Thanksgiving Scavenger Hunt

Find a turkey.

We found turkeys on the regular on the UC Santa Cruz campus. It was a hell of a place to run a summer camp, with threats of mountain lions and bobcats and coyotes all looming. With the turkeys.

They hung around this one parking lot, in the Cowell College part of campus in particular. The one of them attacked the minivan when I transported an injured student, pecking at the tires. It occurred to me that I could kill this large bird if I stepped on the gas, but I didn’t have the heart to do such a thing, and all the less so with a student in the backseat, intrigued, inquisitive, as unaccustomed to the situation and it’s variables as I was, and waiting to see what I would do.

Find stuffing.

Stuffing protruded from the space where Honk’s nose used to be.

Honk was my My Pet Monster—my favorite childhood toy. He didn’t make the journey to college with me.

His big plastic nose had been a design flaw—too big and heavy to stay in place across years of a kid’s roughhousing and to withstand the irresistible choice to pick him up by the nose.

I checked in on Honk when I came home for Thanksgivings and Christmases, before I at last took him away with me.

Seeing him there, the literal monster in my closet, was a lot like seeing an old friend.

Find the cranberry sauce.

I brought cranberry sauce to the annual potluck Monday night dinners before Thanksgiving each November at Homework Club. We met throughout the school year Monday evenings to tutor kids in an auxiliary space at a church. By November, it was always cold there—especially in the upstairs gymnasium where the kids played basketball after dinner and homework time.

But that Monday in November—the kids ready for a few days off from school, me myself gearing up to get out of town in the next day or two—there was a holiday energy in the air.

Other volunteers cooked--really cooked--sweet potato casseroles, green beans seasoned to perfection, freshly mashed potatoes, pies from scratch. But whereas a motley assortment of leftovers that nobody really wanted to take home ahead of the holiday lined the banquet tables after everyone had had their fill, I took pride that th kids had cleared my bowl of four cans-worth of cranberry sauce, in all its jellied sweetness.

Find a the potatoes.

Heather bought a small sack of potatoes to make potato salad over Memorial Day Weekend.

Our son Riley, just shy of two-and-a-half, was intrigued.

He was just tall enough to reach up onto kitchen counter. He clutched potatoes—one in each hand, mistaking them for apples, as pronounced them a-poos—and scattered them around the living room and kitchen with glee, launching one in the refrigerator while Heather loaded other groceries, opening the oven door just far enough to deposit one potato in there.

We’d been warning him away from the oven, those months when his strength, coordination, curiosity, and limited understanding all made him dangerous. He took such glee in this random game of hiding potatoes, though—

Heather texted me while I was coaxing Riley into his afternoon nap. She’d preheated the oven for a pie only to smell burning.

The forgotten potato.

Find the liver.

The older I grew, the less I shared with my father, as his temper angled worse and as I grew into unforgiving adolescence.

But Thanksgiving afternoons, we shared turkey livers.

No one else in the family would touch them, but this was a delicacy so rarely accessed, so delicious I looked forward to it nearly as much as Thanksgiving dinner itself.

So we sat at the table, father and son, mostly quiet, in a sort of ritualistic pre-feast for two.

Find the vodka.

There was that Thanksgiving when I tried to cram in three dinners—at my childhood best friend’s house, with my girlfriend’s family, and last of all with my father.

I drank orange vodka at that first stop, furnished by my friend’s father. A big, old school Italian, he warned us not to try to keep up with him, but the vodka went down so easily I was drunk before I realized it. Another piece of drinking advice from my friend's father, that I’d learned but not really internalized yet: when you think you can have just one more, you can’t.

My head swum, and though I sobered up enough to drive safely to each of those next two dinners, I blame the vodka more than the excessive eating for when I threw up before the third and final round.

Find the pumpkin pie.

My wife doesn’t like pumpkin pie, but I consider it a Thanksgiving staple, so nowadays I buy a frozen one each year and have it all to myself for Thanksgiving dessert, for breakfast on Black Friday, for a day or two to follow.

I suspect I eat it at least equally out of nostalgia as for the taste of it. Because there’s no reason I should need a whole pie to myself, let alone a kind of pie I don’t think I’ve eaten outside the month of November in the last decade, and maybe longer—maybe ever.

I eat pumpkin pie and remember having a pie to myself the first Thanksgiving Heather and I shared, in Oregon.

I eat pumpkin pie and remember eating it those Thanksgivings I drove from Maryland to North Carolina on the initial premise of reconnecting with my sister and mom, and finding new family in earnest in my brother-in-law and his parents.

I eat pumpkin pie and remember it at my best friend’s folks’ table where there were always too many desserts after too much food, enough to last a big-eating family for days.

I eat pumpkin pie and remember eating it at the table in my childhood home, the lone night of the year my grandmother braved the stairs of our raised ranch to come over for dinner. She’d sit across from my sister and I, on the side of the table typically pushed against a wall, covered by a clutter of newspapers. My sister and I shared a side of the table, our smaller, younger bodies wedged close, my mother and father at opposite heads of the table, the lot of us perhaps at our least dysfunctional those Thanksgiving nights.

We never said grace or went around the table and said what we were thankful for.

But I was thankful.

And am.

I eat pumpkin pie and remember.

And remember.

And remember.