By Beth Holt

November, 2000

Thanksgiving!

Oh, the memories! Mama’s marvelous dressing and gravy, twenty-five pound turkeys, Grandmother’s banana pudding, starched damask tablecloths, shiny silver, sparkling crystal, and first-class fiddle-playing from the back bedroom. For decades, our family celebrations had continued in the same manner. We moved several times over the years as the power company transferred Daddy around, so the dining rooms looked different, but the participants stayed the same. As time went on, we added boyfriends who became husbands, and soon, a new generation of  babies babbled and cooed as Mama insisted she’d “never seen a child that young do” whatever. But suddenly and sadly, things changed. Grandmother Frick died, Granddaddy was in the VA Hospital up in Asheville, and Thanksgiving just wasn’t going to be the same.

So, sisters Margie, Carole and I decided to institute a new tradition, and take a road trip to spend Thanksgiving with Granddaddy Robinson in Joplin.  That’s in Missoura, as they say — a fur piece from North Carolina.  We crammed ourselves, and Carole’s daughter Lisa, who was about 6 years old, into a pint-sized Datsun 510, and headed west.

It doesn’t look very far on the map. Only halfway across the country – just a matter of inches. But in a 1970 Datsun, eleven hundred miles with close female relatives is pure agony. We began the drive in Charlotte with great excitement and good spirits. My driving shift began around midnight as we crossed into Tennessee, and the excitement waned as night wore on. I was careful to be very quiet so my relief drivers could get plenty of sleep. Funny thing though – when the sun came up, everyone else was wide awake and raring to go, and not the least bit interested in whether or not I got any sleep. Their high spirits continued and they chattered all the way through Arkansas while I tossed and turned in my tiny corner of the back seat, plotting all manner of torturous revenge.

Putting three sisters into a compact Japanese car for over twenty-four hours straight is a sure recipe for disaster, but we figured that the end would be worth the means. Granddaddy Robinson, known to most everyone as Robbie, was great fun, and he loved to eat out. Thanksgiving Dinner with Granddad, who was a connoisseur of great places to dine, would definitely be worth the trip.

The interesting thing about Robbie is that he wasn’t related to us at all. His love and commitment to our family was simply a matter of choice.  Born in 1882, Robbie was old – impossibly old, and it jolted me to realize that he had been too old to fight even in World War ONE. He loved being a golf-playing nonogenarian, and enjoyed bragging that he’d end up being killed by a jealous husband when he was 100. Recently, he’d lost his good eye to a golf ball accident, but he got around better than folks half his age, and had a series of red-headed widows who brought him casseroles and chauffered him around the country in his Buick.

Somewhere in his long and illustrious life, Robbie met and married a woman named Ruby, who had adopted a boy born to her older sister.  Whoever conceptualized the TV character “Maude” had to have known Ruby.  She was a tough-talking businesswoman with a gruff manner and raspy voice that betrayed her smoking habit, and she was the first drinking woman I ever met. Her first husband, according to family legend, ran off to Mexico, and if you ever met Ruby, you could sorta understand why. In 1940,  Ruby’s adopted son, George Van Hoorebeke, married our mother, and was the father of my older sisters, Carole and Virginia.

Ruby passionately loved her son, and when he married Mama, she welcomed and loved her just as passionately, and the two of them had a close relationship for the rest of Ruby’s life. Long after Ruby died, Robbie, who had no children of his own, still loved Mama and often introduced her as his daughter.

World War II rained tragedy on almost every American family, rearranging lives for generations to come, and ours was no exception. Captain Van Hoorebeke was killed in France, and Mama, a war widow with two little girls, worked as an accountant at Camp Crowder, Missouri. In the waning days of the war, a young signal officer from South Carolina was assigned to Camp Crowder, where Mama was a hot commodity since she owned one of the few automobiles on post. The company commander had his eye on Mama’s best friend, but what with wartime rationing and shortages of everything, he had a major logistical problem. There was no transportation in which to court. When the lovestruck captain found out that Mama had wheels, he took advantage of the opportunity and ordered Lieutenant Frick to ask her out so they could double-date.

Lieutenant Frick wasn’t too keen on the idea, as he still had his eye on a little French girl, and at least one Louise in South Carolina thought he was coming back to her. But he had no choice but to follow orders, and soon Mississippi’s Marguerite electrified the young engineer. A few months later in Ruby’s living room, Daddy married Mama, daughters and all, and our family extended beyond mere bloodlines. Daddy took his new bride and the girls back to Greenville, South Carolina, where he “could get everything wholesale.”

Thirty-some years later (and it felt like we had spent the entire thirty years crammed into that miniature Japanese torture chamber) we pulled up to the curb in front of Robbie’s classic stone bungalow on Joplin’s Main Street. It was late Wednesday night, and we crawled wearily under crocheted bedspreads on antique beds, tired and hungry, because 90-year-old one-eyed golfers who eat out all the time are notorious for having empty refrigerators. But that was okay, because we knew we would be wined and dined in fine style come Thanksgiving noon.

Thanksgiving Day dawned bright and beautiful in the midwestern sunlight, and we relaxed through the morning, reacquainting ourselves with the house that held so many memories. The furnishings were from a different era, and wartime pictures of Mama and my sisters graced the walls and dressers of the bedrooms. Down the street, at the corner of the block was an old-fashioned ice-cream shop that had I had never forgotten, though I was only a toddler the last time we’d been to Joplin. Progress had come to Joplin, so the neighborhood wasn’t what it used to be, evidenced by the encroachment of a fast-food enterprise across the street strangely named the Sophisticated Chicken.

Finally, after eleven hundred miles and weeks of anticipation, it was  time for Thanksgiving Dinner. We dressed up in our 1970s version of fashion, which was certainly “down” rather than “up”, and hurried out to the Buick early so we could “beat the crowd”. Soon, we’d be enjoying an incomparable meal in Joplin’s finest restaurant  or  country club.

We were confused when Granddad pulled into the parking lot of the local mall, and soon we saw hordes of hungry holiday diners lining up outside Morrison’s Cafeteria.

We looked around, hoping to see that a really fine restaurant was just  around the corner, but presently, the reality of the situation became clear. There would be no four-star meal with gourmet oyster dressing and pumpkin flan. We were joining the masses for plainer fare at the local cafeteria. Disappointed, but hungry, and realizing that cafeteria food would be better than no food at all, we started to follow the crowd and stake out a place in line. And then, Granddaddy uttered the words that none of us will ever forget.

“Oh, no. We’re not going to Morrison’s.   Walgreen’s has a Blue Plate Turkey Special for a dollar eighty-nine.”

Suddenly, the cafeteria we had heretofore disdained looked awfully appealing.

Eleven hundred miles. Twenty-four hours in Hirohito’s revenge. Nothing to eat in the house when we got there. Barely any breakfast. And here we were, homesick, sleep-deprived, and ravenously hungry, heading in the opposite direction of the holiday hordes, into Walgreen’s Drugstore, of all places. For Thanksgiving Dinner.

The five of us were the only customers in the place, ’cause everybody else in town was at the fancy restaurant, the country club, or at least Morrison’s. If Ruby was Maude, our waitress was Flo, and bless her heart, she served us the worst cardboard excuse for turkey and dressing to ever come out of a freezer, along with something sticky that was vaguely reminiscent of pumpkin pie. And they didn’t even have any cranberry sauce.

We choked back  tears as we choked down the food, and like well-brought up Southern girls, we lied and told Granddad how delicious everything was. Another thing we discovered about ninety-year old one-eyed golfers is that their taste buds died about thirty years ago.

Thankfully, the rest of the week-end was fun. Granddad took us over to Bartlesville, Oklahoma to see whatever it is that attracts tourists there, and I think we played golf, though to be honest, I don’t remember much. I never recovered from pulling the all night driving shift, and spent most of our sightseeing time in the car with my head lolled back against the back seat, snoring. And then, on Saturday, we crammed ourselves back into the Tin Can, and did eleven hundred miles all over again.

Since that year, there have been dozens more Thanksgiving Dinners. We spent three in Germany with friends from all over the States where we foundered on every kind of regional specialty imaginable. There were Thanksgiving dinners with the troops, when the officers donned dress blues and served the enlisted men. In recent years, we’ve had wonderful times with the Holt family in South Boston, where the kids play bingo and make their own memories. And I’ve learned to make a pretty mean giblet gravy myself.

Not every Thanksgiving dinner was Martha Stewart perfect. There was the time in Burlington when Margie ran crying to her bedroom when Daddy chose that particular moment to reveal that her long “lost” dog had actually been put down years earlier, and he hadn’t had the heart to tell her the truth. And years later, Carole and Margie were with us at Ft. Benning when the oven element burned out and it took 12 hours to cook the turkey. There was a week-end at the beach that most of us would rather forget.  And a couple of years ago, the entire Holt family shared the worst kind flu bug in South Boston. Nope, they haven’t all been perfect.

But Walgreen’s Blue Plate Turkey Special for a dollar eighty-nine takes the cake.

Here’s to a much better dinner for you and yours!

Colossians 3:17 – And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord, giving thanks to God the Father through Him.

With a thankful heart for many, many blessings, Beth