just to avoid that four-mile stretch of GW Parkway, so I pulled myself together and drove. And it was fine. I was terrified, but it was fine. It’s hard to drive when you’re holding your breath, but it was fine. My hands are still a little sore from maintaining a white-knuckle grip on the steering wheel for the entire drive, but it was fine. My son is fine now, my family and I are all fine, and I’ll battle each new stupid trivial fear and manage each new idiotic panic attack as and when they occur, which will be every minute of every fucking day. The Capitals won last Sunday, and the Marymount swim team won yesterday, and I also went three for three this week. #Winning