Pour Me A Story: Thanksgiving Edition
this doesn't count as no. 50, I don't care what you say
hello pals, happy Day After Turkey Day! I hope this fine Friday finds you all with a day off work (for those of you in the U.S.) and a metric ton of leftovers in the fridge for you to graze off of for the next six to eight weeks.
this year is my eighth Thanksgiving as a resident-turned-citizen of this great nation, and while I spent a lot of time here vacationing before I packed up and moved, I didn’t experience this particular holiday until right after I arrived on a one-way flight in 2013 as a newly minted permanent resident.
I feel as though it was pretty fitting. I shared dinner that first year with my buddy (and now seafood festival partner) TJ and his family in Patterson, New York, and got the full experience, including the Thanksgiving morning hangover after spending the night before at his hometown bar with his high school and college buddies. that evening culminated in TJ and I eating moonshine cherries out of his parents’ fridge, and I was so hungover that I feared I wouldn’t be able to enjoy the meal.
my Turkey Day experiences henceforth have generally leaned towards Friendsgiving-type affairs, given that I’ve had to build “family” wherever I went. last year, of course, during both the first year of parenthood and the pandemic, we opted to stay home and make our own little Thanksgiving meal.
this time around, with a marginally safer world and three doses of the Moderna vaccine coursing through our veins, we joined Alex’s family for dinner. Alex made her stuffing from scratch, as I believe she’s done every year since we met and which is always criminally underappreciated (the curse of having Friendsgiving where most attendees are more focused on drinking than eating), and I smoked three racks of pork ribs, one of which remained in our fridge for safekeeping.
“Adrian brings ribs to the turkey dinner” began as a tradition in 2018, when we had a Friendsgiving potluck at the bar I used to work at in Denver. I worked my newspaper job from home that day and realized I hadn’t bought anything to contribute to the meal, so as a last-ditch effort I ordered a couple racks of ribs from the one barbecue place I could find that was open. as far as I was concerned, “bringing food I wanted to eat” to Thanksgiving was a smart move, and I did the same thing in 2019. this year I figured why not just do it myself, and the results were terrific.
as I’ve mentioned before in these pages, the baby doesn’t really care what day it is or whether it’s a holiday, and as such she requires the same general bedtime. so I packed her up and headed home to take care of that while Alex remained in the unenviable position of helping her mom clean up. so I wrote this firmly planted on the couch, with my favorite live performance (Nirvana’s Unplugged in New York) on the TV and a glass of The Macallan 15 by my side.
and as I looked back at last year’s Thanksgiving dispatch, a mere 40-odd newsletters ago, I realized that I had done exactly the same thing in 2020. this time it’s pushing 9pm Eastern Time, and the cat is nowhere to be found, but it’s pretty similar all the same.
as I write this, it’s pushing 9:00pm Mountain Time on Thanksgiving night, still slightly uncomfortable in the stomach region despite finishing dinner around 3:30 this afternoon. I’ve got a glass of The Macallan 15 Years by me and the cat on my lap, and all things considered it’s been a pretty great Turkey Day.
as well as “remaining healthy,” “being vaccinated,” “remaining employed” and “being able to travel and see some friends,” one thing I’m thankful for this year is, of course, you all. I’m very grateful for the support you’ve continued to show this little old newsletter, even when it disappears off the radar for several weeks at a time for one reason or another.
from a personal challenges perspective, I almost think this year has been a harder one than last year, but you folks have given me both the space to deal with whatever bullshit is going on in my world and the space to work it out on paper (so to speak) in this very space.
2022 is rushing up on us and it’ll be the new year before we know it. I hope that it brings all of you everything you hope for, whether it’s a new job or health or a pay raise or achieving a goal or whatever. you deserve it.
in the meantime, here’s a song. Alex and I were discussing Alanis Morissette on the final leg of our drive back from Philly a couple weekends ago and her jams keep getting stuck in my head.
thanks as always for rocking with me for another week. let’s do it again soon, shall we?
— adrian ✌🏻