Thanksgiving isn’t just about a great meal with the people you love most.
In a highly transient country, it also means exorbitant plane fares, layovers and seemingly endless traffic on highways.
This year, I’m staying put so I can fly out to New York for Christmas.
Instead of just bringing a couple of pies to my sister’s house and helping serve food, it means I must cook.
As daunting as the idea sounds, I’ve learned I can make a darned good Thanksgiving meal as long as I’ve got a little help, plan well – and have my mom’s cellphone number on speed dial.
This year’s turkey will be bigger than last’s, 18 pounds – enough to feed eight friends twice over with plenty to spare for days of yummy turkey sandwiches.
Yes, I’ll miss my family. Back in New York, my sister Denise and her husband, Rick, will make an amazing feast.
They will make the traditional turkey, gravy, mashed potatoes, stuffing, veggies and other goodies. Denise also will make Puerto Rican rice and beans, lechón (slow-roasted pig) and fried sweet plantains.
Rick, who is third-generation Italian, will make lasagna, manicotti and Italian sausage.
Oh, and I didn’t even mention the desserts: several pies and Rick’s mother’s homemade cannoli.
I won’t be able to re-create the meal, nor the wacky conversations we have. That’s what I will miss most.
My mother usually starts, telling yarns about how sweet and helpful her children were. I’m glad that’s how she remembers it.
I’ll jokingly remind my older brother, Eric, about how he used to make me cry by squeezing the head of my doll until it was concave. He’ll talk about how hard I tried to keep up with his baseball card collection, but that his allowance was bigger.
Then Eric, Denise and I laugh about the games we’d make up: The absence of lots of toys helped us develop creative minds.
We’d play veterinarian, taking turns pretending to operate on our two confused dogs. My sister and I played “double date” with a mop and broom as our dates, and we’d have these pretend conversations with them and tell them “no” when they asked for a kiss good night.
We talk about the assortment of pets we had: mice, guinea pigs, rabbits, chicks, lizards, canaries and fish that found a way to flip themselves onto the floor. (We figured they were determined to end the boring lives we gave them, and felt guilty about it.)
My brother will remind my mom of the “pet” rooster we had for all of a couple of weeks when we were little – odd for a family living in a tiny apartment in Manhattan.
It would crow us awake, and I wished he were gone. And he was. Mom said he died. Later, when we were older we pieced together that it was more than coincidental that we had chicken that night.
We tell that story all the time, and kid our mom that she was trying to bring a little too much country to the big city.
The last Thanksgiving I was home, my brother and I secretly text-messaged each other sporadically throughout dinner, making quips about the story behind the stories, unbeknownst to anyone else.
If we ever argued at Thanksgiving, I don’t remember it. I just remember those great meals, the sincere blessings my mom would make, and how we each went around the table, telling each other what we were most thankful for.
Our eyes would get misty, and that was the perfect time to make us all laugh by interjecting one of our quirky childhood memories.
Cindy Rodríguez’s column appears Tuesdays and Thursdays in Scene. Contact her at 303-820-1211 or crodriguez@denverpost.com.
