LARGETONY Blog

I had wanted to write something nice for Thanksgiving last week.. Something all warm and fuzzy about the holidays of my childhood, bringing back the memories of frosty mornings and the smell of spice in the air. I’m sure there were some of those greeting card moments back then, but from some reason they just didn’t stick with me. For the life of me I can not remember the details of a single Thanksgiving growing up, except for the one where we didn’t have a turkey.

Before you break out the violins and start pouring out your hearts, worried that I had a less than fortunate childhood, let me clarify. Granted there were some after school special moments in my life, but none of them had anything to do with the fact that we didn’t have a turkey one year. There was no family trauma like my father being laid off from the steel plant just before the holidays (he would have had to have a job to get laid off) leaving my mother faced with choosing between a turkey and a carton of menthols (actually she didn’t smoke). We didn’t have a turkey that year simply because my mother was working two jobs and didn’t want to bother with cooking a big meal. So we went to eat at Cracker Barrel and I ordered pancakes. (Who goes out to dinner on Thanksgiving and orders turkey? If you’re going out, get what you really want.) I was about ten years old and pancakes were the most glorious thing on earth to me at the time. Funny thing is that I hardly ever eat them anymore. And if I was to have fried batter for breakfast these days, it would probably be a waffle. Same food, different shape, I know (kind of like most Mexican food…you know, enchiladas, burritos, quesadillas…all pretty much the same thing) but I prefer the crispness of a waffle to the sponginess of a pancake. (One day I’ll explain my weirdness with food texture.)

True to form, I have digressed and gotten off the path, so back to the point: That’s the only Thanksgiving I have a strong memory of. That Thanksgiving also sticks in my mind because it was one of the only ones that we did not spend at Granny’s. I have no recollection as to why. And I probably had no idea at the time. There probably was some family trauma that was being kept over the head of the ten year old. But, no matter. I had pancakes! You would think I would remember more about Thanksgivings at my grandmother’s house since it meant an hour and a half or so trip into the mountains. But actually, when I think about trips to Granny’s, it’s Sundays that are the most vivid.

Most of you know that Granny is now my “room mate,” but about 20 years ago (!) I spent many a Sunday getting kicked in the stomach by my brother (literally) in the back seat of the car on our way up here to visit our grandparents. It’s my mother’s parents that I’m talking about. My father’s parents were both gone by the time I was five, so I only have very vague shadowy memories of them. And those memories involve odd smells.

Sundays at Granny’s (especially in the summer) were the next best thing to pancakes. And the times we got to spend Saturday night at Granny’s then waking up to Sunday morning pancakes?? Lordy! I can’t even come up with words for it.

We usually got there some time just after Granny and Grandaddy getting home from church. Almost immediately Granny would take to the kitchen to finish up the dinner she had started on that morning. She would have already fried the chicken (every Sunday was fried chicken) so usually that meant things like mashing potatoes or separating the dough for the yeast rolls into balls to do their final rise in the pan before baking. Sometimes she would let me pull off dough from the mound and make the balls, but without fail I would make them too big or too small for her standards. I’ve grown up to be a pretty decent cook, particularly when it comes to baking stuff, but to this day I can not bake bread very well. I can stand there with Granny telling me exactly what to do each step of the way and I still come up with yeast stones. My bread weighs a ton.

At some point my father would make me leave the kitchen for fear that I would grow up to become just what I have (rhymes with como) so I would end up hanging with Grandaddy and my brother. Then my parents would disappear in the car until close to dinner time. I have no idea where they went during that time. But I’m sure Sunday was even better than pancakes for them cause they could get two rambunctious boys out of their hair for a few hours.

My brother was the rowdier of the two, of course. I was no angel by any means, but my brother always had a streak in him to tempt fate and see how far he could go before trouble caught up with him. And when trouble nabbed him, he often managed to deflect it onto me. Like the one Sunday he called me across the yard and asked me to “hold” a pocket knife he had. Now, you find me a little boy who can ignore the allure of a knife. Especially one that belongs to his big brother, who barely would even let the kid look at it, let alone touch it.

So, there I am on the back porch having a pancake moment from having the knife in my hands and I’m all jazzed up that my brother trusted me with it while he went into the house. No matter how many times he did it, I was always a sucker for my brothers set ups. This time was no different. He came back to the porch and shouted loud enough for somebody…anybody…to hear, “What are you doing? You better quit that!” It turns out my brother had cut a gash in the screen door and planned to pin it on me. The planned worked because Grandaddy appeared and found me standing there like a dazed lump with a knife in my hand. Before I could even try to defend myself, my brother shit all over my pancakes by adding to my alleged crime by saying he had been looking for his knife all day and that I must have stolen it from him. The whole situation was strengthened by the fact that Grandaddy knew that I wanted a knife, too (he had been the one to give Exhibit A to my brother). O.J. could have been caught with Nicole’s head in his gym bag and looked less guilty. Besides getting a switchin’ from Grandaddy, he also broke it to me that I would not be getting my own knife on my upcoming birthday like he had promised because he could see I was not old enough for the responsibility. I never said those Sunday memories were all great, just the most vivid.

Actually, karma caught up a little bit with my brother. Trips back home those Sundays always involved a stop at the Dairy Queen for soft serve ice cream. But, that day, my mother was so mad about the knife incident (she didn’t think I was innocent, but she also didn’t believe that my brother wasn’t involved in some way) that she canceled the pit stop for frozen treats. Sure, I didn’t get any ice cream, but neither did my brother. And that was pretty near a pancake for me.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 30th, 2005 at 11:33 pm and is filed under growing up tony, holiday. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.