Guest blog

Marshmellows - Resa Alboher

There was usually a feeling of lack on Thanksgiving. Being an only child growing up in the San Fernando Valley, with all our relatives back east or in the mid west, Thanksgiving was always just my father, mother and myself. Sometimes a stray friend of my parents would come by—usually immigrant adult students of my father from his English classes whom he would then befriend. At my elementary school, I would listen to my classmates talk about the impending holiday ---we are having 20 people and are getting a 20-pound bird. That’s no biggie at all. We are having 40 people and two 20 pound turkeys and a pheasant too that my dad shot hunting. Abundance and dead birds. I felt lonely at our tiny table with our 7-pound turkey. My mother hated turkey, but would make one for me so I would feel like it was a real Thanksgiving, though she would have preferred to have roast chicken. She would also get a pumpkin pie from Gelson’s market and the jellied cranberry sauce in a can, and melt marshmallows on mashed sweet potatoes. I loved the marshmallows, which reminded me of toasted marshmallows and ghost stories from summer camp. Thanksgiving is a goyisha holiday—my mother didn’t make us a turkey until I was in my teens, my mom would tell me year after year. She told me this story again this morning from her hospital bed I have set up for her in her apartment here in LA where she is suffering the effects of metastatic cancer and small strokes, and for the moment is too weak to get out of bed. But this morning she had good energy, and we drank hot cocoa and watched Thanksgiving news on the television and talked. My mother got the turkey from Mrs. Hecht’s deli downstairs. They were selling them for the first time to the Jews in the neighborhood in Brooklyn. I don’t know what to do with this bird, your grandma Yetta said, but then being such a good cook, she found a way and we ate it. I don’t like turkey though. I really hate it, Resa. So today John and I are roasting a chicken in the oven for her---she loves John’s roasted chicken, stuffed with oranges and lemons. I was a vegetarian for years and still feel weird about holidays centered around dead birds roasting in ovens across America, but anyway, aside from the suffering birds, it is a holiday of gratitude and I am grateful to have this Thanksgiving with my mother. The marshmallows are ready to melt on the mashed sweet potatoes and I am about to go out and pick up a pumpkin pie from Gelsons market like my mother did those years ago, which brings us full circle to my childhood Thanksgivings. My father is gone, but John is here and a wonderful caregiver from the Philippines named Shirley just like my mom. And so it will be yet another small Thanksgiving –just the four of us. I can hear the voices from my classmates of the past---only four people and a five-pound chicken? Well, we have 20 people and many roasting birds. This could be the makings of a ghost story, these children’s voices still in my head after so many decades of weird Thanksgivings living in Russia, but I will save the ghost story for when the marshmallows are sufficiently melted on the sweet potatoes and right now head out to Gelson’s to get that nostalgic pumpkin pie.