Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 20, 1994 TAG: 9411210007
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: ELIZABETH OBENSHAIN
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
"Wait a minute!" I want to tell family members gathering at our family home. "I'm not old enough to cook Thanksgiving dinner!"
I am just not responsible enough to be in charge of this family feed. I don't know how to cook Brussels sprouts with chestnuts, like Mama did. Or giblet gravy. Or make her special frozen salad. Heck, I don't even know how long to cook the turkey!
Worse yet, I remember from my childhood days, that it's the adults - my mother and my father's six sisters - who are in charge of the holiday meals.
And there's the real cause of my panic. It's not just the Brussels sprouts.
I am not yet prepared to admit that I have grown up and become my aunts.
Yet the truth is creeping closer.
A few weeks ago we published a story about how members of Virginia Tech's Class of '69 - my old high school friends - have matured from '60s razor cuts and prim hairdos and have now assumed positions of leadership on campus.
Worse yet, another high school friend called to remind me of the planning session for my 30th high school reunion.
Why it was only a few months (years?) ago that I used to roll my eyes after grizzled reporters told frog-strangler stories of their youth and swear that I would never use that phrase, "Why I can remember 20 years ago when...."
And now it's not even 20 years, it's 30 years ago. But I'll be darned if I'm going to admit that I've grown up.
I take comfort in two things: I have NEVER owned a station wagon and no one has ever called me "matronly" - at least to my face.
Especially at holidays, I still want to be a kid. I miss my mother being in charge, keeping six different dishes going at once while she talked and enjoyed the flow of family in and out of the kitchen.
I didn't mind being the first assistant - as long as there was an experienced voice telling me how much flour to stir into the gravy, whether the cream sauce looked right for the sprouts, where to find the china bowl for the dressing.
It wasn't just the food that was special, though.
Mama had a special way for making us all feel welcome and cherished. There wasn't a holiday when we didn't want to be home, in that kitchen visiting with her, feeling that special warmth that only she could give.
My nieces and nephews - now grown to adults - recall visits from their childhood when they would wake up in the morning at my parents home, roll out of their beds, pad down the staircase and run to the kitchen where my mother had the room toasty warm and breakfast on the table. While their parents slept upstairs, they shared their early mornings and their childish confidences with my mother. She had a way of spoiling us that made each of us feel special.
This Thanksgiving, I'll try to muddle through again as I have in the two previous years since she died.
The reassuring note is that our Thanksgiving Thursday will reflect my mother in more ways than one.
We'll have the same dishes that she taught us to expect from childhood (with the possible exception of those pesky Brussels sprouts). We'll use her china, its fragile edges chipped from four generations of holiday dinners.
Maybe by the time I'm 65 I'll have mastered the dishes and the aplomb with which my mother and my aunts fed the family crowd on holidays.
But most importantly, we'll continue to come home, still drawn by the warmth and affection that radiated from her kitchen.
by CNB